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PARTISAN REVIEW
tisan Review.
We expect to publish the proceedings of this conference.
Segments of the next few days' events will be broadcast live on public
radio and will be shown on Suburban Cablevision. Most of all, I want
to thank Lynne Cheney, Chairman of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, whose staff and advisors recognized the educational im–
portance of bringing together writers and academics, Europeans and
Americans, who have proven themselves capable of thinking and speaking
against the grain, of speaking the unspeakable. Moreover, I'm grateful to
our other sponsors: the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, the
Soros Foundation, the Joukowsky Family Foundation, Daniel and
Joanna Rose, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Geraldine
R.
Dodge Foundation, the Honors Program, the Special Events Committee
of the Rutgers Alumni Federation, the Self-Reliance Federal Credit
Union, and the Austrian Institute. And I want to thank Charles Russell,
whose tact, together with the Provost's office, helped me overcome
some of the obstacles I had to deal with. I welcome them all. But most
of all I welcome our distinguished speakers and our audience - many of
whom I would have invited as panelists, had we had the time and space.
I'm looking forward to a wonderful and enlightening three days.
Now it is my pleasure to introduce the other persons on the plat–
form, who really need no introduction. Right next to me is Dr. Lynne
Cheney, a literary scholar and the Chairman of the National Endow–
ment for the Humanities. Next to her is Dr. Francis Lawrence, a
renowned scholar of French literature and the President of Rutgers, the
State University of New Jersey. The next speaker is Dr. Norman Samuels,
the Rutgers-Newark Provost. He not only is a trained political scientist
and the person who originally hired me, but my boss.
Norman Samuels:
It is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to the
Newark campus of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. It's a
wonderful bit of irony that we are meeting today in a building which is
named for a great artist who was persecuted because he was a Commu–
nist, Paul Robeson. Like many cities of Eastern and Central Europe, our
host city, Newark, is a hard place. It is also a phoenix risen from the
ashes, a city of immigrants, and a cradle of writers and singers. We are
delighted, therefore, to welcome poets, scribblers of all kinds, dreamers,
thinkers, the only people who truly understand and transcend hard lives.
I'm sure that all of you have noticed that people who offer welcomes at
events like this often manage to expand their simple official functions
into their larger, personal agendas, and I'm afraid that I am no different.
As I look at the languages in which many of you write, Russian, English,
Polish, German, and so on, I am drawn to remember another language
which until World War Two was a fountain of poetry and novels and
