ABSTRACT
I have a vivid memory of a day in the spring of 1954 when a professor in the Columbia College English Department told me that the distinguished literary critic Lionel Trilling was Jewish. I could not tell what affected me more, surprise that this genteel and apparently gentile man was a Jew or exhilaration that if Trilling was Jewish then anything was possible. Trilling was the only professor to have asked me, “What is your Christian name?” And he wrote an impressive High Church critical prose that a teenage undergraduate from the Bronx contemplated with a sense of intimidated wonder. The author of the novel The Middle of the Journey, Trilling would not have been taken by my provincial emotionality. He had written in 1944, a time of particular Jewish vulnerability, that the American Jewish community is “sterile,” partly because it reflects a history of “exclusion,” which he thinks of as a willing parochialism. Though it was “a point of honor” to affirm his Jewishness as a “citizen,” it had nothing to do with his being a writer. “I should resent it,” he made clear, “if a
critic of my work were to discover in it either faults or virtues which he called Jewish” (Trilling: vii, n. 1).
