A well-regarded literary critic, editor, and occasional writer of fiction, Pearl Kazin (1922–2011) rubbed elbows with a who’s who of the post-World War II American literary scene, including the novelists Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison and the poets Elizabeth Bishop (one of her closest friends), John Berryman, and Dylan Thomas (with whom she had a love affair). She was also the sister of the writer Alfred Kazin and the wife of the sociologist Daniel Bell, two of the most prominent of the group known as the New York intellectuals. Her son, David Bell, describes what he has discovered about Kazin’s life and literary career from her correspondence, and reflects on her relationship with her own origins:
In 1943 she won a fellowship to graduate school in English at Harvard. . . . The years at Harvard left other marks. Her strong Brooklyn accent, she told me once, when I was a teenager, seemed physically to repel the other students and faculty. So she took elocution lessons and lost it. When I asked her to say something in her old accent, she spoke a few sentences in the broadest Brooklyn I had ever heard. Without thinking, I gasped, “Oh my God,” and a look of horror and shame crossed her face.
When I was a boy, at home my father would sometimes lapse into Yiddish, the language both my parents had spoken before starting school, but my mother almost never did. She never openly expressed any shame about the immigrant world she came from, but the genteel and reserved way she spoke, dressed, and carried herself—perfect posture, no hand motions, skirts and sweaters in muted colors—made clear that she had left that world behind forever.
[Thomas] also described her as an important editor with an elite education and an “air of professional sophistication.” My mother certainly tried to present herself this way, but she was still a Jewish woman not so far removed from a poor immigrant background, and prey to enormous insecurities.
Read more on New York Review of Books: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/02/20/my-mothers-archive-pearl-kazin/