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

Book Reviews 153 Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990, by Suzanne Klingenstein. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998. 492 pp. $34.95. This is an important book, not only for what it says but for what it implies. Klingenstein has traced the intellectual history of those Jews who taught or were students in the rarified atmosphere of Harvard and the more egalitarian Columbia. The book begins with the first Jewish academic who was given the opportunity of becoming a tenured member ofthe Harvard English department, Harry Levin, and continues through Lionel Trilling and his immense influence on some important writers, to the present-day "Young and Not-So-Young Turks," Stanley Fish and Susan Garber. But this is notjust a survey ofthe academic Jews who have been, in Norman Podhoretz's elegant phrase, "Making It," but of its implications for American Jews in a wider cultural context. If! had had an opportunity to retitle this book, I would have called it "The Crisis of the Jewish Intellectual," with a nod to Harold Cruse. Klingenstein is not writing such a polemical work as did Cruse, but this book implies that, indeed~ Jewish high culture, as expressed in the academic world, is in crisis. The beginnings of a Jewish presence at Harvard was with Harry Levin, who managed to recognize that there was something terribly wrong about T. S. Eliot's antisemitism. As Klingenstein observes, "'In the last analysis,' Levin wrote, 'Eliot's critical technique is impressionistic, his dogma based on nothing less ephemeral than good taste, and his authority a personal authority.' The idol had fallen; Levin was free ..." (p. 64). It was bold for Levin to dare criticize one ofthe most influential critics of the period, especially at Harvard, but Levin had been an "outsider" less as a Jew than as a Midwesterner. This outsider status can be considered typical of a number of the figures Klingenstein presents, but the three that comprise the first section ofthe bookLevin , M. H. Abrams, and Daniel Aaron-are clearly assimilated Jews. It is obvious, according to Klingenstein, that "the first Jewish literary scholars were integrated into East Coast literary academe as facsimile WASP's; had they been visible as Jews or written on Jewish topics, they would not have had academic careers" (pp. 153-154). Perhaps the most significant ofthese scholars was Lionel Trilling, who had a profound influence over a younger generation ofsuch literary figures as Cynthia Ozick, Norman Podhoretz, and Carolyn Heilbrun. "Trilling's goal, spelled out in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, was immensely appealing to his impoverished, culture-starved Jewish students, who thought ofthemselves as breaking out ofworlds that did not seem to allow for the 'variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty' (p. xv) that Trilling ascribed to literature" (p. 215). But most ofthose ofthe second generation including Allen Guttmann, Leo Marx, and Jules Chametzky wrote, as had their mentors, about the English and American literature of mainstream culture. What is fascinating about Klingenstein's approach is her attempt, not always, I believe, successful, to link the formative years of the future scholars with their mature work. It is her ability, however, to explain in clear and 154 SHOFAR Fa112000 Vol. 19, No.1 concise language the theories, ideas, and influences that fonned the intellectual culture ofthese exceptional academic figures that I would consider one ofthe strengths ofher book. It is not a history ofJewish-American literature, far from it, but it gives the reader a precise and lucid view ofthe most important literary issues facing the academic world in the past sixty years. The third immigrant generation, it is said, tries to recapture what the first knew and the second had tried to forget, and although that fonnula does not always follow in this book, it does bear a rough resemblance to what can be more clearly perceived in Jewish-American culture in the twentieth century. Robert Alter, who did studies of Hebrew literature, Malamud, and Roth, observed that such scholarship was regarded as "some kind of parochial diversion" (p. 293) by his colleagues in the late 60s, the "Golden Age" of Jewish-American literature. Ruth R. Wisse, who became Harvard's first...