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Milberg inspires celebration of Jewish-American writing
Jennifer Greenstein Altmann Princeton NJ -- Leonard Milberg '53 is a passionate book collector who does not give up when he decides he wants to find a rare edition of a novel or a never-before-published work from a well-known writer. His obsession is responsible for an unprecedented series of events taking place this month at Princeton to celebrate Jewish-American writing.
And to supplement the exhibition's offerings, Milberg rifled through file cabinets and called on old acquaintances to gather three previously unpublished short stories by prominent Jewish writers Isaac Bashevis Singer and Henry Roth, which will be published in a special edition of the Princeton University Library Chronicle. The issue also will have original poems, essays and stories from dozens of other writers. "Leonard Milberg has made an enormously generous contribution to the future of Jewish studies at Princeton, providing not only the kind of material scholars will be able to use but also providing the conference, much of which will be televised and recorded," said Ben Primer, acting associate University librarian for rare books and special collections. "Altogether, these events offer an amazing breadth and depth of information about Jewish-American writing." The conferenceAmong the writers and artists scheduled to appear at the conference, called "Celebrating Jewish-American Writers," are novelist Marge Piercy, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, artist and author Will Eisner, author Grace Paley, playwright Tony Kushner and poet C.K. Williams, a Princeton faculty member. Eleven writers will read from their work, and another 14 will participate in panels to discuss Yiddish America, American irony, the fiction of identity and the Holocaust. A roundtable discussion called "COMIX!!" will explore the work of Jewish artists and cartoonists. Playwright and essayist Wendy Wasserstein will give the opening lecture at 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 21, and author E.L. Doctorow will deliver the keynote address at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22. All conference events are open to the public. (For the complete schedule, visit <www.princeton.edu/~jwst/writers/program.html>.) The conference will be simulcast on Monday and Tuesday from 301 Frist and available over TigerTV Channel 7 on campus. "It is probably the first and largest such gathering of Jewish-American writers ever," said Morris Dickstein, a Distinguished Professor of English and senior fellow of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who will be participating in the conference. Bringing so many prominent Jewish-American writers together in one place for formal and informal interaction makes for an intriguing prospect. "Sometimes the most interesting things happen between (events)," said Michael Wood, chair of the English department. "I'll be interested to see what conversations come out of the cross-generation pollination between the younger writers and the older ones, because so many of them will be here for the three-day period," said Barbara Mann, assistant professor of Hebrew literature. The collectionThe Leonard Milberg '53 Collection of Jewish-American Writers was two years in the making. It was the brainchild of Milberg, who previously collected and donated to Princeton's library two other special collections, one of Irish poetry, the other of modern American poetry. "He loves to collect, and he loves looking for things," said Wood, who assembled a group of professors and library staff to help Milberg choose the works that would be included in the collection. Milberg is the chairman of Milberg Factors Inc., a finance company in New York City. He is a member of the advisory council for the Department of Art and Archaeology and a member of the Council of the Friends of the Princeton University Library. In 1998 the Friends of Princeton University Library presented him with the Hyde Award "for distinction in book collecting and service to the community of scholars." More than 130 writers are represented in the collection, which includes poetry, fiction, drama and essays. Among the items are sermons from the 19th century; the memoirs of Leonardo da Ponte, who penned librettos for Mozart; works in Yiddish by Celia Dropkin and Chaim Grade; books by contemporary fiction writers Allegra Goodman and Nathan Englander; and essays by Jewish intellectuals Harold Bloom, Philip Rahv and Norman Podhoretz. There are also manuscripts, such as a draft of a poem by Stanley Kunitz later included in a prize-winning collection of his poetry. The collection, its publications and the conference are dedicated to Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton from 1988 to 2001. Following the exhibition opening, the collection will be available for researchers to peruse in Firestone Library. "In a sense what the exhibition most clearly shows is that Jewish writers started as a marginal minority group and became a very significant portion of the mainstream in American literature," said James Weinberger, one of the curators of the exhibition. The collection is intended to satisfy the interests of both book collectors and researchers. The book collector, for example, will find a rare first edition in its dust jacket of Henry Roth's 1934 masterpiece "Call It Sleep." The researcher will find all of Roth's books, and might run across related material from Roth's era. Milberg is eager for Princeton students and other scholars to delve into the collection. "There are a lot of surprises here, and I hope people will find them," Milberg said. "I'm looking forward to the discoveries they make. This is a field in which a lot has been written, but there are still many questions to be answered." He plans to continue to add to the collection in the coming years. The exhibition of selected items from the collection, called "Not for Myself Alone: Celebrating Jewish- American Writers," will open Sunday, Oct. 21, in Firestone Library, and will remain on display until April 21. The Library ChronicleTo assemble material to publish in the Library Chronicle, a scholarly journal for the Friends of the Princeton University Library, the organizers wrote to every living author whose work was included in the Milberg collection and asked for a submission of an unpublished work. Several essays also were commissioned, and some writers whose work does not appear in the collection also were asked to contribute. The result is a 392-page double issue with 27 original essays and short stories and 46 original poems written by and about Jewish-American writers. They include excerpts from a novel in progress by Cynthia Ozick; facsimiles of previously unpublished letters by Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth and Alfred Kazin; poems by Jorie Graham, Anthony Hecht and C.K. Williams; and essays by Paul Auster and Leslie Fielder. In his search for unpublished works to bring to light, Milberg took Wood on an expedition to the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City to pore through about 20 file cabinets brimming with the unpublished work of Henry Roth. They discovered a short story called "Antica Fiamma," about a man who runs into a former girlfriend (the title means old flame). Wood paired the story with an excerpt from Roth's journal in which Roth recalls running into a former girlfriend. The story and diary excerpt, which appear in the Chronicle together, will give readers a sense of how Roth transformed a real-life experience into fiction, Wood said. Also remarkable are the two stories by I.B. Singer. "Anytime there's an unpublished story by Singer you grab it, because he's such a good writer," said C.K. Williams, who is a lecturer with the rank of professor in the creative writing program. Singer, who grew up in Poland and emigrated to the United States, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. His varied and rich body of work, most of it written in Yiddish, make him an important link from the Yiddish writing of the Old World to the Jewish-American writers of the 20th century. Singer died in 1991. Milberg found the Singer stories through intuition. "I sensed there must have been (unpublished) material, because I knew he wrote every day," Milberg said. He recalled the director of The Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin telling him that the center had Singer's papers. Milberg got access to several of Singer's stories from the center, and obtained permission from Singer's family to publish two of them. One story, titled "Distinguished Lineage" in the English translation, tells the tale of a father who moves up in the world and decides that, because of his elevated status, he should break off his daughter's betrothal to a baker and marry her to someone from a good family. "The story has Singer's wonderful sardonic humor, and it gives a sense of the lost world he's writing from," Milberg said. Singer's stories will appear in the Chronicle in the original Yiddish, accompanied by an English translation. Acquiring the excerpts from Cynthia Ozick's novel in progress was fairly simple. "I asked her," Milberg explained. But getting unpublished manuscripts is not always that easy. Said Milberg, "If I hadn't been persistent, I wouldn't have gotten a lot of these things."
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