Necrology: Mark Shechner (1940-2015).

Whitfield, Stephen J.

In the decades immediately after the Second World War, three writers rose to such prominence (and found themselves pelted so often with National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes) that this trio constituted the very definition of literary excellence. Despite their divergences, they were grouped together as Jews, which led Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate in 1976, to nickname Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and himself the literary counterparts of Hart Schaffner & Marx. When names like Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller are added, the Jewish inflection to the national letters was bound to compel the academy to offer admiration and critical assessment. That recognition became the mission of a generation of scholars who explicated the lineage of American Jewish literature, specialists who came of age when the study of the Jewish imagination had managed to achieve respectability in the nation's Departments of English. Sarah Blacher Cohen, Bonnie K. Lyons, Sanford Pinsker, Daniel Walden and Donald Weber belong on a list that is not intended to be exhaustive, while other students of American Jewish literature--Edward Alexander, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi and Alvin Rosenfeld--also illumined the representation of the Holocaust. Yet none exhibited a more blazing talent than Mark Shechner, who died last year at the age of 75.

In contributing essays and reviews that appeared in the Nation, the New York Times Book Review and the New Republic, as well as in highbrow quarterlies like Partisan Review and Salmagundi, Shechner adopted "the style of brilliance" that Irving Howe attributed in 1968 to "the New York intellectuals." (1) Shechner displayed a gift for transforming literary scholarship into a performance art. Much evidence can be found in the book that made his reputation, After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary jewish-American Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). It surprises and abounds in fresh and arresting notions, and yet the author's aptness of characterization--his flair for summing up a novel in an epigram--demonstrated a yearning to get an interpretation right, and not merely to say something fresh.

Drawn largely from articles that Shechner had previously published, and from his canonical assessment of American Jewish literature in The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1979), After the Revolution takes a historical approach. Its baseline is the departure of the second-generation from the world of their fathers and mothers. Starting out in the 1930s, these progeny of immigrants characteristically hopped aboard what Marxists called "the locomotive of history," but then discovered that its destination turned out to be the dead-end of Soviet totalitarianism--the kangaroo courtrooms of the Great Purges, the shock of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Arctic desolation of the Gulag Archipelago. In the postwar era, the fiction that the disenchanted produced treated leftism as remembrance of things past, as the American Jewish novel became domesticated. Shechner traced the arc from the political to the personal, as fiction turned inward to explore family tensions and to expose the interior battle of opposing selves as well. The social and political analysis that gave way to psychoanalysis was capped with Alexander Portnoy's sessions of grievances directed at his mother, at his family and indeed at Jewish life itself, as told to a silent Dr. Spielvogel, in Rorh's 1969 novel. The historical process that Shechner recounted could be characterized as shrinking.

The writer whom this scholar found most congenial and most inescapable was therefore the author of Portnoy's Complaint. A fiercely Freudian reading of Ulysses marks Shechner's own first book, Joyce in Nighttown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), which was based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of California-Berkeley; and he saw in Roth's work the best proof of the power of psychoanalysis, with its stress upon mixed and problematic motives, and with its tendency to convert biographies into case histories. Without the insights derived from the talking cure, Shechner wrote, we cannot appreciate "a writer as nimble and as mercurial as Philip Roth, who has made of ambivalence not only an art but a theory of art, producing out of his arguments with himself a literature as richly conceived and intricately designed as any in America." (2) (It did not hurt that Shechner also happened to have been born in Newark, before his family moved to Los Angeles.) As Roth's oeuvre kept growing, Shechner assiduously tracked it; and his final scholarly book, defiantly entitled Up Society's Ass, Copper (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), consists of previously published pieces, burnished with retrospective and revised verdicts. The subtitle, Rereading Philip Roth, also hints at why Shechner cherished academic life. As he told an interviewer from the New York Times Book Review, the vocation of teaching gave him "a license to do what has always been my pleasure, to sit home and read." (3)

