Posted By richards on January 12, 2015
Cultural Historian's First Love Was Kafka
Photo courtesy of Harvard Public Affairs & Communications. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Cultural Historian: At the time of his death, Bercovitch was working on a project entitled, Ashkenazi Renaissance; 1881-1941.
There can be no greater left-wing yichis than being named after Sacco and Vanzetti. The Canadian Jewish cultural historian Sacvan Bercovitch, who died on December 9 at age 81, was born to Russian Jewish parents who cherished a revolutionary ideal.
In his Rites of Assent,, Bercovitch explained that he was drawn to Americas Puritans because of the Romantic-Marxist utopianism of his parents: The analogies to the rhetoric of my own past seem so striking it still surprises me that they did not occur to me at once, and stop me in my tracks.
Long a fixture at Harvard, where he was typically droll about occupying the office in Widener Library previously graced by the ultra-WASP Yankee historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Bercovitch was working on an ambitious new project at the time of his death: the Ashkenazi Renaissance; 1881-1941, spanning late-nineteenth-century pogroms in Russia, which launched a wave of Jewish migration from Eastern to Western Europe, Palestine, and the Americas; and the triumph of German fascism, culminating in the Holocaust.
Between these years, Bercovitch noted, Jews in the arts and sciences produced a body of cultural riches comparable to the highest achievements of any other group in history (Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England) and unsurpassed in modern times. Adopting a panoramic view of many different domains, he planned to discuss Einstein, Freud, Husserl, and Wittgenstein as well as Chagall, Lipchitz, Heifetz and Mahler to locate a certain coherence, through a common Jewishness, to the diverse worlds they represent. Avid readers of Berkovitch hope his reflections on Kafka, I. L. Peretz and Sholom Aleichem, Babel, Agnon, and Singer will see the light of day, since his most recent project with solid Yiddishkeit was as editor of the Library of America volume of the writings of Nathanael West.
The Montreal-born scholar was raised in a Yiddish-speaking household in an impoverished district once crowded with Jewish immigrants, most of whom had ceded the ambient squalor to poor French-speaking Roman Catholics. His ailing mother, abandoned by his father the painter Alexandre Bercovitch (18911951), placed him in a series of unwelcoming foster homes from age nine until he finished high school.
Finding consolation as a devoted reader of Sholom Aleichem, Berkovitch would later translate him into English, along with Itzik Manger and Yaakov Zipper, among other Yiddish authors. Berkovitch also noted: Kafka was my first (and lasting) literary love. The Rites of Assent disarmingly discusses Kafkas Investigations of a Dog in which a canine narrator is oblivious to the existence of humankind, as a great parable of interpretation as mystification also a great parable of the limitations of cultural critique.
A diligent scholar, Berkovitch honed his work ethic after high school as a dairy farmer at Kibbutz Nachshon in central Israel, established by immigrant members of the youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. For around four years as he told the interviewer Giuseppe Nori in 1993: he shoveled manure and milked cows, revelling in a socialist utopia which was radical, it was idealistic, it was also a kind of security that I always wanted, like a family, having a ready-made family. His kibbutz experience remained a decisive, if indirect, influence on his interpretation of New England Puritans and American utopianism.
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Sacvan Bercovitch, Translator of Sholem Aleichem, Dies at 81
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