Remembering Irving Howe
Kornblum, William
If you become a teacher you will yearn for a teacher of your own. Long before death stole Irving from us this irony of academia hit me when, through his open classroom door, I caught snatches...
...No people, neither Ethiopians, nor Israelites, nor any other, were exempt from Irving's wry judgments...
...Did he not know that what I most wanted were more of his ideas and his opinions...
...Like Irving Howe, Amos of the Old Testament was a universalist...
...The last of the many authors Irving commended to us was Primo Levi...
...Levi's lessons from Auschwitz encompass a vast theater of human failure, folly, cruelty, and heroism...
...Why then, over coffee in the cafeteria of the City University Graduate Center, would he persist in asking me for my opinions...
...Irving's occasional public lectures also left me with a craving for more of his tough-minded insights on politics and the arts...
...His just criticism was not reserved for our ideological foes of the moment but could easily fall with tender weight on us, his friends and students, which is what made him a prophetic leader and a teacher truly worthy of the term...
...And often his most precious lessons came indirectly, from the books by others whom he most deeply admired...
...How often he was there to remind us, for example, that parties of the left, even when armed with a few paltry truths, are also capable of immense folly and evil...
...Long before death stole Irving from us this irony of academia hit me when, through his open classroom door, I caught snatches of Professor Howe's brilliant lectures on Dickens or Twain...
...Levi never avoids the uncomfortable issues of how, for better or worse, the victims themselves dealt with the calamity...
...Irving's hopeful pessimism recalls the spirit of Amos, the first of the literary prophets, who railed against his people's transgressions but believed in his heart that somehow, improbably, they would mend their ways...
...Even more than Saone or Orwell, this gentle Italian Jew, an unusual master of science and letters, will always evoke memories of what Irving Howe brought to us as a teacher...
...Neither did Irving ever fail to raise the difficult issues...
...Amos hears the Lord ask, "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto Me, 0 Children of Israel...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
