elinor grumet_the apprenticeship of lionel trilling

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Prooftexts.

http://www.jstor.org

The Apprenticeship of Lionel Trilling Author(s): ELINOR GRUMET Source: Prooftexts, Vol. 4, No. 2 (MAY 1984), pp. 153-173Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689088Accessed: 25-08-2015 01:40 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 109.121.32.205 on Tue, 25 Aug 2015 01:40:42 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ELINOR GRUMET

The Apprenticeship of Lionel Trilling for Sherman Paul

1

LIONEL TRILLING BEGAN his career as an essayist and writer of fiction in the pages of a journal devoted to the "advancement of Jewish culture and ideals." From the spring of 1925, when he was nineteen

years old, to the autumn of 1931, Trilling published in the Menorah

Journal a total of eighteen book reviews, a personal essay, an essay in

literary history, two signed translations from French, and four short stories, at least two of which were conceived as chapters of novels. At the end of those six and a half years, Trilling divorced his literary career from Jewish cultural interest. That divorce was a thoughtful and con scious act. This essay describes the terms of Trilling's affiliation with the Menorah Journal, and examines some of the materials that explain his

rejection of American Jewish culture as appropriate ground for the

development of an intellectual life. The Menorah Journal had been founded in 1915 as the organ of the

Intercollegiate Menorah Association, a forerunner of the Hillel move

ment, under the editorship of Henry Hurwitz. The Menorah movement ceased to be an extracurricular force on American campuses by the Depression, but the Journal was published fitfully until the early 1960s: Hurwitz died in 1961, and a final memorial issue was brought out by his son the following year. The Menorah Journal was handsomely designed. Its well-written articles were informative or speculative, though non

scholarly. Like its parent organization, the Journal styled itself radical

PROOFTEXTS 4 (1984): 153-173 @ 1984 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


154 ELINOR GRUMET

within Jewish circles, but aimed for respectability among educated Americans. It was available by subscription only, and had national circu lation. The historic centrality of the Menorah movement and its publi cation lies in the institutional definition they gave to secular Jewish identity among college-educated American Jews.

Between 1923 and 1931, Elliot Cohen-like Lionel Trilling, then

only in his twenties-was managing editor of the Menorah Journal. In 1945 Cohen would design Commentary magazine for the American Jewish Committee on the same secular, cultural model. Then, as earlier, he would attract a stable of young writers with his forceful personality and the occasion he offered for a spirited assessment of Jewish life, observing the standards of literary excellence.

Henry Rosenthal first introduced Lionel Trilling to the Menorah: In

1925, Lionel Mordecai Trilling and Henry Moses Rosenthal were both seniors at Columbia College, and best friends. They served together on

the staff of the Morningside, Columbia's literary magazine, under the

editorship of fellow-students Clifton Fadiman and Victor Lemaitre. The

magazine had quality; Whittaker Chambers, Jacques Barzun, John Gassner, S. Guy Endore, and Meyer Shapiro were writing for the

Morningside those same years; Louis Zukofsky and Mortimer Adler had

appeared in its pages several years earlier. Trilling, Rosenthal, Fadiman, and Herbert Solow were known as campus intellectuals, and meeting often in the Hartley Hall dormitory, came to be called the Hartley Cor

poration. (Trilling himself did not live in the dorm, but walked to school from his parents' modest apartment at 108th Street and Central Park

West.) The members of the Hartley Corporation brought one another into Elliot Cohen's circle at the Menorah Journal.I

The friendship between Lionel Trilling and Henry Rosenthal was

especially significant in Trilling's development at this time. Their long conversations confirmed them in the values they shared: respect for excellence and critical intelligence; faith in the primacy of literature and works of imagination, and the fresh superiority of their own observations about cultural life. They were also bound by the issue on which they finally differed-the implications of being Jewish. First Rosenthal, then Elliot Cohen, were Trilling's Jewish higher education, and Trilling's later

public pronouncements about Jews and Judaism were the heuristic observations of these friends adopted by Trilling as conclusions. Their fiction and essays in the Menorah Journal show that young Trilling and Rosenthal encouraged each other's tendency to ground their work in

autobiography. Reflecting on several of his Jewish students at Columbia in an article

written for the Menorah Journal, and published in 1928, Mark Van Doren noted the disparity between the two friends. He described Rosenthal:


The Apprenticeship of Lionel Trilling 155

The first Jew I remember in any Columbia class was not very tall, I believe; but my impression then as now was of something in his mind, corresponding to something in his figure and his face, that was almost grotesquely long drawn out. He presented his pale, ascetic features to my attention after one

of the first meetings of the class and said without the flicker of a smile: "I have read Mencken. What are we going to talk about? Are we going to get

past Mencken?" I had not mentioned Mencken in the class that day nor, I

think, did I ever mention him, since he was not germane to the course. But

if I did speak of him thereafter, I am sure I guarded my remarks with a

glance at this face, the eyes . . . which were always dropped down in immi

nent disapproval, to see how truthful I must be. For I quickly learned to

watch my step in the presence of-let us call him A. A developed the

fiercest method of attack that I have ever known in my none too long

experience with controversy. It was as if his mind lay in a coil-deadly,

waiting, pale-from which at any moment it might rise and strike. Scorn

for me, I thought then, as well as for all of the other students and virtually all of the writers and thinkers of the world-scorn was the very fiber of his faculties; he could express himself only by saying No.

. . . He wrote many brilliant essays for me, and during one period he was sole author of a little

periodical whose issues he deposited weekly in manuscript upon my desk.

Nothing that he ever wrote praised anybody or anything; he was inveterately satirical, and he did the job thoroughly with each new victim. Though I often wondered what it was he did like, who it was he could conceivably

approve of, I of course never asked-it would have been dangerous. He

would have asked me why it was necessary to approve, and I could not have

told him why. Eventually my question was answered however. A graduated; and word came to me that he had gone into a seminary to make himself a

rabbi. He had approved, then, of God! And I remembered that this was so.

