Why Not Say What Happened

October 27, 2014
A young man navigates the tensions between his Orthodox Jewish background and his calling as a literary intellectual in this rich coming-of-age memoir. Dickstein (Dancing in the Dark), an English professor and cultural historian, wanders episodically from his boyhood as a yeshiva student in New York in the 1950s, surrounded by a close-knit, eternally kvetching immigrant family, through adolescence, when his religious strictures were gradually displaced by books and a usually unrequited interest in girls, to his budding academic career at Columbia and Yale. It’s a mainly quiet and interior narrative of observation and reflection on ordinary life; Dickstein’s maturation is propelled by summer jobs, trips abroad, persistent conflicts between kosher living and the allure of secular lifestyles, strong friendships, and a deeply felt, luminously described romance with his future wife. Scholarship emerges as an engrossing, even adventurous activity in his vivid descriptions of often brilliant—though sometimes lousy—classroom lectures and seminars; his evocative portraits of such writers and critics as Lionel Trilling, Susan Sontag, and Harold Bloom; and his probing appreciations of novelists and poets (an extended exegesis of Keats is a tour de force). Dickstein’s rapt, unabashed delight in literature and his willingness to let it inform his own experience make for an indelible account of the life of the mind. Photos.

November 1, 2014
An esteemed cultural and literary critic charts the intellectual and religious paths of his early years, sometimes saying too much in the process.In this varyingly astute and chatty memoir, Dickstein (Emeritus, English and Theater/CUNY Graduate Center; Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, 2009, etc.) recalls his journey from Lower East Side yeshiva boy to Ivy League academic and critic. Along the way, he lost inhibitions, struggled against ingrained Jewish beliefs and customs, and contracted at least as many neuroses as he shed. Dickstein had the good fortune to come of age during the late 1950s and 1960s, when books (and eventually movies) were still at the center of cultural debate. The author was part of that conversation, and he leaves indelible portraits of his contemporaries and mentors. There's the brilliant Lionel Trilling, who tended to wing his way through lectures; F.R. Leavis, a "slash and burn" critic cowed by his imperious wife; and the redoubtable Harold Bloom, who even then was already the smartest guy in every room. Dickstein also ably captures his own nervous embrace of secular culture, as the world of his youth proved all but impervious to assault. "As a freethinking intelligence yet a child of the ghetto, a vagrant offshoot of a venerable tradition," he writes, "I would either learn to live with contradictions or perish under their weight." He was both old and young; a member of the Columbia University establishment during the protests of 1968, his sympathies were squarely on the side of the students. He's still that young man in many ways; while the book can get long-winded, especially as he recalls trips abroad, Dickstein hasn't lost his zeal for art or ideas or his passion for writing about them. There's a compelling story in this late-in-life memoir, which is at its best when Dickstein sticks to that story.

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September 1, 2014

Leading critic/historian Dickstein (Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression) here turns that spotlight mind on a subject close to home as he details his Lower East Side childhood, then breaking away from his close, observant Jewish family as he discovers Beat-imbued New York and the rich literary life at Columbia University. Then it's on to oh-so-proper Yale and Cambridge and the wild Sixties.

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