A Partisan Review

- By Jim Hicks

Yet how could it be otherwise? In Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers, Jules Chametzky, a founding editor of MR, has assembled his reflections on and recollections of an amazing array of writers, many more than the thirty-one crystalline chapters in this jewel of a book. Not least among its contributions is the case it makes for the centrality of Jewish writers and writing to whatever we think of, or about, American culture. No one ought to have doubted this before; after reading Jules, no one ever will again.

You’ll be wanting samples. One chapter ponders whether anyone—other than those in the business (editors, writers, professors, and students)—still reads “serious” literature. And then Jules happens across, in an elevator in apartment building in Manhattan, a man reading Tobias Smollett. Unable to restrain himself, he asks the man if he teaches, or is perhaps a student. “‘No,’” the stranger replies, “‘I’m just reading it for pleasure.’” Jules reports that he “radiated with wonder.” At last! Such anecdotes need telling, so Jules relates this one to his friend, who lives in the building. “‘Oh,’” she says, “‘that must have been Harold.’ Harold who? ‘Harold Brodkey,’” she replies, “‘He lives upstairs. Would you like us to invite him for dinner?’ Yes, of course” . . .

So we’re still waiting for that “ordinary, non-literary reader of Smollet.” Yet there is, of course, another sort of “radiant wonder” shining from this elevator encounter. For our sort of people, the non-ordinary literaries, a chance meeting with Brodkey (or Brodsky, or Bellow, or Singer, or Rich) is like crossing paths with the pope. More than a half-century as editor has given Jules these and plenty of other stories to tell. Now, I could write here that I’ve got nothing against the devotees of People magazine, or against fans of the latest TV star-studded stripshow, but I’d be lying. I don’t value that sort of celebrity, yet I too have my heroes: Those who, as Chametzky puts it, “Through art, literature, criticism, culture generally. . . tried to keep alive the idea and hope of a world more attractive—as Trotsky called literature—often in the worst of times.” To read a series of intimate sketches dedicated to these souls is a rare sort of pleasure. Not the same as riding in that elevator, but close.

Of course, this book, subtitled A Cultural Memoir, is not just People, it’s also the Times. The portrait of Tillie Olsen, for example. Remembering the year that this “grandmother in mini-skirts” spent at Amherst College, Chametzky comments that “It is no exaggeration to say Tillie Olsen kicked off. . . the feminist movement in the Pioneer Valley, home to five institutions of higher learning.”  And beyond. Chametzky also recalls how he himself used Olsen’s “Broadening the Canon” syllabus as the basis for a course he taught in Berlin the following year. One of his teaching assistants that year, Beate Schopp-Schilling, “went on to become the arbiter of women’s issues in the Bonn government.” The other, Werner Sollors, is now Professor of English and African-American Studies at Harvard, where he has chaired their Afro-American Studies, American Civilization, and Ethnic Studies programs.

This post might well have been titled MR: A User’s Manual, if only to indicate, indirectly, what ought to be an obvious reason for reading Out of Brownsville. If you too are a reader, a writer, a translator, or an editor, as I am, you can certainly do no better than to spend time with Jules Chametzky, as I have. What emerges from this series of portraits is also a self-portrait, and that alone is reason enough to read on. But Chametzky’s more attentive students will also gain an invaluable set of instructions for reading, for writing, and—we must add—for editing. Jules cites a conversation with John Edgar Wideman, after the novelist had just heard Baldwin lecture in Amherst. Wideman commented: “When a man stands up there and says, ‘Then I said to Martin,’ or ‘That’s what Malcolm said to me,’ I pay attention!’”  Well, yes. At MR, we’re doing our best to do likewise.

As I’ve said, we too have our heroes.