He still is in the seminary, and I hear that he has started something like a

revolution against the teaching methods there. But I know that he still

approves of God. I can see him in some future pulpit, pale as wrath itself,

reminding his amazed hearers of all they never knew.2

And of Trilling Van Doren wrote:

F, starting brightly as a freshman, grew more melancholy each year, and

more beguiling. Something fastidious in his gentle nature kept him from

irony and rendered him incapable of satire, though he was by no means

unaware of absurdities; if he had been he would have been informed of them quickly enough by his friend A. F spoke diffidently, with a hushed and harmless voice; and though he wrote exceedingly well he found it hard to decide what to write about. I thought I detected in him a particularly sensitive and at the same time healthy set of nerves, and said to myself that this was equipment indeed for a story-teller or a poet. He became both-but was careful to maintain the amateur standing which his fastidiousness forced him to prefer. He took up this, he took up that, only to let both fall gracefully at his feet, which passed lightly on to other pleasant fields. He is a college


156 ELINOR GRUMET

instructor now in the Middle West [in 1926-27, Trilling taught at the Uni

versity of Wisconsin], whence he writes back letters full of praise for a few

persons and of blame for a few others. He still is feeling himself out

respectfully, with dignity, and with grace. What he will eventually do, if he does it at all, will be lovely, for it will be the fruit of a pure intelligence slowly ripened in not too fierce a sun.3

Rosenthal brooded deeply on the difference between Trilling and himself in a story called "Inventions," published in the Menorah Journal in

January 1928, in which he models a character after Trilling, named

"Dolman," and a character after himself, whom he calls "Starobin." There he defines the loving tension between Dolman's "mannered ner

velessness" and his own swartness and passion as a matter of Jewishness. The hotly Jewish Starobin "would have forsworn himself to see the

perpetual qualifications of [Dolman's] nice speech, spaced in wit and

Cambridge slang, brought to a gasping directness by a sound punch in the wind from a member of the Hakoah" (the Viennese Jewish athletic

club). Starobin describes himself as "a sort of animated earlock," destined to be a professional Jew, the complete Pharisee "at home both in the

world and in the kingdom of heaven." Dolman's imperturbability rankles him. The fictional Trilling is too much the young swell, amusedly sensual,

geometrically courteous, "a copybook George Moore given better shoulders and made devilish by a slight Semitic smear in the Irish face."

Dolman's consciousness is "tight and smooth"; he is a man not vaguely ashamed of shaving, one born spiritually blond. The fictional Rosenthal wants to jolt him to Jewish awareness, slug him, make him watch the

rapes described in Dubnow's History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, trick him by argument, convince him of his implication in a turbulent and

spiritual history.

[Starobin] knew that fundamentally what all the Zionists wanted to do, and he certainly among them, was to twist those soft impassive lips of all the

Dolmans with a little good coarse Yiddish-preferably a Yiddish salute to the flag of Zion, which he should repeat unwillingly, persuaded by the

Maccabean fists of an experienced Chalutz, a bronzed Palestinian bully of the second generation, heart-whole and astink with the soil.4

Starobin decides to challenge his friend in their senior year, setting out, as Rosenthal puts it, with a "slightly hysterical earnestness" to convert Dolman, to find out "what kind of a Jew he was anyway." Apparently the senior-year confrontation-either in reality a single incident or a series of conversations-was based on fact; Trilling also

wrote about it. It was in his senior year that Lionel Trilling wrote

"Impediments" (close in title, as well as source to Rosenthal's "Inven tions"), a short story in which an intense and passionately intellectual



student at Columbia tries to establish friendship with a classmate who is well-dressed, mannered and nerveless. Originally intended for the

Morningside, the story was Trilling's first contribution to the Menorah

Journal-after he had revised it to heighten the point that the characters were both meant to be Jews.5

Henry Rosenthal suggested that Trilling send it to the Menorah. In their intimate circle of friends, Rosenthal was the only observant Jew.

He took courses down the block at the Jewish Theological Seminary while still an undergraduate; and he was the only one of his literary circle who belonged to a fraternity-where the Jewish men called their awkward, intense brother from Louisville "Hank." Rosenthal's intention, as he defined it in the pages of the Menorah Journal, was to make himself what Stephen Daedalus could not be-"both pious and clever," "both rabbi and maker of paradoxes," both Jesuit and genius. In his early effort to merge the religious and modern secular compartments of his mind, satire served him as a way of shaming the extremes of both

positions. Lampoon forced postures to be pliant, and he defended satiric freedom to his teacher, Mordecai Kaplan, by claiming that it was blas

phemy to believe it possible to blaspheme God. Kaplan thought that a

courageous position, a "mystic observation worthy of the great Kab balists," which enabled Rosenthal to be at once both fully alive to the

vulgarities and sterility of Jewish life (Kaplan's words), and deeply in love with it.6

What Kaplan perhaps failed to appreciate was that Rosenthal's satiric faith included the obligation to satirize even his own motives and temper. Rosenthal observed of his alter ego Starobin:

... although he was reputedly keen, it was chiefly by virtue of his clever statement of superficial things or for his knack of inventing an extremely

complex (and highly literary) sentiment or relationship and assigning it arbitrarily to whomsoever he wished to describe. People were awed by the

sheer multiplicity of any particular judgment which he might utter, by the reticulation itself in the pattern of personality he might be trying to project, and fancied that they had here a Marcel Proust or a new Dostoevski . . . but in his deep heart he was more modest, and did not fail to make the proper discounts.7

The young writers on the Menorah Journal considered Henry Rosen thal their mad genius, their James Joyce, the one most marked for literary success. As undergraduates, he and Trilling talked long and intensely

with each other, making their minds, proceeding probably as Rosenthal depicted Starobin and Dolman, verbally destroying all the values they had always professed and reconstructing in the travail of conversation "that beauty, truth, and religion without which the world was foul."s


158 ELINOR GRUMET

2

Elliot Cohen sent a letter to "my dear Mr. Trilling" on March 18, 1925, accepting his story "Impediments," and inviting him to lunch to discuss the possibility of future contributions. Trilling earned $35 from the piece, at the Menorah's usual rate of two cents a word; it was his first

published work in a national periodical. A year passed before Trilling's next published story, though he did make at least one submission that was rejected, a story similar in subject to "Impediments" set at Yale, and called-if the title does not refer to yet another story that went

unpublished-"Donald and Jerome."9 "Chapter for a Fashionable Jewish Novel," his second story published

in the Menorah, was submitted with an endorsement by Rosenthal, a note

intimidatingly clever in Rosenthal's way, defending the fiction's incidental

Jewishness: "To be sure, if, in one's present day literalness, the Journal

requires more rigorous evidence of the piece's Chaldean ancestry I can undertake to suggest to Mr. Trilling that, literally or metaphorically, he hook the noses of his characters and, as in my own writings, intersperse a few judicious references to circumcision, and so on." During the aca demic year 1925-26, Cohen met Herbert Solow and Clifton Fadiman

through Trilling, and learned to handle the inspired fierceness of Henry Rosenthal's temperament.10

That same year, while Trilling worked at Columbia on his master's

degree, his friendship with Cohen and his dependence on him as an editor deepened; when in Madison the following year, Trilling sent him letters in a high-spirited scrawl-now addressed to "Elliot" rather than "Mr. Cohen," and often signed "Li"-filled with notes and arguments about revisions and witty Jewish news.

Trust you have recovered from the convention [the Menorah Convention on the Spiritual Situation of the Jew, in January 1927]. I really think you should have wangled (as my English friends say) a trip to New York for me. If I had nothing to say about the Jew in America, I could have sung or told dirty stories.