Shechner consolidated his reputation as the savviest student of American Jewish imagination with The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays (1990). It also gave him a chance to modify the stances he had taken in After the Revolution. The Conversion of the Jews allowed him, for instance, to acknowledge how fully the travail of the family could already be discerned in the interwar period--"in the explosive battles of father and daughter in Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, in the blows visited by father upon son in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep; in the omnibus bickerings and betrayals that mark Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!." (4) Shechner also seized the occasion to rectify his earlier neglect of Malamud, a writer who is barely mentioned in After the Revolution. To be sure he had never been a man of the left, nor do the characters he created seek relief on the psychotherapist's couch. More chapters in The Conversion of the Jews are devoted to Malamud than to any other novelist, even as this essay collection demonstrated Shechner's gift for formulating shrewd critical judgments and for concocting bons mots that bubble effortlessly to the surface. Nor could he resist advancing the sorts of generalizations that seem to demand dissenting opinions and cautious modifications. For example, do Bellow's Dangling Man and Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker and Roth's The Ghost Writer and the short stories of Grace Paley really fit the categorization of American Jewish literature as "egotistical, self-assertive ... naked in its appetites, unembarrassed in its need, and sometimes more than a little bit fanatical in its demands upon the reader"? (5)

Perhaps too demanding. After revising his dissertation on Ulysses, Shechner never wrote another book as a unified creation, a work conceived without collecting and converting earlier pieces. A synoptic volume eluded him; perhaps he made no attempt at producing one. And then, near the end of the last century, Shechner concluded that he had little further to say on the subject of American Jewish culture. (That topic had brought us together to serve as co-panelists at conferences at Boston University and Mount Holyoke College as well as under the auspices of the Association for Jewish Studies.) Then Shechner virtually abandoned scholarly work itself, and switched to the challenge of writing book reviews and literary articles--eventually in the hundreds--for his local newspaper, the Buffalo News. Reviewing contemporary fiction in particular appealed to him because, as he wrote me, "I like the swiftness of this kind of reading and the concision of writing it forces me into." (6) For all of his sophistication, the deepening preoccupation with theory among other literary scholars left him unenthusiastic. Invited to lecture on Jewish comedy at the Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities, he admitted to being "a little apprehensive about walking into such a hotbed of semiotica and deconstruction without a method," he wrote me, "but I'll try to cover it up with a rapid patter and.... [with] lots [and], lots [of] jokes. What I lack in theory," he added, "I hope to make up for in delivery." (7) (Male Jewish intellectuals who realize that they'll never be Sandy Koufax have to settle for Jackie Mason.)

Except for two Fulbright Visiting Scholar lectureships that brought Shechner to Japan (at Kobe University and at Doshisha University in Kyoto), he taught for his entire career at the State University of Buffalo (1970-2012). He lived with his wife, Anne (from whom he was eventually divorced), and with their daughter, Sarah, in Buffalo. (8)

Some academicians can talk with impressive facility, but they can't pin their insights down onto the printed page. On the other hand, some writers can't manage to transfer their gifts of expression to the ease of oral communication. I can report that Shechner's conversation could be as quick-witted, as ironic and as knowing as his books. Whether talking or writing, he was the same attractive and engaging person, the same acute observer of ethnic fiction (and the same connoisseur of human folly). His death represents a loss to American Jewish studies.

(1.) Irving Howe, "The New York Intellectuals," in Decline of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1970), 240.

(2.) Mark Shechner, The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 91.

(3.) Quoted in Stewart Kellerman, "Lives of Passionate Excess," New York Times Book Review, May to, 1987, 15.

(4.) Shechner, Conversion of the Jews, 21.

(5.) Shechner, Conversion of the Jews, 16.

(6.) Mark Shechner to author, March 15, 1994 (copy in possession of author).

(7.) Mark Shechner to author, September 18, 1979 (copy in possession of author).

(8.) Colin Dabkowski, "Mark E. Shechner, longtime English professor at UB, Joyce scholar, News book reviewer," Buffalo News, October 20, 2015, at www.buffalo. com/2015/10/20/news/fine-arts/literary/mark-e-sbechner-ub-professor-lilerary-scbolar-andreviewer (accessed October 25, 2015).