Word: kazin
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...tales which are the primary sources of Yiddish literature. Yet, Singer's conviction that the demons he writes about are real is balanced in his fiction by a wholly modern psychological skepticism. He has been condemned by many Yiddish critics for the same qualities that critics like Rexroth, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe find praiseworthy--a lack of concern for the fate of the Jews as a nation, a wholly Western concern for the individual, the unique...
CONTEMPORARIES (513 pp.)-Alfred Kazin-Atlantic-Liftle, Brown...
...Jarrell writing about writers is another matter; his virtues are exactly those that Alfred Kazin lacks. Jarrell understands that what is serious need not be solemn. The scales of justice are part of his equipment, of course, but they are a lighter model than the vast, slow-swinging mechanism that burdens Kazin. After following Jarrell's ardent and scholarly puffs for the short stories of Kipling or the poems of Eleanor Taylor, the reader feels that life will not be supportable without these stories or these poems. Kazin's approval of a writer, however well thought out, inspires...
...Kazin's solemnity may be the result of his status in what is usually a two-level hierarchy of book reviewer (bottom) and book critic (top). Kazin is in the middle, looking wistfully upward. He charges that book reviewing is wretchedly done in the U.S. and deplores "the professional philis-tines" of the daily press. He complains of the New York Times's Orville Prescott, for instance, that it is no longer possible to tell what book Prescott is reviewing, since all his reviews sound as if he had written the books himself. The trouble with Kazin...
Readers compliment him on articles, but seldom argue with him, Kazin admits, solemnly regretting the middle-brow docility of his congregation. In the course of letting some of the air out of Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan, Kazin discovers a maxim he himself would do well to follow. The British writer's rule, he reports, is "rouse tempers, goad, lacerate, raise whirlwinds." Kazin does none of these things as he dolefully doles out justice...