Rosenthal is Passovering among the nymphs and Seders of Louisville, and to the regards he would no doubt send, he probably adds the season's greetings. As in everything, the Jews are curious in their celebration of

liberty: it is done by keeping one imprisoned in the house waiting for three meals a day for eight days because no restaurant and no other person's house is celebrating liberty with sufficient severity.'1

Trilling's involvement in Cohen's cultural enterprise was so keen, that the evening of his arrival in Wisconsin, he sat to write a story for the Journal. He sent his early Madison work first to Henry, who then delivered it to Elliot. (A story written during the year he was in Madison,



now lost, was finally called either "The Butcher's Sister's Doctor" or "Galatea Incomplete.") Trilling conceived himself a writer of Jewish fiction at the time, defining the adjective "Jewish" by the passionateness of both Cohen's and Rosenthal's committed satirical intelligence. Though he later recoiled from Jewish cultural enterprise, refusing to serve on the editorial board of Cohen's Commentary, Trilling remained personally devoted to Cohen. He delivered his eulogy in 1959, pale and barely able to stand. Trilling's friendship with Rosenthal was of shorter duration,

apparently ending in the early thirties, when the careers of the two men

diverged.12 Altogether Trilling's association with the Menorah Journal lasted

through Trilling's graduation from Columbia; a year of master's work

there; his year as an "assistant" in the Department of English at the

University of Wisconsin, teaching lower division courses; and four more

years of literary study at the Columbia Graduate School, and part-time teaching in the Evening, Extension and Day divisions of Hunter College. In addition to the work published in the Menorah Journal, there survive in the papers of the Menorah Association an essay, "The Changing Myth of the Jew," written between the autumn of 1930 and the autumn of 1931 (but published only in Commentary almost fifty years later in August 1978), and a pointless review of James Sykes' biography of Disraeli's wife. The Yale and Madison stories mentioned above survive only in

passing reference.13 The word "identity" was not in common use in the 1920s; the writers

who apprenticed themselves to the Menorah Journal rather described their affiliation with a Jewish magazine by evoking the terms "self-acceptance," "self-realization," or, less frequently, "authenticity." That catch-phrase for all types of felt Jewish inauthenticity, "self-hate," was applied to the

Jewish situation only in 1930 in Berlin by Theodor Lessing; so what the Menorah men eschewed went under the name of "self-denial" and "shame" at being a Jew. Trilling defined the Jewish self-acceptance they promoted as a Jew's "finding pleasure and taking pride in the identification, dis

covering in it one or another degree of significance. From which there

might follow an impulse of kinship with others who make the same

recognition, and perhaps the forming of associations on the basis of this

kinship." He readily predicated that self-acceptance and belongingness of himself, noting in a personal essay published in the Menorah that he was among those who "had investigated and in part discovered what it means to be a Jew to one's self." His claim was warranted by his involve ment in the business of building an American Jewish culture through the pages of the Menorah Journal, as ElliQt Cohen conceived it.'"

In 1929, Trilling stood before the delegates to the December 1929 Convention of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, presenting himself as an example of a young Jewish writer whom the Menorah


160 ELINOR GRUMET

Journal had saved from diversion to other fields and dissipation of talent. His appearance was both an act of public relations and the kind of

personal testimony Alcoholics Anonymous encourages: Here was a

young man saved by the Menorah Journal, one of "the young men, earnest, trained, perhaps talented, whom Judaism loses only with a terrible effect on itself"-as Trilling described the redeemed in a letter that same year. Out of commitment to his first public forum and love for its managing editor, Trilling wrote a very long and very personal endorsement of the

Menorah Journal in 1929 at Cohen's request-a request made of all his stable of writers-at a time when the finances of the Journal were so

desperate that its continuance was called into question.15 Trilling's letter of endorsement is best read as his retrospection on

what the Journal had meant to him, written even as he was freeing himself from the Journal's program. What he described it to be was

essentially a "little magazine," one of those organs of critical imagination which, as he explained years later in his introduction to the Partisan Reader, keep "our culture from being cautious and settled, or merely sociological, or merely pious." For in the late 1920s, Trilling's feelings about America were similar to Waldo Frank's and Lewis Mumford's: America was unsupportive of native creativity, and hope for cultural excellence lay only in the work of critical subgroups. He wrote in a

Menorah review of this country: "America, where it is considered best that . . . freedom and creation [be] shown their limits." The Menorah Journal and its program of Jewish cultural nationalism provided such a creative subgroup. Its members might imagine that their creative activity grew from a soil richer than America's, and stood related organically to their smaller Jewish society as both means and end, redeeming it from

Babbitry, in the same way that Matthew Arnold supposed cultural

activity would leaven the lump of English bourgeois life. From the

Jewish point of view, the Menorah program was a dream of Diaspora's end in an autonomous Jewish cultural center, such as Simon Dubnow had imagined. From the American point of view-Elliot Cohen's and Lionel Trilling's-it was a communal dream of premodern creativeness and organic, folk integrity in the desert of middle-class sham and boosterism.16

I have been trying hard [Trilling's endorsement concluded] to understand the reason which would, of all Jewish activities, first abandon the Journal. I can only see such an action as to the last degree illogical. It seems to me that the whole purpose of practical Jewish endeavor is to create a community that can read The Menorah Journal. More exactly, of course, what I mean is that this purpose is to construct a society that can consider its own life from a calm, intelligent, dignified point of view; take delight in its own arts, its own thoughts, the vagaries of its own being. It may be argued, of course, that the Journal does not do these things. But granted that it does, it is



performing an essential function in the Jewish body. And if it does these

things, it is a madness to cut it out from the Jewish body.

If the situation of the Jews were suddenly made perfect, if there were no

longer struggle and heartbreak, many forces in present Jewish life would be stranded and made useless. But the Menorah Journal would not. In a perfect

Jewish world, the Journal, with very little change, would still be valid and useful. It is not often that a thing can be both a means and an end. Perhaps

only the best things are both-creation, love, truth.

I have tried to think why the Journal must of all things in Jewish life be first sacrificed. I cannot discover why. I can only see the sacrifice as a terrible

waste. As for how the Intercollegiate Menorah Society can be justified without the Journal, I simply cannot conceive it. The Society's purpose is cultural, is

it not?-the purpose of Jewish life is cultural, is it not? Have we then so much learning, have we then so much spiritual fertility, have we so much

intelligence in Jewish life that we can afford to chuck a good deal of it very casually over the side? Nobody can think that we have. A good Jewish book, a fine Jewish thought is rare enough, God knows. You bet He knows. And He knows that all the ewes are blemished, that the column of smoke rises crooked as a corkscrew, that unclean accidents happen to the priests, that

the sanctuary buzzes with flies.

... If the Journal is chucked, then Judaism has also to be chucked and made

over into a Benevolent Association.

And then a man could decently make up his mind whether he wanted to

join that bunch or the Elks.'

