Krim's Way
by Kenneth H. Brown
Home > No. 10 > Lives

On Wednesday, August 30, 1989, Seymour Krim bit the dust. He'd had a massive coronary a few years before, and he'd been forced to give up smoking, cut down on his drinking, eat a bland diet, and live, for all intents and purposes, like a bloody monk. It just wasn't his style, and when his ability to concentrate started to fail him and he could no longer write, he wrapped his cantankerous teeth around a big wad of dust and bit down hard. He did himself in with barbiturates, and when they found him in his writing chair, there was an empty whiskey glass on the desk beside him and a cigarette butt neatly extinguished in the ashtray. He left notes telling everybody what to do. He'd been planning his demise for a long time. He didn't want to be a burden on anyone and he was not about to become a victim at the end of a wire grid provided by insurance companies and the American Medical Association. Krimeroo, as I used to call him, was primarily a critic and an essayist, and I'm here to tell you that he was an old dust biter as long as I knew him, a period of about twenty years.

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Krim looked like a rabbi should look. He was studious, expressive, with a deep raspy voice. He made observations on everything, said what he thought. It was an earmark of his profession. On the other hand, he was outwardly ambivalent about his Jewishness. He never talked about it, nor did he seem prepared to discuss it if anyone else brought it up. In the play I was doing there at the time, "The Green Room" by name, there was a character called Solomon, a contemporary wise man in a small, closed society. I asked Krim to play the part because nobody else in the area could possibly have had a feel for it. He agreed. As rehearsals proceeded, this character emerged from somewhere deep within Krim's being, this medieval Polish Orthodox fellow who wore all the trimmings that announced his religious fervor. Where Krim got the accessories for his costume I never knew, but they showed up on his person like remittances direct from God. By the time the show opened, he was so good at it that you could almost see the Wailing Wall behind him. It was a shame that there was nobody there besides myself who could appreciate it. In the reviews of the play, nobody even mentioned his performance. No one knew what he was doing. There wasn't a Jew for miles around. 

This is an excerpt. To read the rest, please continue your travels in the Republic by purchasing No. 10, September 2004.

Kenneth H. Brown's bio is forthcoming.