not Martin but Mircea

Sun May 22 02:50:03 CDT 2016

Check out "Connoisseurs of Angst. /The Jewish Mystique and Postwar 
American Literary Culture/" by Julian Levinson!

http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/julianlevinson/wp-content/uploads/sites/262/2015/07/CONNOISSEURS-OF-ANGST1.pdf

" ... Indeed, whereas literary trendsetters from the previous generation 
such as T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound were renowned for their antisemitic 
views, American literary culture in the post-World War II era was marked 
by an increasingly prevalent philosemitism. What emerged and soon became 
commonplace was a positive view of Jews as integral to the most daring 
and original developments in the national culture. This philosemitic 
enthusiasm reached its apogee, arguably, between the late 1950s and the 
early 1960s, a transitional moment in American cultural life when the 
buttoned-up conventions of the early Cold War period had begun to lose 
their coherence, but the insurgent counterculture of the later 1960s had 
yet to assert itself ..."

And Pynchon's socialization as a writer took place between the late 
1950s and early 1960s.

The passages about Delmore Schwartz made me think of Lou Reed's song "My 
House":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYq2kPjdBDw

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

On 21.05.2016 12:09, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Matthew,
>
> Looking forward. yes, when I studied Eliot at a good uni---U of 
> Toronto----no one mentioned, I did not find in library books, any 
> mention of his anti-Semitism. Only later, maybe 80's, did I encounter 
> this perspective. A younger-then-me woman asked--to my surprise--and 
> then I saw reviews of books about him talking about it.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
> On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 5:56 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com 
> <mailto:mccissell at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Mark,
>
>     It's a subject that deserves some discussion. Young Pynchon was
>     probably not aware of TSE's anti-semitism, afterall when you read
>     Pound's "Cantos" the Prof likely doesn't start off with Ezra's
>     fascism, and in the late 1950's less so. We should remember that
>     in the post war period in the US there was institutional
>     anti-semitism (and racism of course).
>
>       Pynchon, growing up where he did, was likley to encounter
>     anti-semitism. "Jewish population of Nassau County grew from
>     18,000 in 1940 to 110,000 in 1950" and the population in Nassau
>     really started to grow from the late 50's to 70's - by which time
>     Pynchon was long gone.
>
>       So Pynchon goes to Uni and starts to meet people that are
>     jewish, even dates a jewish girl apparently. But what about that
>     couple, the Meyerhofs, who used to entertain Pynchon and the whole
>     sick crew in the late 50's? How does all that inform the young
>     writer, especially after he reads more and finds out about his
>     dear TSE. And the camps. How does that affect his position-taking
>     as he enters the literary field? Is it not interesting that Oedipa
>     is WASP and young republican, but by the time we get to BE his
>     heroine has become Jewish and clearly left leaning? What does this
>     say about his trajectory as an author?
>
>       In the near future I hope to be able to present some information
>     about the Meyerhofs and what his experiences with them might have
>     meant for the budding writer.
>
>     ciao
>     mc otis
>
>
>
>     On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 11:03 PM, Mark Kohut
>     <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>         Here's a little grenade into ...things. Henry Adams & T.S.
>         Eliot were also, in an on-paper opinion-mongering way, --don't
>         know of any real life examples--- said to be anti-Semitic.
>
>         Din't bother our genius who plundered for intellectual
>         influences...?
>
>         On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Jochen Stremmel
>         <jstremmel at gmail.com <mailto:jstremmel at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>             In the annals of anti-Semitism, Romania holds a
>             particularly egregious position. For example, it is
>             estimated that 130,000 local Jews were slaughtered in
>             Romanian-occupied Ukraine, and that Romanian forces
>             massacred 150,000 Jews in the area of Odessa and Golta. In
>             a pogrom in 1941, as Sebastian records in his /Journal/,
>             Jews were herded into an abattoir and hanged by the neck
>             on meat hooks. “A sheet of paper was stuck to each corpse:
>             ‘Kosher Meat.’”
>
>             Of course, Romania was not unique in this regard. In the
>             early years of Nazi conquests in Eastern Europe the
>             ravening enthusiasm for pogroms among the indigenous
>             populations of countries such as Poland, Lithuania, and
>             Estonia startled even the SS. However, the detestation of
>             Jews among all levels of Romanian society, particularly
>             intellectuals, was unrelenting. Here is a typical
>             outburst, recorded in the /Journal/ in September 1939:
>
>                 The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish
>                 resistance. Only yids are capable of the blackmail of
>                 putting women and children in the front line, to take
>                 advantage of the Germans’ sense of scruple…. What is
>                 happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal,
>                 because new waves of Jews are flooding into the
>                 country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes,
>                 it would be better to have a German protectorate.
>
>             Who might the speaker be? Some embittered partisan,
>             perhaps, or a street-corner orator? No: the speaker is
>             Mircea Eliade, one of Romania’s leading scholars and
>             writers of the time, who after the war slipped away to
>             America and there became a highly respected and
>             influential thinker and historian of religions. In 1937
>             Eliade says of a left-wing student flogged by Iron
>             Guardists that personally he would have put his eyes out
>             as well. Sebastian writes, “Perhaps one day things will
>             have calmed down enough for me to read this page to Mircea
>             and to see him blush with shame.”
>
>
>             http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/surrounded-by-jew-haters/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Prisons%20Uganda%20anti-Semitism&utm_content=NYR%20Prisons%20Uganda%20anti-Semitism+CID_ab89f8bfb0519728730ad1d09ee20312&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Surrounded%20by%20Jew-Haters
>
>
>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160522/a23dd99a/attachment.html>