Category Archives: English

In Montreal, in the fall of 1933, two Jewish radicals name their son after two dead men. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti die in the electric chair in Massachusetts in 1927. Six years later the Bercovitches fold the two names … Continue reading →

One fall morning in 2003 Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003) walks through Manhattan with her friend Mary Ann Caws (b. 1933). She says she feels sad. Caws asks why. Heilbrun answers, “The universe.” Then she goes home. The next morning her … Continue reading →

Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) grows up behind the counter of her father’s pharmacy in the northeast Bronx, and the first thing she learns about herself she learns from the other children. They have a word for her, and the word … Continue reading →

The shop sits on a Brooklyn corner in the 1930s. Sawdust on the floor, the smell of blood and brine, a scale on the counter. Beny Chametzky came from Volhynia in 1913, learned the trade, and bought the place. Anna … Continue reading →

In 1976 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave a literary critic a chair. The chair had a long name, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Cultural History, and it sat inside the temple of the machine. Leo Marx (1919-2022) … Continue reading →

A photograph from 2014 shows Daniel Aaron (1912-2016) in his Harvard office, pointing at a picture of himself as a boy. He is a hundred and two. The hand that points has signed petitions, edited seventeen million words of another … Continue reading →

In 1943 a man sits in a basement laboratory at Harvard and listens to a human voice drowning in roar. The Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory has a war problem. A bomber crew cannot hear an order over the engines and the flak, … Continue reading →

The Harvard catalog for the fall lists a course, Proust, Joyce, and Mann. A young woman reads the line and decides her life. Marjorie Perloff (b. 1931) never takes the course and never studies with the man who teaches it. … Continue reading →