Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Maishe Mirsky

79 Maishe Mirsky hat’s Mark Mirsky. Recently he decided that was what he wanted to be called—his right, and considering the path of his career, probably inevitable. Harvard, the son of Wilfred Mirsky, also Harvard, one of the earliest Jewish representatives (from Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury, the old Boston’s Jewish East Side) to the General Court of Massachusetts. Wilfred Mirsky spent his career in that tribal enclave of Irish pols (and a few token Italians, see The Last Hurrah, where they would give them “another statue to Columbus”), and summered in Hull, with those pols and retired judges (also pols). Using this leverage, he did push through the first big building program for the University of Massachusetts when he was the first Jew in the legislature to chair its committee on education. Mark inherited that house in Hull, where Anne and I spent some lovely hours, including one memorable Passover seder. It was done in a grand and traditional manner and, because it included his sister and long-standing family conflicts, “a Passover meal with all the fixations” (to quote Diana Trilling about her family seders). I never did go diving in the Bay with Mark/Maishe, though I envied him his daring—he also drove a motorcycle for years, once at least all over Europe, where he visited us in Freiburg and gave Anne a thrill riding up and down the hills of the Schwarzwald. There, too, I was chicken. In short, I grew to T 80 love and admire Mark, from the time we met at the founding of CCLM, more than any writer I have known. The “path” of his career should have been predictable. Early on his was a different voice among Jewish American writers. Even in the earliest of his seven or eight novels and story collections the familiar immigrant stories are imbued and estranged with deep knowledge of the conventional as well as the arcane aspects of the Jewish tradition. His bent for the surreal and mystical has often been noted, but it is not an affectation, as it so often seems to be with other contemporary writers who suddenly see the potential for what they hope will be originality in all that. In Blue Hill Avenue (1972) the authorial voice asserts that “A mystical doctrine says God exists only by recognition of the scholars.” Mirsky is a scholar as well as a fiction writer, and he has created God throughout his career, even when he writes about teaching, lust, and sexual longing. He devoted years to the study of Kabbalah for hours every morning before going off to teach at City College. MR published one of his fine stories about Kabbalah in the Connecticut Valley, later part of a novel, The Red Adam (1990), that I mention because, aside from its subject matter , it was the first (and maybe the only?) time we printed a Hebrew letter in the text. Odd, because Leonard Baskin, who set the tone of MR’s art and design for years, was a great lover of the Hebrew alphabet, which appears in many of his works. Mark’s work only got richer and deeper with the years, and in many forms. He edited a massive history of Pinsk, his family’s home-place in Russia, lengthy and original studies of Shakespeare and Dante, and much else. Maishe Mirsky 81 He was a great public reader, having hoped to be an actor in his Harvard years. He dazzled me and an audience at an annual Jewish Studies meeting in Boston when we spoke together about Jewish American literature, and he gave a brilliant twenty minute talk, impromptu because the organizers had changed his subject without informing us prior to our appearance there. A serious man, as writer, father, teacher, editor of Fiction, but a helluva lot of fun, with many writer friends, here and in Europe. It was always worth climbing the long flights to his basic Bowery loft apartment which he and his artist wife Inger (a Norwegian convert to Judaism, and beautiful) continued to live in for years, saving money for the yeshiva— and later Williams College and Harvard—education of their gifted son and daughter. One always met interesting people there, with good food, wine, talk throughout an evening. I learned more about Massachusetts and New York politics from Mark than from any other source, and I have...