Dreams as Nightmares: From Nazism and Communism to Behemoth: Irving Louis Horowitz, a Mensch for all Season

Irving Louis Horowitz once said that an author spends a lifetime writing the same book under a series of different titles. Though he did not take credit for this insight, declaring it ‘commonplace,’ it is hard to resist the temptation of suspecting that he may have included himself. Given his immense output, the idea that one grand theme (or even two) could embrace all of his nearly nine thousand highly original and thoroughly researched publications is, to say the least, tantalizing.

I did not have to look far for clues. Irving gave us a hint as to what that theme might be in the very first chapter of his monumental opus on genocide, Taking Lives. Looking back on four decades of writing and research, he writes, ‘It is [now] plain to me that the subject of life and death has been a constant companion, if not a steady compunction.’¹ There we have it: his unifying theme is predictably no less Tolstoyan in scope than in size.

If it seems grand, that is because it had to be. The quest had to match Irving’s larger-than-life persona, the intensely passionate nature of his heart and mind, and his refusal to accept easy answers to trivial questions. And he knew it: ‘Given autobiographical—that is, who I am, what I am, and why I am—as well as analytical elements, this could hardly be otherwise.’² He meant that he had no choice but to explore, always and in every way, the question of life and death in light of human desires, illusions, and frailty. The scope of his task, as he saw it, was a reflection not of self-importance but rather of humility, reflecting his conviction that eternity spares none of us; he merely happened to have encountered that difficult truth very early and very painfully, in ways that would have easily defeated a lesser man.

Irving had to confront more rudely than most people who had grown up in more comfortable settings the ways in which life and death are, whether we know it or not, no more than a hair’s breadth apart. He had no choice but to face it head-on without a helmet in the ghetto, where letting your guard down even briefly could be catastrophic. It was to remember those years, and to reflect upon their impact on his soul and his thinking, that he eventually decided to write the story of his childhood and adolescence. It is an American classic, at once heart wrenching and funny.

Irving tells us that the book’s title, Daydreams and Nightmares, stemmed ‘from the fact that [his] private thoughts often paralleled a public life of great aspirations and even greater tragedies. Every day was a risk.’³ He had lived at the edge, as did most of the people with whom he had grown up, but the blows toughened him and made him the ‘Bear’ we all knew. He loved that nickname, and it suited him perfectly. When he gave you his signature bear hug, he seemed to want to transfer all of his affection in an enormous squeeze that left you breathless from both the overwhelming physical and emotional contact: it was never to leave you.

Irving was determined to survive. He owed it to his adored sister, who eventually lost her sanity; to his contemporaries whose lifeboats capsized, then sank, in the Depression; and to the family members swallowed by the Holocaust. But Irving was never one to stoop to melodrama. In a recent article, published in 2009, which he considered a ‘footnote’ to his childhood memoir, he distinguished being poor, which his family certainly was, from feeling poor, which he insisted they never did. But times were indeed hard, which was bound to ‘engender the search for utopias as well as the faith in ideologies—especially in a cosmopolitan ghetto.’⁴ Irving was not talking about himself—the clarity of his mind not permitting the self-delusional comforts of utopia—but about too many of his contemporaries...