H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis are speaking in these lines. Trilling's

literary generation established itself very early, and its young voice is often the voice of collective feeling, and its unedited tone, the tone of adolescence. When, twelve years later, Hurwitz asked Trilling if he could make public use of this letter of endorsement, Trilling refused: "For one thing, I very much dislike its manner of expression; . . . Then for another thing, those paragraphs were written in a special context

which, for me, doesn't exist any longer and so for me they can have truth only historically."18

In his letter of endorsement, Trilling recalls his first impression of

the Journal:

When I first saw the Journal, my emotions were naive but not, I think, difficult to explain nor unworthy. I was first struck by its handsomeness: I had never seen a modern Jewish publication that was not shoddy and dis gusting. Here I found no touch of clumsiness or vulgarity;-believe me: this was perhaps the first public Jewish manifestation of which I could say that. I suppose my naive apprehension of this acted as a sort of catalyst to

whatever vestigial Jewish feeling I had had. I saw that this Jewish manifes tation was careful, considered, intelligent. I had heard no rabbi be these


162 ELINOR GRUMET

things, though I had heard many rabbis. I saw Judaism taken as an accepted and legitimate thing; no apology was being made....

I had in my drawer a story I had written about two Jewish students. I do not

usually remember the things I write with much affection, but as I remember

that story it still seems a pretty good story. It exploited a situation between

two Jews; but I had not said they were Jews; and I tried to hint it but not say it by giving the characters names that might or might not be Jewish. This evasion did not make the story dishonest. It had truth-general truth. But

when, before sending the story to the Journal, I indicated unmistakably that

they were Jews it gained more truth. Not only did it contain particular truth; by the gain of particular truth it made a gain in general truth. It

became a better story. It could have been printed nowhere save in The

Menorah Journal.

The implications of this I shall not develop, save to say that, in one way or

in another, this situation is repeated about twenty times a month, in every

piece of writing the Journal publishes. Nowhere else can these pieces appear; and for each one that will not be able to appear, a lie will have been told

because the truth has not. I myself am chiefly interested in the fictional

representation of the Jew; and remembering the fiction which exploits the

Jew, as it is published by the established houses, I know that the Jew is written about carefully, fearlessly, without easy "sympathy" nowhere save

in the Journal, nowhere else as a human being and not as a problem. And I

know that this is a terribly important thing to have done.

But I fear I must return to myself. With the publication of my story I was caught. I could not escape thinking about Jews. I was not obsessed with

Jewishness. I did not get religion. I did not, I think, make romantic and

compensatory gestures. But I accepted the fact of Jewishness as an important

thing. I accepted it as part of my individuality and it functioned like a personal characteristic-I could talk of it as "mine" as one talks of a person's

honesty, weakness, strength, selfishness. I wasn't very sure what it was, but it helped direct my life. When I began to conceive a story, some element

of Jewishness entered into it. I used to be told that this Jewishness was

extraneous, that the story would have a more "universal" appeal without it.

This may have been true, though I think not, but certainly the story always took on more life for me, more clarity, more point, if it contained

Jewishness.19

Trilling was committed in the same way Cohen was to the conscious creation of a Jewish cultural renaissance in America, and he betrays certain Menorah idiosyncrasies in his early reviews and letters: Elliot Cohen's ironic eye for reading current events; Henry Hurwitz's profound faith in objective, sociologically-oriented history-in Trilling's vision, a history of early American Jewry-as relief for Jewish insecurity; and a certain taste for Jewish curiosa. He enjoyed, for example, Stopford Brooke's description of Browning's "Jewish quality," and cited it to scold Cohen for making cuts in one of his stories. Then there was the appendix



to Funk and Wagnall's 1905 edition of George Croly's Tarry Thou Till I

Come, which Trilling found interesting for its tabulation of "the sullen or

eager responsa of Jewish rabbis and scholars to the question: What do

you think of Christ?" Trilling also shared the feeling for Jewish com

munity, even beyond his immediate group. In 1928, he published a translation of Paul Morand's poem "Another Jew Dies." He was looking hard at the facts of history Rosenthal wanted him to confront. The poet describes the body of a victim of a pogrom: "Upon his cheeks the seals of

hobnails, I and his ripped mouth hangs open, I a box emptied of cries-."2O But Trilling's specific interest, as he pointed out in his letter of

endorsement, lay in his own craft, what he called Jewish fiction-novels and short stories both by and about Jews. He requested to review work

by L. Steni, whose novel, Prelude to a Rope for Myer, had just been published in England; and the novel Jud Suss (Power, in English) by Lion Feucht

wanger, the German Jewish writer enjoying tremendous popularity, who at about the time of Trilling's request had submitted a satire sup

pressed by the German government, exposing the rise of antisemitism

there and in Austria. (It was a piece published in two parts in the Menorah

Journal in 1928, called "Conversations with the Wandering Jew," in which the then unfamiliar symbol of the swastika was footnoted and explained for American readers.) Trilling's main project while associated with the

Journal was a prolegomenon to Jewish fiction, a critical essay he projected, to be definitive on the subject. The closest he came to producing it was a course he taught in the Menorah Summer School in 1930 on the Jew in Fiction-an experience he recalled made especially trying by the presence of Cecil Roth in the earlier sessions. While preparing the course, during the academic year 1929-30, Trilling lectured on the subject before at least the Menorah Societies of Hunter and Adelphi, then both women's

colleges. His essay "The Changing Myth of the Jew" was a summary of the essence of the six-week survey course, probably written after the summer was over.21

Trilling's commitment to the Menorah Journal was purely social and

cultural, and did not include longings for Zion. He apparently shared Herbert Solow's profound skepticism about the Zionist movement,

recalling that during the riots in Palestine in 1929, several of the Menorah circle were pro-Arab on principle. Elliot Cohen's letters indicate that he was deeply upset by the anti-Jewish violence, but even for him Zionism was finally meaningful only for its power as a cultural movement. In his dream of organic community, he felt Zion in some way an arbitrary source of inspiration, the more serious challenge being to educate Jewish character in America. That solved, then political Zionism, or perhaps a more intrinsically appealing project, might be undertaken.22

Trilling's commitment to the Menorah Journal was also not a religious one. In his letter of endorsement, Trilling explained:


164 ELINOR GRUMET

My family is orthodox, with a pretty sound tradition of learning and piety behind it. But, like most families with such a tradition and with sincere and not unintelligent intentions of continuing it, it was losing out. I see its

Jewish gestures as the swing of the clapper of a bell: while the clapper hung in the bell it was intended for, it struck the sides and gave forth a sound. But now the clapper had been hung in a bell that was too big for it. It swung but it could never reach the side of the new environment. No sounds came.

So, except sentimentally, my parents' gestures could not touch me at all. I

need not go through for you the rationalizations of a young man who was

bored and unattracted by the whole business.

At college I was one of the clever young men. I need not explain this, either.

