November 29, 2018
Perseverance; or, My Fight to Study, and to Teach, Yiddish Literature
By Dr. Ruth WisseIn the late 1960s, appointments in Jewish studies were springing up in tandem with the “adversarial culture.” But we intended to strengthen the universities, not to trash them.
We present here the seventh chapter from the memoirs-in-progress of the renowned scholar and author Ruth R. Wisse. Earlier chapters can be found here. Further installments will appear over the next months.
Enduring graduate school was harder than I had anticipated.
I arrived in New York at the beginning of January 1960 armed with a friend’s offer of temporary lodging, only to find the room so cold that I slept in my winter coat. Until I could register at Columbia University and make use of its facilities, I stayed warm in the main branch of the New York Public Library, plucking Yiddish books from the shelves of the Judaica reading room and hoping to get a head start in my studies. Though in the past I’d often chafed at the requirement to follow a prescribed syllabus at a set pace, now my random reading made me long for a teacher’s guidance.