Remember Emanuel Geltman
Morton, Brian & Walzer, Michael
We mourn the loss of Emanuel Geltman, one of our founding editors, who died on September 6. "Manny" was a socialist for longer than most of us have lived. As a teenager, influenced by his radical...
...Something had been settled back then among the three of them, and there was a firmness and steadiness ever after...
...He was the first managing editor of Dissent...
...I can hardly imagine him using the more standard sectarian epithets (though he surely did): once Dissent was under way, he learned to make his points without them...
...And Manny did love to talk...
...For one thing, it was a pleasure to listen to Manny—he had a great sense of humor, he'd read everything, and he'd known everyone...
...We print their talks below...
...Only people close to the magazine can even begin to understand the importance of the part he played over many years...
...If the finished pieces had a certain elegance, that was because it had been supplied by Manny...
...One of the oldtimers"—that's the way I thought of him when I first met him: he would have been in his early forties...
...Soon he was a leading member of the youth group...
...In A Margin of Hope, Irving Howe describes a factional fight, sometime in the late 1930s, when a Greek comrade chased Manny with a knife—because Manny had called him an Albanian...
...Stanley, and Manny, and Irving: they came out of an older politics together and (with Lew Coser, whose political history was different) they made the magazine and kept it going...
...Manny worked as an editor for the Quadrangle Press, the University of Chicago Press, and elsewhere...
...And I, who rarely spoke at board meetings unless Irving kicked me, took a while to recognize the value of all that: it was our collective life, edited (and probably revised) and kept alive in Manny's head...
...Manny was never one to leave in the middle of a conversation...
...In the post-World War II era the limits of sectarian politics became clearer, and in 1953 he left the Shachtmanites and joined Irving Howe, Stanley Plastrik, Lewis Coser, and Meyer Schapiro, among others, in founding a journal that, Howe and Coser wrote, would "provide a rallying point for those who dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States...
...In the days since he died, I've kept hearing Manny's voice...
...They had come through a certain political experience, and though they would disagree afterward about this or that, they were never really at odds...
...they were as one . . . and Manny the last of them...
...He enjoyed reading the things that came in over the transom, because he loved to discover new writers...
...more inclined, within our own ranks, to make peace...
...But after a while I realized that Manny wasn't talking just to entertain...
...Work...
...You learned a lot from Manny by watching him work...
...They had left behind a sectarian orthodoxy...
...During the years I knew him Manny wasn't doing much writing under his own name, but he was doing a lot of writing behind the scenes...
...He was right...
...ready with a joke, a story, a reminiscence whenever an argument got a little rough...
...Reading unsolicited manuscripts, for example, is usually considered a chore, and Manny could easily have handed the job off to someone else, but he never did...
...But the flow of conversation never stopped WINTER • 1996 • 123 In Memoriam for long, and I was grateful for that...
...When he got to Manny, he said, "You'll like Manny...
...Every office has its recurring scenes, and one of the recurring scenes at Dissent involved the giveandtake between Manny and Simone Plastrik...
...Then he smiled and said, "Manny loves to talk...
...He was giving us an education...
...Now that he is gone, we will have to tell the stories ourselves: who first wrote about that issue in the magazine, and who obj ected to what was written, and why . . . . And now Manny is part of the story...
...less eager for a polemical exchange...
...As a teenager, influenced by his radical older brothers and sister, he joined a young Communist group...
...Manny was a superb editor...
...I saw him mostly at meetings, where I sometimes thought he talked too much...
...when something needed doing, when there was a particularly difficult article to edit, an outraged friend who needed to be placated, some complex arrangement to be delicately negotiated, he was certain to be ready...
...we thought there was time . . . ). In the movement, among the Trotskyists, there was a style of argument, of extended argument, which would start with the division of labor in ancient Babylonia in order to reach and analyze the latest strike in Detroit or Akron...
...When he told you about the people he'd known, you felt as if you'd known them...
...their politics henceforth was open, experimental, attuned to change...
...Even when he turned a piece down, he'd send the writer a long and serious letter about it...
...Usually a rejection letter brings you down, but this one made me feel eager to keep writing...
...When Manny and Stanley Plastrik and Irving gave that up, Manny replaced it with something else, with an inner-Dissent history of the argument...