At the time, it was, I believe and you perhaps will remember, taken for

granted that a clever young man was a completely free spirit. This, too you will understand. I suppose that the characteristic thing about our intelligent society was its assumption that religion (I use the word with a little Ruskinian

machinery: "religion," "binding" of any sort) was not a valid thing.23

By his own account, Trilling lived as a child in a "comfortable New York suburb," Far Rockaway, in a community united around synagogue activities. Later, when the family moved to 108th Street, Trilling was trained for his bar mitzvah by Max Kadushin, then a student at the

Jewish Theological Seminary, and a protege of Mordecai Kaplan. Kadushin recognized the Trilling home as Conservative, rather than Orthodox: there was still a significant amount of observance, but the

emphasis in conversation was on the cultural value of Judaism and its accommodation to the best of the larger world. The house was kosher, and Trilling's maternal grandfather, who was learned in traditional

Judaism, was a presence in the family. (He turns up in Lionel's story "Notes on a Departure.") David Trilling, Lionel's father, urged his son to lay tefillin while in High School, and study Hebrew for the sake of

Jewish culture. While he studied with Kadushin, Lionel accompanied his tutor to services every week at Kaplan's Jewish Center. His bar mitzvah

was held at the Seminary and was followed by an original speech delivered in the family circle. In later years, Kadushin recalled, Trilling was moved by the death of his mother to say Kaddish. In the 1920s,

Trilling was solicitious of his friend Rosenthal's orthodox practices, because he knew them intimately, but he did not attach himself to the Menorah Journal in order to share them. "I did not get religion."4

Finally, Trilling's commitment to the Menorah Journal was not the result of a longing for Jewish study in its own terms. In his letter of endorsement, he makes the statement: "It seems to me that there is but one thing which must be done for Judaism today. Content must be given it. Meaning must be given it." Trilling's call for meaning and content is less astonishing when one realizes that these are the exact words of Mordecai Kaplan, which Trilling certainly was hearing at that



point from Rosenthal. It is a slogan of cultural renaissance Trilling repeated, but for him, the call for Jewish content-something excellent to study and contemplate-must have had literal force. He found Judaism contentless because the classics of the tradition were inaccessible to him. In his celebratedly "Jewish" essay, "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" (1950), Trilling explains that he never mastered Hebrew, and that the

Sayings of the Fathers, which he had read many times as a boy when he was

supposed to be davvening in Hebrew School, defined the extent of his

familiarity with traditional Jewish literature. His characteristic way of

reviewing Jewish fiction and poetry in the Menorah Journal was to compare the contemporary work with other works of established excellence and of similar style or genre or concern, in the canon of Western literature; so placing Jewish imaginative writing in its proper secular tradition, and

extending and refining his own intellectual points of reference in the literature of Western civilization.25

For example, in his book reviews, when he wishes to evaluate the too-delicate prose of Robert Nathan, he refers to the style of Lamb,

Goldsmith, and Sheridan. And at the center of Lester Cohen's novel The Great Bear is a hero larger-than-life; Trilling concludes that the novel is

wanting only after he has surveyed "our" responses to fictional titans, which we have learned from familiarity with the heroes of Balzac, Galsworthy, Nietzsche, and Dreiser; and from our familiarity with Grettir, the hero of the Icelandic saga that bears his name, and with Tamburlaine, and with Plutarch's Alexander. During his Menorah years, the tradition Trilling mastered and shored up was that of Western liter ature. He was finally so insensible to the integrity of the transmission of other literary traditions, that it did not concern him that confessing ignorance of all but one short collection of rabbinic maxims in translation,

might be an embarrassing qualification of his observation about the

Sages. "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" (that early draft of chapter 4 of

Sincerity and Authenticity) is, after all, a study and meditation on Words worth, not rabbinic literature.26

It is noteworthy too in this connection, that when writing criticism for the Menorah Journal, Trilling had already adopted the first person plural of the British essayist, for which he was later criticized as a coterie writer. At that early date he was already generalizing about our" emotional and intellectual habits, derived from what "ve" have

read or heard about, being people sharing a Western education. On the

psychological level, the pronouns seem to function as an extension of the autobiographical ground of Trilling's work. By saying "we," he creates a community-by-incantation which shares and validates the culture as he perceives it. He is also iterating his choice of community. Overtly, he is simply making Victorian "speaking prose" his own-the language of ethical meditation on the state of society. It is a style used by nineteenth


166 ELINOR GRUMET

century British writers, who assumed in talking to their countrymen, as

Trilling and Harold Bloom later put it in their anthology of Victorian

literature, "that there really is an English nation; with particular problems to confront and decisions to make, and with a definable destiny to

pursue." Trilling easily translated the mode for the Jewish and the edu cated American nations. The contemporary Jewish fiction that interested him had no roots in Jewish history or letters, though it, and Trilling's criticism of it, are a part of Jewish history now.27

During 1929-30, Trilling served as an assistant editor of the maga zine. The job of reading manuscripts agreed with him less than the intellectual work he undertook in the Menorah spirit. He made the cultural nationalist's attempt to establish a usable past by retrieving Jewish heroes from the history of Western arts and letters. Though he considered several subjects, Trilling wrote only one essay on a Jew-in the-arts, and it probably led him to what he had not counted on: a confrontation with someone else's crisis of Jewish identity.

His subject was Isaac Nathan, "A Friend of Byron," as the article was called, who had originally set the poet's Hebrew Melodies to music.

Trilling understood Nathan as someone whose career in culture was a failure of the most frightening and reprehensible kind: Nathan was

caught between a full Jewish education, the legacy of parents who had

hoped he would enter the rabbinate, and his own personal ambition to eminence in the British cultural circle closest to Byron. Nathan's solution, as Trilling read it, was to pass as a composer by cribbing Jewish liturgical music, and a literary critic by moralizing on texts in the "sanctimonious" cadence of the pulpit. He betrayed the integrity of both traditions, tra

ducing Jewish piety and English artistic excellence in his ambition. Trilling could not tolerate the familiar falseness of Nathan's cultural position, and he wrote of him with uncharacteristic condescension.

Poor Nathan! Poor Nathan in that anomalous position of yours, not quite a

tradesman, not quite a gentleman, not yet quite an artist! Poor Nathan

seeking to set yourself firmly in some respected social niche, as like a club

window as possible, trying to shake off the [Jew peddler's] crowning tower of three tall hats, one on top of another! . . . Poor, poor Nathan who envied

too greatly the world of the Gentiles, who could cite Jonathan, son of Huziel, David Kimchi, Rashi, and Julius Africanus, and who might have been a good-enough rabbi in Israel, but who became a mediocre musician and a bad critic!28

For all its resemblance to "polite" gentile opinion, Trilling's objection to Isaac Nathan was a Jewish one: If Nathan was vulgar, it was because he did not accept himself as a Jew and rest there. Nathan was Jewishly inauthentic, which meant-as Trilling would define inauthenticity in 1970-that he made "the sentiment of [his] being dependent on the



opinion of others." By the ungenerous temper of the idea of "self-hate," Nathan deserved the contempt of one exploring his own Jewishness.29

