Remembering Irving Howe
Konrád, George
If I were to meet with Irving Howe today, in a New York coffee shop, or at Drenka Willen's* lovely dinner table, or in our kitchen here in Budapest, where my wife and I would invite a few friends...
...The younger one brings him up to date on the latest, things we already know, only too well...
...He reflected for a moment and answered with a question: "You mean a type of chicken soup with no meat or soup greens or noodles...
...I encountered smiles like his, in my father's small-town hardware store in prewar Hungary, on the faces of worldlywise provincial types who came in to warm their hands over the potbellied stove...
...He was one of the leaders, an elder, a paterfamilias, who had to remain true to himself and produce a life that was a coherent whole...
...Irving was a little like the uncle we all seem to need, the uncle we can confide in, whose approval we crave...
...He was one of the great intellectuals, an authentic dissenter, the odd man out in any cozy establishment...
...The name hardly matters...
...Ens...
...Irving could have FALL • 1993 • 537 stood there, too, amid the pots and pans, rubbing his hands, staring at the fire, managing a smile...
...If I were to meet with Irving Howe today, in a New York coffee shop, or at Drenka Willen's* lovely dinner table, or in our kitchen here in Budapest, where my wife and I would invite a few friends to meet Irving and liana, we would most certainly be interrogated...
...His death cannot prevent us from resuming our animated conversation, in a New York coffee shop, at Drenka Willen's lovely dinner table, here in our kitchen, or perhaps outside in the garden...
...American Jewish literature, he said, is being absorbed into the mainstream as American Jews themselves, the younger generation, are becoming culturally more and more like other middle-class Americans...
...didn't feel a need to be surrounded by that many more Jews...
...He was an American, an American Jew...
...There was little that could still surprise these respectable-looking older men...
...Whenever these merchants and tradesmen, friends of my father, spoke to me, I answered them as best I could, and even tried to make them smile...
...It's true, though—and here I have to make a distinction between Irving and the men who stood around that potbellied stove—that the year 1944 came as a surprise even to them, so much so, that in 1945 they did not come back to warm their hands...
...It seems I had known Irving Howe long before I met him...
...And it wouldn't be simply the curiosity of a colleague or that of a critic, a friend of foreign dissidents...
...He knows how to receive and release people at this party, which he knew he was going to attend, though he wasn't entirely convinced he should...
...you couldn't really separate their smile from their resigned frown...
...He was pleased with his rejoinder, as well he should have been, but a few minutes later—we had just left Drenka's house and were ambling down Houston Street—he struck down the winning metaphor: "Ah, but there is clear consomm...
...What Howe said had a ring of authority...
...he * Irving Howe's editor for many of his books...
...So the possibility does exist...
...it pleased him that the parade of faces passing in front of a New York café represented the world...
...In my mind Irving Howe remains a reliable witness, a friend from a different world, an empathetic dissenter, the founding father of a culture of dissent, who dared, and knew how, to distinguish between good and evil...
...who can be skeptical and judgmental, not just supportive, even when we are among family...
...people approach him, he is very good at shaking hands and saying something brief, or something a little meatier, depending on his interest in the individual...
...Two curious people have become fond of each other...
...He returned to the subject in Budapest, in a series of lectures he gave at several Hungarian universities...
...It happens that we cannot stay in a place even when we think we probably ought to, and for him this included Israel, which always had a claim on his attention, but his true home was of course New York...
...Paradoxes amused him, he felt they made the picture whole and real...
...TRANSLATED FROM THE HUNGARIAN BY IVAN SANDERS...
...there was more bad news than good, and even good news had a way of turning bad...
...Though the day was not much different from other days...
...I once asked him if he thought there was a type of Jewish literature, written not by Israelis, in Hebrew or in Yiddish, not avowedly Jewish, which nevertheless was Jewish, if only because its world implied paradox...
...An intelligent, painstaking curiosity would like to know what is happening here, how we are faring, and just what sort of people are we, anyway...
...I can see him at a New York get-together, standing by the wall, preferably in a corner...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
