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28-08-2017 | Profile

Alfred Kazin and the Holocaust

Author: Stephen J. Whitfield

Published in: Society | Issue 5/2017

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Abstract

The reputation of Alfred Kazin is based primarily on his criticism of American literature. But his intense Jewish consciousness was self-evident, and that identity was haunted by the horror and memory of the Holocaust. It challenged his faith in the power of language to grasp the texture of experience. The Holocaust also shattered his friendship with Elie Wiesel, whose memoir of Auschwitz and Buchenwald led Kazin the question the veracity of the Nobel laureate.

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Quoted in Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill (New York: Random House, 1968), 84, 85; Alfred Kazin, “The Death of James Joyce” (1941), in The Inmost Leaf: A Selection of Essays (New York: Noonday Press, 1959), 4, 6.

Alfred Kazin, “New York Jew,” in Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 196.

Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 248; Alfred Kazin in “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record, 7 (February 1944), 10.

Quoted in Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 28–29; Julian Levinson, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 154; Kazin, “An Introduction to William Blake,” in Inmost Leaf, 47–51.

Alfred Kazin, “In Every Voice, in Every Ban,” New Republic, 110 (January 10, 1944), 44–46, New York Jew, 26, 30, and Writing Was Everything (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 103–4; Varian Fry, “The Massacre of the Jews,” New Republic, 107 (December 21, 1942), 818.

Franklin Foer, ed., Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 139–46.

Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 80–86.

Quoted in Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 329n; Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 11, 166, and New York Jew, 140–41, 258; Ann Birstein and Alfred Kazin, Introduction to The Works of Anne Frank (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 16, 17–18.

Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 51–52; Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 157.

Kazin, “Gastprofessor für Amerikanistik” (1952), in Contemporaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 312, 314, and “New York Jew,” in Creators and Disturbers, 204.

Kazin, “At Ease in Zion” (1960), in Contemporaries, 348.

Kazin, “Eichmann and the New Israelis” (1961), in Contemporaries, 445–46.

Kazin, “Eichmann and the New Israelis,” in Contemporaries, 444, New York Jew, 34, and Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (New York: Delta, 1973), 85.

Kazin, Writing Was Everything, 80–83, 128–29, “Hannah Arendt: The Burden of Our Time” (1982), in Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings, ed. Ted Solotaroff (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 469, and “The Jew as Modern American Writer,” in The Commentary Reader, ed. Norman Podhoretz (New York: Atheneum, 1966), xix, xxii, xxiii.

A. J. Goldman, “Kubrick’s Unrealized Vision,” Forward, August 5, 2005.

Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties, 32–34, 45–47.

Quoted in David Remnick, “In the Capital of Words,” New Yorker, 74 (July 22 & 29, 1998), 141.

Alfred Kazin, “We Who Sit in Darkness: The Broadway Audience at the Play,” in Inmost Leaf, 135.

Quoted in Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 153; Kazin in “Under Forty,” Contemporary Jewish Record, 10, and “Jew as Modern American Writer,” in The Commentary Reader, xvi-xvii.

Alan M. Wald, “In Retrospect: On Native Grounds,” Reviews in American History, 20 (June 1992), 282; Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 152, 164, 167.

Alan Lelchuk, “Philip Rahv: The Last Years,” in Images and Ideas in American Culture: Essays in Memory of Philip Rahv, ed. Arthur Edelstein (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1979), 218–19; Eugene Goodheart, “The Jewish Writer in America,” Sewanee Review, 116 (January–March, 2008), 103; Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, 147, 149, 166.

Alfred Kazin, “The Least of These” (1960), in Contemporaries, 296, 297, and “My Debt to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi,” in Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, ed. David Rosenberg (New York: Times Books, 1989), 115, 117, 119–20; Elie Wiesel, Night, tr. Stella Rodway (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), 70–71.

Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, I: 1928–1969 (London: HarperCollins, 1997 [1994]), 335.

Kazin, New York Jew, 284–85, and “My Debt,” in Testimony, 121; Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 230–31.

Richard M. Cook, ed., Alfred Kazin’s Journals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 519–21.

Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, 335, 336; Kazin, “My Debt,” in Testimony, 121, 123.

Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, 347–48, and “Elie Wiesel: Les nouvelles menaces,” L’Arche, n. 646 (January 2014), 36–37.

Lothar Kahn, Mirrors of the Jewish Mind: A Gallery of Portraits of European Jewish Writers of Our Time (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968), 176; Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71–87.

Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 64–69; Kazin, New York Jew, 42–47; Cook, Alfred Kazin, 319; Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 119–20.

Alfred Kazin, Foreword to Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), x-xii, and “New York Jew,” in Creators and Disturbers, 208.

Title: Alfred Kazin and the Holocaust
Author: Stephen J. Whitfield
Publication date: 28-08-2017
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society / Issue 5/2017
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0175-0

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