3

But Trilling could not proceed for long on the assumption that cultural life was something political, to be rallied, built up, defended. He found Jewish cultural nationalism an intellectual dead-end, and his sub

sequent criticism was impervious to the claims of ethnic groups upon the English canon which established his terms of excellence. Finally Trilling could not permit himself to be implicated in Jewish cultural agony. He could never allow Isaac Nathan's dilemma of being caught between longing and allegiance to be his own, nor would he permit Jewish emotion to determine the content or the conclusions of his intel lectual life. This is what Henry Rosenthal's fictional counterpart Starobin discovered on confronting his friend Dolman during their senior year at

college.30 In Rosenthal's story, "Inventions," Starobin decides to "convert" his

friend, feeling in the challenge the anxiety of a test-case. Can Judaism be accepted by an honorable and clever-minded man? Will the miracle of belief grip Dolman, and so extend their meeting of minds to a meeting of souls? Is Dolman open to the "kartharsis of pleasant dread" on inclining his head for the Aleinu or on hearing the Kaddish, as Starobin experiences it? Starobin decides intuitively to argue the heroism of the Jewish cultural attitude as it fills him. He is not without self-irony, and approaches his further rehearsals of the encounter "intoxicated and reeling with

worthiness." The noble phrases of affiliation come out in the sharp and

yearning voice of the satirist.

You tell [a Dolman] that a soul draws its precious sustenance only from the

deep racial roots of it. You tell him that we must kill Jewish shame once and

forever, for worlds and worlds of worlds. You tell him to hate Gentiles with

all his soul's blood. You tell him about the new culture. There is an old

culture, you say, which has the bald stink of madness; it is prickly and venomous, and in one form or another it has curdled the brains of all of us

from Simeon ben Yochai to Heinrich Heine. And there is a new culture, you

go on, out there somewhere between the Jordan and the Western Sea which will draft your soul into the throbbing loneliness it hungers for. This culture will be like a cool hand to the head, like spikenard to the nostrils, and like a beautiful wedded wife to all the passions.3'

Dolman sits listening on the couch with his legs bent up against his chest. He answers first by refusing the heroism: "I haven't got many values, but what I have I shan't bury near Pisgah. I don't want to bury


168 ELINOR GRUMET

anything anywhere." Then he subverts his friend's arguments by con

fronting Starobin with his own shamed confusion about being Jewish. Dolman knows that behind the Jewish rallying cry is a shame that erodes Starobin's social balance and self-esteem, a feeling that turns murderous-with all the rage of the accusation of self-hatred-when Starobin detects it in a fellow Jew. Dolman will have no part of that neurosis. This quiet line lingers: "... neither you nor anybody else can

freely make me miserable."32 Rosenthal's "Inventions" is an extraordinary piece of writing. Even

more than an exposure of Dolman's coolness, it means to be the psycho logical notation and indictment of Starobin's turbulence. Dolman, at

least, is decent and serene in his own system of values, the fiction

argues; he is "an idiot who had every right to be a snob and resigned the

privilege." But Starobin writhes in his Jewish attitudes, harboring mis

sionary and murderous thoughts, exalting in ready-made generalizations of Zionism, at once loving their vision and loathing their ease, loving Judaism and hating what its arguments of justification have done to his

mind. The title of the story is from Ecclestiastes: "God made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions" (7:29). The allusion is to the tortuous and over-clever conversations Starobin has with himself from the time he meets Dolman to the time he confronts him. The stream of neurosis runs something like this:

I have met another Jew, a fellow cripple, with whom to establish the

strong and necessary bonds of mutual disability. But, wait: he doesn't consider himself a cripple, he is not overly troubled by the fact that he is a Jew, doesn't require that fact in a friendship. It's clearly a matter of time before he snubs me. So I will prepare to snub him, find a character fault: Since he downplays his Jewishness, he must be an antisemite. But how can I say such a thing? I thought he was my equal, but he is much better than I am, unashamed of himself, "a saint, a gentleman, one of the sweet serene giants." So how can I show him I am better than he is? I will tell him that the Jews are despicable; that will make his politeness to them the most arrant genteel condescension. Meanwhile I will pas sionately adopt them, become "an ideal composite of Jesus Christ and the Baal Shem Tob," who will suffer the bruised children of Israel to come unto me, seeing in "their raw bentschen a genuine first-rate Mass." But if Dolman really believes that Jews are such swine and in need of a

savior, he is despicable himself and not worth the time. On the other hand, if he refuses to believe it, leaving me in my posture. . .. Can he care for Jews more than I do, respectfully leaving them alone, while I

harangue and despise them myself? But no. I'm ashamed for them, not of them. I will beat him up. But here is a man so tenaciously courteous he

will not recognize a victory by force. I will convert him, confront him, one mountain meeting another. . ..



Starobin describes his spirit as ingeniously corrupted to disguise insecurity. He knows that his defensive habits of mind threaten to

compromise his intellectual health. Several months after the appearance of "Inventions," Henry Rosenthal published a "Note on the Problem of

Judaism" in Mordecai Kaplan's SAJ Review, where he argued that the

greatest danger facing Judaism was inundation by the cliches, generali zations, and speculative definitions of itself Jewry was defensively manufacturing and promoting. "The dangers which beset Judaism seem to be many," he wrote, "but it is a point worth considering whether chief among them is not that Judaism will die of inanition but that Jews

will suddenly and on one day die of hysteria. . . . Jewish life will on the American scene probably not die of external shock, though the constancy of the external pressure almost amounts to shock. There is only one

thing it can die of, then; it can get sick of itself and die. This it might seem to be doing." In his SAJ Review article, Rosenthal is more uneasy

with the grandiose spiritual ambitions of Zionism to reconstruct a civili zation and conjure up a culture than his alter ego Starobin. What agitates him is that in a generation of activity and talk, Zionism has allowed enthusiasm to substitute for excellence, and "not precipitated one idea that shall be not only fervent but permanent and true, nor one

personality-a product of the Zionist spiritual discipline-that shall be not only true but distinguished and creative." (So saying, he was rejecting contemporaries like Chaim Weizmann, Judah Magnes, and Henrietta Szold.) Lionel Trilling borrowed this criticism of Rosenthal's as his own conclusion about Jewish intellectual life in general, making it explicit in a symposium in 1944, conducted by the Contemporary Jewish Record, then under the editorship of Adolph Oko: "Modern Jewish religion at its

best," Trilling wrote, "may indeed be intelligent and soaked in university knowledge, but out of it there has not come a single voice with the note of authority-of philosophical, or poetic, or even of rhetorical, let alone of religious, authority." And Rosenthal lamented: "Whatever are our common social habits in a sociological sense, our common social habit in a psychological sense is disquiet-and our most manifest value, distress.

