Alan Mintz, z"l

In November of 1961, the New England region of United Synagogue Youth (USY) held its annual fall regional convention in Brookline, Massachusetts at Congregation Kehilath Israel, where my family belonged, and where I was a member of the USY chapter. We were responsible for hosting that conference, so all of us kids got to meet and greet the various groups from around New England that showed up at the synagogue. It was there and then that I met Alan Mintz. We were both fourteen years old. He was in the ninth grade, and I was in the tenth. That fact turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong joke. He'd say, "You know, I am a month older than you," and I would reply, "But I'm a year ahead in school … and I always will be."

I remember that moment from 1961 and always have, as if it were yesterday. It was, one might say, "friendship at first sight." For the next fifty-six years, there was never a time when Alan was not part of my life. So I want to write about Alan as a friend, knowing that others are exploring his extraordinary accomplishments as a scholar and teacher. When Alan was elected national president of USY a few years after our first meeting, he arrived by train—I think from Chicago—and my family picked him up at the station. Because it was too late to get to his home in Worcester, and he was exhausted, he slept over at my house. My sister and I chanted "Hail to the Chief" as he entered the house. All through high school he would come to Brookline for Simh.at Torah, and we would go together from dancing at the Bostoner Rebbe's to dancing at the Talner Rebbe's.

We were friends when he founded Response Magazine in 1966, and he invited me to join the editorial board and come to the founding meeting. We were still friends when I didn't come to the meeting because I thought that the long bus ride wasn't worth the schlepp, and he wrote me a really angry letter about skipping out on that. Alan, I'm so sorry. You were right; I should have come. He forgave me even after I suggested that he call the magazine "Commentary for Teens."

He knew my parents and my sister, and I knew his parents and his brother, Lenny. I don't have many friendships that go back that long and with so much of our lives shared. I crashed in his apartment at 106^th and Amsterdam back when he was a student. This apartment was so dilapidated that, when I went to sleep the first night, he said, "One word of advice. If you get up in the middle of the night, don't turn on the light." "Why?" I asked. "You really don't want to see all the cockroaches," he replied dryly and shut off the light. That was Alan in his student days.

Alan and I travelled parallel career paths: both of us got doctorates in English literature, and both of us subsequently moved into the Jewish academic world. As many know, Alan devoted a great deal of energy in his career to the work of the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon. This included the anthology of Agnon stories that he and Anne Hoffman edited some years ago, as well as The City and its Fullness, the large collection of late Agnon stories that Alan worked on with James Diamond, z"l and Jeffrey Saks, that came out in 2016. (His book Ancestral Tales, a study of Agnon's Buczacz stories, came out shortly after his sudden death.) Alan's death came, so sadly, at the height of his powers and reputation as a scholar and literary critic. Sadly, he will not get to fully enjoy the accolades he has accrued both here and abroad.

Where he was in his career at the time when he passed is illustrated for me in the boldness of an idea for a book that he sent me...