BOOKS
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Goodheart has learned enough from the fiction he has spent a lifetime
explicating to make the characterizations in this memoir vivid. He has
also reflected deeply enough upon the sadness and instability of human
relationships to gain some solace from the struggle to retrieve the traces
of friends and relatives from oblivion. Caught between natality and
fatality, Goodheart doesn't differ from the rest of us. But out of the
episodes and encounters that might otherwise be random or inconse–
quential have come meditations that achieve a lapidary acuity.
Confes–
sions of a Secular Jew
is therefore something of a triumph in the richness
of its psychological texture.
The title is a bit misleading, however. Jewish origins, Jewish attach–
ments and allegiances, Jewish fate-these are hardly synonymous with
the memories that the author summons, nor with the persona that this
book projects. For example, he broods on the laser-intensity of the sta–
tus of an only child, on the vulnerability of the graduate student (which
he felt at the University of Virginia and then at Columbia), on the pun–
gent yet fleeting intimacies of friendship and the mysteries of familial
bonds. He indulges in comparative analysis of academic life, having
taught at institutions as varied as the University of Chicago, Mount
Holyoke, and MIT. Part of Goodheart's saga is political-a record of
emancipation from the Stalinoid coils of his boyhood. He became a cen–
trist or a moderate who disdained the rancid self-righteousness of the
New Left, yet he is still unable
to
forget the hunger for social justice that
marked his own coming-of-age . A certain loyalty
to
the modest circum–
stances of his Brooklyn origins has kept the author vaguely on the left
and has blocked the path
to
neoconservatism.
But because Goodheart is a Diaspora Jew, the academic star cannot
distance himself entirely from the
shlemiel;
and success co-habits with
self-deprecation. Thus the humiliations are inscribed as well: from a
boyhood spent on the borough's playing fields, where maladroitness
cannot be covered up with ambiguity;
to
France, where he lands on a
Fulbright, strides for the first time into a cafe, and orders a cheese sand–
wich-bur it comes out as
"dommage,"
to the universal ridicule of the
local patrons. Giving the first in a series of prestigious Christian Gauss
lectures at Princeton, Goodheart flirts with disaster; his typescript has
been mistakenly placed in a friend's briefcase during the earlier dinner.
The most commonplace theme of embarrassed recollections is sexual
initiation. Recounting such experiences is a temptation
to
which he does
not yield; also discreetly soft-pedaled is a failed first marriage.
Not that the claims of the body can finally be ignored-but in its suf–
fering and its senescence. The most harrowing chapter in
Confessions of