What might be the wages of this?"33 Dolman, the Trilling character in "Inventions," refuses to center his

spiritual and intellectual life in the situation of modern Jewry if it means

assuming the personal agony he sees in his friend. In one of his Menorah stories, "Funeral at the Club with Lunch," Trilling has a young Jewish teacher sit separately in the lunchroom, because he automatically assumes that the death of a gentile colleague will unite all the others in an exclusive and anti-Jewish feeling, which he wishes to defy by provok ing, sitting apart without overt cause. Suddenly, realizing his psycholog ical reflex, he calls it a "mad and filthy" response.34

As his contributions to the Journal attest, Trilling used the composi


170 ELINOR GRUMET

tion and criticism of "Jewish fiction" to exorcise his ethnic habits of

mind, by making those reflexes the subject of literary contemplation. In the same way that Nathaniel Hawthorne exhorted himself to "keep the

imagination sane," Trilling came to issues of Jewish identity with the intention of ensuring the balance of his emotional intelligence. The attitude in which he came to rest after repudiating the program of

Jewish cultural nationalism, was made explicit in the 1944 symposium. There Trilling explained, with acknowledgment of the "gracelessness" of his position, but adamant about its appropriateness, that being Jewish was for him a "point of honor," a minimal and passive position, uncon

cerned with the Jewishness of future generations, consisting only in the

feeling that he would not deny or escape being Jewish, even if he could. That was all. He would certainly identify himself publicly as a Jew, as he

did, for instance, in the symposium; and he would continue to entertain

Jewish feelings, as he did when Jewish scholars were appointed to the

English faculty at Columbia, and he came home grinning; but he would

absolutely not permit that identification and those feelings to legislate his emotional or intellectual life.a3

Department of Religion

Wellesley College

NOTES

HHMA = Henry Hurwitz-Menorah Association collection, American Jewish Archives,

Cincinnati, Ohio

MJ = Menorah Journal 1. "Comment," Morningside 13 (May 1925): 162-64; Hartley Corporation: Columbian,

1925, p. 168, and 1924, p. 1970; Personal interview with James and Elsa Grossman, 19

August 1978; the Trillings lived at 478 Central Park West?see, for example, Trilling, Letter to Ada Diamondston, 26 March 1926, HHMA, box 59, folder 10.

2. Mark Van Doren, "Jewish Students I Have Known," MJ 13 (June 1927): 264-65.

Van Doren's students are identified in his Autobiography of Mark Van Doren (New York,

1958), p. 130; and in a letter received from Clifton Fadiman, 20 October 1976. In the

article, A = Henry Rosenthal, = Clifton Fadiman, C = Meyer Schapiro, D

= John Gassner,

E = Herbert Solow, F = Lionel Trilling, G = Charles McBurney Prager, a friend of theirs,

who Fadiman believes never quite found himself, and died in his thirties.

"In 1927 only an editor of Elliot Cohen's ironic imaginativeness could have thought to invite a college teacher of English, even in New York, to write about the Jews he had

taught!"?Diana Trilling, "Lionel Trilling, A Jew at Columbia," Commentary (March 1979): 43.

3. Van Doren, pp. 267-68. 4. Rosenthal, "Inventions," MJ 14 (January 1928): 49-61, extended quotation, 49.

The identity of the characters in "Inventions" was suggested by James Grossman, a friend

of both men at the time: interview, see note 1 above. 5. Trilling, "Impediments," MJ 11 (June 1925): 286-90; Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 23

October 1924 [actually 1925], HHMA, box 7, folder 14; Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 2

December 1929, p. 2, HHMA, box 59, folder 10.



6. Rosenthal "Theological Student: Advanced Model/' M] 11 (October 1925): 508; Mordecai M. Kaplan, unpublished diaries, microfilm copy, AJA, reel 571a> entry for 12

November 1928.1 am very grateful to the late Mordecai Kaplan for permission to consult and quote from his diaries: Letter received from Mordecai Kaplan, 13 March 1977.

7. "Inventions," pp. 50-51. 8. Personal interview with Diana Trilling, 10 February 1976; "Inventions," p. 57.

Elsa and James Grossman recall that during that period Rosenthal wrote essays on Proust and Joyce; Diana Trilling remembers that he wrote half a novel.

9. Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 18 March 1925; Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 23 October 1924 [1925]; Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 4 August [1926]; Trilling, Letter to Cohen, n.d.

[from Madison, beginning: I am very sleepy ...:], all in HHMA box 59, folder 10. 10. Trilling, "Chapter for a Fashionable Jewish Novel," M] 12 (June-July 1926): 275-82;

Rosenthal, Letter to Cohen, n.d., addendum to Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 16 February 1926, HHMA, box 59, folder 10; Solow: "Young in the Thirties," Commentary 41 (May 1966): 46; Fadiman: Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 3 April 1926, HHMA, box 59, folder 10.

Cohen wrote Trilling in Wisconsin: "I see your friends Fadiman, Solow and Rosenthal from time to time. They weep when they mention your name, but otherwise they preserve the even tenor of their ways?which in one, at least, is not notably too even. Your friend

Henry, I mean, is at the point of excommunicating the whole lot of us; lock, stock and

barrel."?Cohen, Letter to Trilling, 11 November 1926, HHMA, box 59, folder 10. 11. Trilling, Letters to Cohen, 2 February 1927: 3 April 1926; both in HHMA, box

59, folder 10.

12. Trilling, Letter to Cohen, n.d. ["I am very sleepy"], HHMA, box 59, folder 10.

Personal interview with Albert Halper, 11 February, 1976; Diana Trilling, interview,

February 1976.

13. Letter received from Bernard Schermetzler, Assistant Archivist, University of

Wisconsin Memorial Library, 6 October 1977.

Trilling taught in the Evening and Extension Sessions of Hunter College from Spring 1928 to Fall 1929, and Fall 1930 to Spring 1934; during the academic year 1928-1929, he

was on temporary assignment in the Day Session, and he taught in the Hunter Summer

Sessions in 1932 and 1933.?Letter received from Rose Gilligan, Archivist, Hunter College, 15 May 1978.

"The Changing Myth of the Jew," Commentary 66 (August 1978): 24-34; proofs in

Lionel Trilling, Nearprint Biography Box, AJA; TS in HHMA, box 60, folder 2.

Review of Mary Anne Disraeli in HHMA, box 60, folder 2; Trilling himself may have

thought little of this review: Trilling, Letter to Cohen, n.d. [Hunter College stationery;

begins: "This is the account"], HHMA, box 59, folder 10. 14. "Young in the Thirties," p. 46; "A Light to the Nations," M] 14 (April 1928): 402.

15. Trilling spoke at the National IMA Convention on Friday, 27 December 1929:

"Report of the National Convention of Menorah Societies," pp. 3-4, HHMA, box 67, folder 16; Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 2 December 1929, HHMA, box 7, folder 15; Trilling's

description of the young men comes from this letter of endorsement.

16. Trilling, introd. to The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of Partisan Review, 1933-1944: An

Anthology, ed. William Phillips and Philip Rahv (New York, 1946), rpt. in The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y., 1953), p. 93;

On America: Trilling, "What Price Jewry?" M] 13 (April 1927): 219; James and Elsa Grossman, interview.

