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Introduction
Leon F. Litwack
| Larry Levine was born in New York City, where his father ran a fruit and vegetable store in Washington Heights and gave a 10 percent discount to schoolteachers. Larry was educated in the public schools, barely graduating from high school, because, as he explained, "I was an absolute screw-up"; he then enrolled in City College of New York and in the graduate program at Columbia University, where he completed his Ph.D. under the direction of Richard Hofstadter. When he left New York for his first job, as an instructor at Princeton University, he described it as crossing the Hudson River into America. The next year, 1962, he would enter the larger America, perhaps the real America—heading westward for California and Berkeley. That is where we met, some forty-two years ago. |
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One of the joys of this profession is the opportunity to share the study and teaching of history with extraordinary people. For forty-two years, I have valued Larry as a close friend, as a fellow Berkeleyan, as a much-valued critic, as a historian whose work influenced my own view of how to re-create the lives, thoughts, and expression of men and women long absent from the historical narrative. On occasion he has been a fellow traveler (by plane and train, for example, from Berkeley to Olomuc, Czech Republic, where we dedicated the library of a close friend, Nathan Huggins, which was donated to Palacky University there after his death). Larry has been a comrade in the original sense of the word (a close friend with shared interests and visions). Our friendship was from the very outset aided and abetted by our interest not only in certain kinds of history, but in sports, politics, film, and music, in people such as Charlie Chaplin, Lenny Bruce, Mel Ott, Reggie Jackson, Thelonious Monk, and Giuseppe Verdi. But most important, perhaps, we shared working-class roots, Larry the son of a Jewish fruit and vegetable store keeper from New York, I the son of a Jewish gardener from Santa Barbara. There I had the advantage. I knew something about Jewish fruit and vegetable peddlers in New York. Larry had never heard of a Jewish gardener from anywhere, nor had anyone else; that I was from Santa Barbara made my very Jewishness suspect. |
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For some thirty years, before Larry departed for George Mason University, we shared the Department of History at Berkeley, or at least whatever portion of the department they were willing to allot to us. We managed somehow to survive, perhaps because we were both deemed unacceptable as department chairs—one of those rare moments when the department showed good judgment. Of course, Larry's sheer presence made such a difference at Berkeley, as a colleague, a teacher, and a generous mentor for his students. |
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Few individuals I have known in this profession (or out of it) have been as important to me: as insightful, as creative, as imaginative, as challenging, as intellectually engaged, as stimulating, as provocative, as tough-minded, as open to new ideas and experiences. That Larry is gregarious is an understatement; his company is an experience in itself—his presence is always felt. George Burns once talked about George Raft and Gary Cooper playing a scene in front of a cigar store: it looked like the wooden Indian was overacting. Larry is no recluse, he is a participant, a gifted, an avid conversationalist. We have all experienced Larry's marvelous wit, his remarkable sense and command of humor. (How does he remember all those jokes, the right one for the right moment?) He has used his wit and humor, as well as his irreverence, his combative, questioning spirit, his sometimes quiet rage, and his not so quiet rage to afflict the comfortable, to unmask hypocrisy, to expose pretensions (no matter their ideological bent). I have appreciated, too, his generosity, the care and time he has taken reading my work and the work of others. With analytic rigor, he is able in his critiques to take you into areas and make connections you had failed to consider, asking the kind of questions that provoke deeper thought and reconsideration. For all of these qualities, I remain grateful. Larry Levine—if he did not exist it would be hard to imagine him. I remain grateful as well for the family Rhoda and I have come to know and to love these many years: Cornelia, Alex, Jennie, Stephanie, Ben, Josh, and Isaac; they have all enriched our lives. |
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