Jules Chametzky

Jules Chametzky (1928 in Brooklyn – September 23, 2021, in Amherst, Massachusetts) was an American literary critic, writer, editor, and unionist.

His parents were immigrants who came to New York State from Eastern Europe, his father Beny from the Russian province of Volhnyia in 1913, and his mother Anna from Lublin, Poland.

Both were Yiddish-speaking and working-class; his father worked in, and later owned, a butcher shop, and his mother worked in a sweater factory.

Chametzky was married for over fifty years to the writer, editor, and educator Anne Halley (1928–2004).

Chametzky was born in Brooklyn, in 1928.

His older brother Leslie enlisted in the infantry in 1940, participated in the North Africa invasion, and was taken prisoner by the Germans.

Later freed by British and North American troops, he went on to take part in the Sicily campaign.

In 1948, he joined the American Labor Party, and became a member of the Labor Youth League and the NAACP two years later.

He did his graduate work in English at the University of Minnesota, where he studied with Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith and read Saul Bellow's Yiddish-inflected English for the first time.

Chametzky studied first at Brooklyn Tech, an engineering school, and then Brooklyn College, where he began writing plays, graduating in 1950.

Having joined the NAACP in 1950, at the University of Minnesota, Chametzky headed the organization's committee on fair employment practices, and was "intensely involved in Minnesota's passing of the first American Fair Practices Employment Act".

Differing with their position on the national (i.e., Jewish/Zionist) question, disagreeing that social realism was the best way to judge or write literature, and opposing Stalinist methods of dealing with political opposition, Chametzky refused to join the American Communist Party.

His self-definition as "a member of the non-communist—i.e. social democratic, or democratic socialist—left" was confirmed definitively by the trial and execution of Rudolf Slansky, a Czech Jew, formerly Secretary-General of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

In 1953, Smith asked him to become an editor for the journal Faulkner Studies.

Such decisions, however, were no protection when in January 1954 Chametzky was named by a witness before the U.S. Justice Department's Subversive Activities Control Board.

The case received extensive coverage in the local papers, and Chametzky was called to testify before a special Investigating Committee headed by the University of Minnesota President.

He was eventually cleared later that same year.

Chametzky was a union man from an early age, and a member of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) during his Brooklyn years.

He received his Ph.D. in 1958, and, with the support of Leo Marx, began teaching the following year in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was tenured in 1961, at the age of thirty-three.

He was a Fulbright professor in Copenhagen, Tübingen, and Zagreb, as well as head of the University of Massachusetts program in Freiburg.

He has also taught as Visiting Professor in Venice and at the Kennedy Institute (Freie Universität) and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

The subject of Chametzky's Ph.D. dissertation—the plays of John Marston—reflected both his early interest in theater and the then dominant tastes of the New Criticism; his most influential writings on literature would respond instead to the themes of regionalism and ethnicity in other authors, such as Faulkner and Bellow, first read during his graduate school years.

Typical of this work is the essay "Broadening the Canon: A Consideration of Regional, Ethnic, Racial, and Sexual Factors," which argues that the importance of authors such as George Washington Cable, Abraham Cahan, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin is missed when they are read as regional or "local color" writers.

A collection of Chametzky's essays would later borrow from this essay's title in order to give a general description of his scholarship.

His first book-length study focused on one of these same authors, the journalist, novelist, educator and translator Abraham Cahan.

In 1958, Chametzky penned a memo suggesting that the University of Massachusetts's English Department sponsor a new literary magazine; the following year, the Massachusetts Review, a quarterly publication, was launched.

His essays in the 1960s and 1970s on the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to American literary culture anticipated the later schools of New Historicism and Cultural Studies in American letters.

Chametzky was a founder and long-time editor of the Massachusetts Review, an editor of Thought and Action, the journal of the National Education Association, as well as the third President of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the faculty/library union at the University of Massachusetts.

He was also a founding member of the Coordinating Committee of Literary Magazines (CCLM, now Council of Literary Magazines and Presses) and its first secretary.

The name of the magazine was chosen to honor an earlier journal, Emerson's Massachusetts Quarterly Review. Chametzky was the second managing editor of the journal and, from 1963 to 1974, co-edited the Review with John Hicks and others.

In 1967, when the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) was formed by combining two previous organizations, Chametzky was a founding member and its first secretary.

The organization's original name, the "Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines" was given by Chametzky, chosen in order to allude to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC.

The other signatories to the original NEH grant request letter were editors of other prominent reviews: Robie Macauley, William Phillips, George Plimpton, and Reed Whittemore.

Responding to the tumultuous times, in 1969 Chametzky and Kaplan put together a collection of essays from the first ten years of MR; Julius Lester, in the New York Times, called Black and White in American Culture "a rare anthology [...] with a higher degree of relevance than almost any other book of its kind."

From its inception, the magazine had the support of the German and History departments as well as English, and when the English professor Sidney Kaplan—who would in 1970 become a founding member of the University's W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies—joined the planning committee, the magazine's scope extended further.

In a chapter from Enlarging America, the Harvard literary scholar Susanne Klingentein offers a description by Chametzky of the publication's editorial goals during its formative years: “We wanted to break the logjam of ideas represented by the New Criticism and formalism,” he commented; publishing so-called "marginal" voices (e.g., Jewish, black, and women writers) was one way of "letting in fresh political and ideological currents."

At the University of Massachusetts, he supported the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP) from its inception in 1972-73, and became the union's third President in 1979-80.

In 1988, Chametzky would serve as advisory editor for Lewis Fried's Handbook of American-Jewish Literature, and, in 2000, as a co-editor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. A series of short, personalized portraits of noted literary figures—a number of which had previously appeared in the Massachusetts Review or on the "Jewish Currents" website—has recently been published as ''Out of Brownsville.

Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers'', by Meredith Winter Press and the University of Massachusetts Press.

Chametzky would be asked to return as co-editor in the 1990s, and, in 2001, he became MR's Editor Emeritus.