17. The letter of endorsement: Trilling, Letter to Cohen, 2 December 1929, HHMA, box 7, folder 15.

18. Hurwitz, Letter to Trilling, 28 May 1941; and reply 2 June 1941, both in HHMA, box 60, folder 1.

19. Trilling, Letter of endorsement. 20. An American-Jewish history: "Our Colonial Forefathers," MJ 14 (February 1928):


172 ELINOR GRUMET

219-20. Trilling writes there: "if Jews need relief and assurance, an admirable scholarly work such as I have described [an 'exhaustive book on early American Jewish history, a

production dispassionate and authoritative'] will bring them more comfort, showing as it

will that their (racial if not lineal) ancestors have been woven into the American woof

from the beginning." Brooke: Trilling, Letter to Cohen, n.d. [begins: "I think I have make all the necessary

corrections"], HHMA, box 60, folder 1; Brooke wrote: "The craft with which Browning's intellect persuaded him that he could insert into his poems thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted was as

Jewish as the Talmud."

Jewish curiosa: "Changing Myth of the Jew," Commentary, p. 29; George Croly, Tarry Thou Till 1 Come (or Salathiel) (New York, 1901), pp. 551-70.

Trilling, trans., "Another Jew Dies," MJ 14 (April 1928): 369.

21. Trilling, Letters to Cohen, n.d. [stationery of the Men's Faculty Club, Columbia

University]; 2 February 1927, both in HHMA, box 59, folder 10.

Feuchtwanger, "Conversations with the Wandering Jew," MJ 14 (January 1928):

29-34, and (February 1928): 148-59; swastika footnote: (January 1928): 32. Fadiman review

of Feuchtwanger: MJ 13 (February 1927): 102; Trilling later reviewed Feuchtwanger's novel Success: MJ 19 (June 1931): 470.

The Menorah Summer School: Trilling, "The Jew in Fiction: A Syllabus by Lionel

Trilling," HHMA, box 60, folder 2; and bulletin of the Menorah Summer School 1930,

p. 12, original in the collection of David Lyon Hurwitz. Trilling wrote of the Summer

School: "I do recall . . . that my Menorah Summer School course of 1930 was a disaster, made the worse by the presence of Cecil Roth at one of the early meetings of the

class."?Letter received from Trilling, 27 June 1975.

Diana Trilling recalls that Lionel did not finish the course because of her illness that

summer.?Interview.

Trilling speaks at Hunter: Leah Edelstein, Letter to Francis Grossel, 26 April 1929,

HHMA, box 70, folder 14; Trilling at Adelphi: "Report of Membership and Activities of Menorah Societies," 15 August 1939, HHMA, box 67, folder 3.

22. "Young in the Thirties," p. 46.

Cohen, "The Ideal Rabbi," MJ 5 (February 1919): 37. Reporting on his visit to Yale, Alexander Dushkin characterized Cohen as a "non-Zionist," as opposed to an "anti-Zionist":

Dushkin, Letter to Hurwitz, 3 February 1919, addendum to Hurwitz, Letter to Nathan

Isaacs, 9 February 1919, HHMA, box 20, folder 4.

In 1970, Trilling joined Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz in writing a letter to the New York Times to express disgust with the pro-Arab sentiment of the young Jewish members of the New Left.?Times, 13 September 1970, Sec. 4, p. 15, col. 1.

23. Trilling, Letter of endorsement. 24. Trilling, "Under Forty," Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (February 1944): 15; personal

interview with Max Kadushin, 30 August 1978; Diana Trilling, "Lionel Trilling, A Jew at

Columbia," p. 41; James and Elsa Grossman, interview. 25. Trilling, Letter of endorsement; compare Trilling's statement about Jewish content

with Mordecai Kaplan's editorial note (actually composed by Henry Rosenthal) in the SA] Review 7 (1 June 1928): 3: "The content of Jewish life still needs largely to be created; there

does not yet exist so much content in Jewish life that one need only point to it. The creation of materials for Jewish living is obviously the first corollary of the proposition that Judaism is a civilization, and to encourage such creation were the best earnest of one's commitment to such a Judaism."

Trilling, "Wordsworth and the Rabbis," The Opposing Self (New York, 1955), p. 124.

26. Review of There is Another Heaven by Robert Nathan, in MJ 17 (December 1929): 292; review of The Great Bear by Lester Cohen, in MJ 13 (November 1927): 522.

27. Trilling and Bloom, Victorian Prose and Poetry (New York, 1973), p. 5.



28. "A Friend of Byron/' M] 12 (August-September 1926): 380, 381. 29. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 102. 30. Note Trilling's conclusion, articulated in 1948, that the struggle between majority

and minority groups is largely insubstantial:

. . . the question of whether the American attitude toward "minority" groups, par ticularly Negroes and Jews, is not the equivalent of class differentiation. I think it is

not, except in a highly modified way. And for the purposes of the novel it is not the same thing at all, for two reasons: it involves no real cultural struggle, no significant conflict of ideals, for the excluded group has the same notion of life and the same

aspirations as the excluding group, although the novelist who attempts the subject naturally uses the tactic of showing that the excluded group has a different and better ethos; and it is impossible to suppose that the novelist who chooses this

particular subject will be able to muster the satirical ambivalence toward both groups which marks the good novel even when it has a social parti pris.

?"Art and Fortune," Liberal Imagination, p. 253n.

31. "Inventions," pp. 56, 59. 32. Ibid., pp. 60, 61. 33. Ibid., pp. 54, 49; SA] Review 8 (9 November 1928): 5, 9-10, 11; "Under Forty,"

p. 16. 34. "Funeral at the Club With Lunch," M] 13 (August 1927): 385. 35. "Under Forty," pp. 15-16; Diana Trilling, interview, February 1976; Diana Trilling,

"Lionel Trilling, A Jew at Columbia," p. 46.


Article Contentsp. [153]p. 154p. 155p. 156p. 157p. 158p. 159p. 160p. 161p. 162p. 163p. 164p. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168p. 169p. 170p. 171p. 172p. 173

Issue Table of ContentsProoftexts, Vol. 4, No. 2 (MAY 1984) pp. 111-214Front MatterAmichai at SixtyAmichai's God [pp. 111-126]On Amichai's El male raamim [pp. 127-140]Images in Transformation in the Recent Poetry of Yehuda Amichai [pp. 141-152]

The Apprenticeship of Lionel Trilling [pp. 153-173]Suicide in Yiddish Literature: Vehicle and Vision [pp. 175-185]NOTES AND READINGS"In the morning, behold, it was Leah": Genesis and the reversal of sexual knowledge [pp. 187-192]

REVIEWSMoses-cide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism [pp. 193-204]Recent Studies in Aggadah [pp. 204-213]

Back Matter

elinor grumet_the apprenticeship of lionel trilling

Documents