...Manny was a socialist's socialist, a dissenter's dissenter...
...When I first came to work at Dissent, Mark Levinson told me a little about the different people who worked at the magazine...
...and yet they were socialist rocks, "standing fast in good times and bad"—as Irving said of Stanley—"on call for whatever task was needed, living by a code, largely unspoken yet not to be violated, of concern for the lives of men and women...
...Part of what made him such a good editor was a matter of temperament or character...
...I miss him very much, but I think I'm going to be talking with him for the rest of my life...
...Manny'll make you feel at home...
...MICHAEL WALZER q WINTER • 1996 • 125...
...I realized that when Manny talked to me or any of the younger people who came to work at Dissent, his talk had a very serious purpose...
...If you have written for Dissent but are not part of the inner circle, you probably don't know or can't acknowledge how much of your best prose . . . was Manny's...
...Someone might mention Meyer Schapiro, and Manny would say, "Did I ever tell you the story about the time Meyer and Irving and Norman Mailer got stuck in an elevator for half an hour, and Meyer made the time go by by giving them a lecture on French impressionism...
...At his memorial service, Brian Morton and Michael Walzer, men of two different generations influenced by Manny, spoke of Manny's contributions to the magazine and to the socialist project...
...He was completely unjaded...
...Manny's stories were rarely about himself...
...Manny did make me feel at home—within a month of my coming there Manny and Frances had me over for the first of many dinners...
...Along with James P Cannon and Max Shachtman, founders ofAmerican Trotskyism, and youth leader Nathan Gould, he attended the Paris meeting that resulted in the Fourth International in 1937...
...Manny was teaching us about the history of Dissent, and the history of the American left in the twentieth century...
...He was a good teacher...
...because he worked every day with people he loved and people who loved him...
...And the two of us would be quiet for a while, because we were both afraid of Simone...
...He was a good editor with all the writers he worked with, but he was a miracle worker with the tough cases—the writers who had something worthwhile to say but not much idea of how to say it...
...Manny would go on to give a paraphrase of Meyer's lecture, slightly abridged, and in the middle of all this Simone, the taskmaster, would look up and say, "Brian...
...It happened, for example, yesterday afternoon at Dissent, when I read a manuscript by a writer who was promising but not quite ready, and I was trying to write a rejection Emanual Geltman Photo by Chalmers K. Stuart 124 • DISSENT In Memoriam letter that would somehow make the writer feel encouraged and eager to try again . . . . I'm glad that I keep hearing Manny's voice, and I'm not at all surprised that I do...
...Manny used to joke that he joined movements just in time to leave them...
...EDs...
...Perhaps it is appropriate that he should have been the last, for he remembered everything and told us about it...
...Choosing to be a socialist doesn't seem like a formula for a lifetime of gratification, but listening to Manny's stories it was clear that his choice had brought him nothing but joy—because it was a choice of comrades...
...We always felt sure about him...
...BRIAN MORTON A Dissenter's Dissenter You all know the phrase "a ballplayer's ballplayer," which describes someone whose qualities are best appreciated by people in the game...
...Never one to follow a "party line," he broke with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party and went with the Shachtman group that had been disgusted by the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Soviet invasions of the Baltic countries...
...No talk...
...I received one of those letters myself about two years before I came to work for Dissent...
...Like the other oldtimers and unlike them: less prickly...
...It wasn't only through talk that Manny gave you an education...
...Most of them were about Irving, Stanley, Simone, Meyer, Joe Clark, Joe Carter—the people he'd worked with, the people he loved...
...I wish now we had recorded every word (or sent someone to do an oral history...
...when he told you about some of the political battles he took part in, you felt as if you'd taken part in them too...
...That describes the three of them .. . and Manny the last...
...He was always ready to tell us who first wrote about this or that issue, and who objected, and why, and who responded to the objection, and how...
...By the time he entered Brooklyn College he had come to question the Communist accommodation with Hitler, and he joined the embryonic American Trotskyist movement...
...Before he was drafted, Manny edited Labor Action, the Shachtmanite group's weekly paper and served as an organizer on the West Coast...
...Dissent has had a few of those...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
