To the Editor:
Joseph Epstein’s essay on Alfred Kazin [“Kazin’s Complaint,” September] is far too dismissive of such a major American Jewish writer. For those of us who teach and write about American literature, On Native Grounds, Contemporaries, and An American Procession are invaluable. Likewise for Jewish Americans who wish to understand the lives of first-generation Jews born in the United States, A Walker in the City, Starting Out in the 1930s, and New York Jew, contra Mr. Epstein, are tender portraits of the immigrant generation and not marked by shame for Jewish heritage or early poverty.
American Jewish critics, Mr. Epstein among them, owe a debt to Kazin—as well as to Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe—who paved the way for Jews writing about fellow Jews and their place in American culture. Kazin was a socialist who was always anti-Stalinist, and he was far from anti-Israeli. I do not understand Mr. Epstein’s posthumous attacks, first on Irving Howe and now on Alfred Kazin. Mr. Epstein, himself such a gifted short-story writer and essayist, does himself no honor to take down men who have contributed so much to American and Jewish culture.
Marek Breiger
Hayward, California
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To the Editor:
It is disappointing that Joseph Epstein has decided to review Alfred Kazin’s character instead of his journals. Kazin’s journals are, of course, informed by his personality, opinions, and beliefs, but Mr. Epstein largely ignores the value of the book as a literary text and a historical document, focusing instead on his distaste for the author’s personality and political views. Echoes of the old arguments between the left-wing New York intellectuals and their right-wing counterparts reverberate throughout the review, and the reader is left with the impression that Mr. Epstein’s main complaint is that Kazin chose the wrong side in the political battle.
The review seems to have afforded Mr. Epstein a long-awaited opportunity to avenge himself on Kazin for “attack[ing] Hilton Kramer, Norman Podhoretz, and others of [Epstein’s] friends” during a lunch more than three decades ago. Throughout, Mr. Epstein seems more concerned with what Kazin didn’t write than with what he did. He marshals anecdotes and personal memories, as well as quotes from Ann Birstein’s memoir, as evidence in his indictment of Kazin’s character and politics. Ultimately, the essay reads more like a gossip column than a serious review. Instead of offering the reader a thoughtful evaluation of Alfred Kazin’s Journals, Mr. Epstein has used the article as an opportunity to score easy hits off an ideological adversary who, as he well knows, will have no chance to respond.
Benjamin Pollak
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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Joseph Epstein writes:
I am grateful to Marek Breiger for the temperate tone of his letter objecting to my essay on Alfred Kazin’s Journals and harking back to an earlier essay of mine in Commentary on Irving Howe. All critics have politics, but superior critics write in a way that allows them to surmount their own politics. I don’t believe this was the case with either Alfred Kazin or Irving Howe, which was part of my point in writing about both of them. I do not argue that my politics are superior to theirs, only that theirs obtrudes upon and deeply mars their criticism.
I have to disagree with Mr. Breiger’s assessment of Kazin’s “tender portraits of the immigrant generation.” The first of these portraits, or autobiographical books, is vastly overwritten, and the other two are dominated, and hence disqualified, by spite. I also want to make plain that, while I feel a debt to Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson and a few other 20th-century critics, I feel none whatsoever to Alfred Kazin. I do feel a debt to Irving Howe for his and Eliezer Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories, one of the splendid literary anthologies of my time and a book that greatly enriched my understanding of the subject.
Mr. Pollack’s complaint is that I did not review Alfred Kazin’s Journals but the character of their author. I wonder if Mr. Pollack has read the Journals. If he had, he would quickly enough have seen that the Journals and their author’s character are coterminous. What the Journals—what perhaps every published journal—declare is: Here I am, the private man. The Journals, as Kazin knew, revealed him. What he could not have known, else he would never have wished it published, is that his Journals also reveal the sourness and corruption and disqualifying bias of nearly all his other writings.