Remembering Irving Howe

Some time ago, in an impatient review of Fiddler on the Roof, Irving wrote that the people who, one by one, made up Yiddish civilization in Eastern Europe were to be mourned—not with sentimental homage—but rather with “dignified silence.” We younger men and women who loved Irving, and claimed him, cannot write of his death without feeling somewhat preempted by that show of impatience. If anything was sacred to him, it was the mystery and density of a good man’s life. How do you eulogize a person you imagine poised to pounce on the slightest oversimplification?

You remember, I suppose, that certain things were sacred to him. Just after A Margin of Hope was published, I found Irving exasperate...