Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990 (review)

Enlarging America is a fascinating book. At the outset, Professor Klingenstein confesses that she "fell in love" with America, and its vibrant Jewish culture, many years ago from her "perch" at the University of Heidelberg (p. xiii.) Her love and enthusiasm come across as she recounts the success story of American Jews in academe from the period of World War II almost to the present, continuing the story she began in Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940 (we are promised another installment dealing with a younger generation). Perhaps because of her enthusiasm, this book is not at all a standard academic or scholarly treatise. Professor Klingenstein tells her story through the lives of various academics associated with Harvard or Columbia, crafting what she calls "history through biography" (p. xiii). And though she presents considerable analysis of the works of the scholars she deals with, how they "enlarged" America by their interpretations of American literature and culture, she also discusses their upbringing, their background, especially their relationship to Judaism and their Jewish identity. While she emphasizes the individual nature of each of the scholars she discusses, she does attempt to generalize about the group as a whole: "Since a life within the confines of the Jewish community was not held out to them by parents, teachers, and peers as a desirable or even viable alternative to life in America at large, the generation of academics portrayed in this book spent much of its intellectual energy on defining its relation to America" (p. xvii).

Professor Klingenstein focuses on a relatively small group of scholars: from Harvard, Harry Levin, M. H. Abrams, Daniel Aaron, Leo Marx, Allen Guttmann, Jules Chametzsky (who does not quite fit the paradigm, since he was always comfortable with his Jewish identity and started teaching American-Jewish literature early); from Columbia, Lionel Trilling and several of his students, including Cynthia Ozick and Norman Podhoretz, who are not really academics, of course. She ends with lengthy discussions of the lives and works of Robert Alter, Ruth R. Wisse, and Sacvan Bercovitch (back to Harvard). In every case she presents considerable biographical background before she discusses her subject's academic career and writings.

Some of her most interesting pages describe the pervasive anti-Semitism at Harvard before World War II. She presents extensive analysis of the writings of people like George Santayana and T. S. Eliot, exemplars of "genteel" and sometimes not-so-genteel anti-Semitism, who formed the backdrop for Harry Levin--a young Jew allowed to enter the sacred precincts. Because of this extensive discussion, Professor Klingenstein's speculations about Levin ring true: for Levin, "mastery of the intellectual tradition of America's dominant culture would surely put an end, if not to discrimination, then at least to his sense of being an outsider" (p. 46). This mastery, however, would come at a price: "...the desire to remain neutral, detached, invisible as a critic also reflected the wish not to stand out, not to become a target" (p. 67). Did Levin's Jewishness ever affect his literary criticism? Perhaps. About The Power of Darkness, Levin's study of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Professor Klingenstein tentatively speculates: "Indirectly, perhaps, Levin's worry and concern at the time [World War II, the Holocaust] found their way into the book" (p. 68).

There is more--equally interesting--speculation in the chapter on M. H. Abrams. (Incidentally, I enjoyed being reminded that "M. H." stands for "Meyer Howard" and learning that Abrams, one of the icons of my graduate school days, had an upbringing similar to my own). Abrams' great work, The Mirror and the Lamp, according to Klingenstein, "made perfectly clear that it was quite possible for a 'freethinking Jew' (T. S. Eliot) to penetrate the intricacies of the Romantics' 'high argument' (Wordsworth) without necessarily sharing their beliefs" (p. 83). In fact, Abrams "established the...