A link to a video of Mr. Judt's Oct. 19 lecture.
"The Trials of Tony Judt," The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Night," The New York Review of Books
February 8, 2010
A Chronicler of the World Now Looks Inward
By PATRICIA COHEN
In one of the short personal reminiscences that the historian Tony Judt has been writing for The New York Review of Books he mentions that he was part of the “lucky generation” born in the affluent West after World War II, free to indulge in daydreams and passions.
In the current and forthcoming issues Mr. Judt has followed up with further autobiographical sketches — on the overboiled English food and Indian tikkas from his youth, the subtle and complex class relations among Cambridge students and their housekeepers, and his naïve revolutionary consciousness during the ’60s — that offer a window into Mr. Judt’s sensibility and the evolution of his views.
The reflections are partly a result of his constricted circumstances. Night is by far the hardest time to bear. Mr. Judt, who has two teenage children and is married to the dance critic Jennifer Homans, has a nurse to help him through the laborious process of getting ready for and into bed. From then on, he lies motionless “like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts,” he writes.
His survival technique has been to scroll through his life and imagination to divert his mind from his body. “This cockroach-like existence,” he writes, referring to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” “is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable.”
Some of these remembrances, captured by his increasingly keen memory, have been dictated to an assistant. Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, had the idea of publishing them. “I asked to see them,” he said, “and then they came one after another, two and three at a time.” Writing them is “heroic, an incomparable act of courage,” said Mr. Silvers, who has been editing Mr. Judt for 17 years. The vignettes are a link to Mr. Judt’s past as well as to the world outside of his spacious Greenwich Village apartment.
“I would say that about one-quarter of the essays so far constitute self-explanation for curious outsiders,” Mr. Judt wrote in an e-mail message. “The rest are somewhere between self-indulgence, self-interrogation and an attempt to work in a rather different literary form, blending autobiography, history and social commentary.”
His last public appearance was in October, when he delivered a lecture on social democracy before an audience of 700 at New York University, where he is a professor of European history and the director of the Remarque Institute. Wrapped in a blanket and seated in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr. Judt started off by “shooting the elephant in the house.” Some of his American friends advised that seeing him talk about A.L.S. would be uplifting, he told the audience, taking a breath after every few words, but as Mr. Judt explained, “I’m English, and we don’t do ‘uplifting.’ ”
At the moment he is turning that lecture into a small book, “Ill Fares the Land.”
Mr. Judt no longer feels up to giving interviews, but he did respond to questions by e-mail, writing that, since his illness, “my priorities are slightly reordered: the things I write about are the things that seem to me more urgent, given not just my own reduced life expectancy but a sharper appreciation of which of our contemporary dilemmas and challenges matters most.”
He added that he’s had a lot more conversations with friends about life and death: “I’m not sure I’ve learned anything new about life; but I’ve had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.”
Mr. Judt has written nine books and scores of essays. His 878-page 2005 book, “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. But he is probably most famous — or notorious, depending on your point of view — for his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A 2003 essay in The Review of Books in which he advocated a single binational state that Israelis and Arabs would share as equal citizens thrust him into the public eye and excited often vitriolic debates. His defense of others who have been attacked for criticizing Israel has only heightened his profile among its vocal defenders.
When The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long and moving profile of Mr. Judt last month, the online comments were dominated by a bitter back and forth about the one-state solution to the Mideast conflict.
“I feel that a lot of the reading of the work has been imprecise and unfair,” ignoring the differences between short-term objectives and long-term solutions, Mr. Silvers said.
Mr. Judt was a committed left-wing Zionist as a teenager. He spent summers in Israel on a kibbutz and was active in the Jewish youth movement. But he later soured on the Zionists’ utopian vision. As he recounts of the time he spent with young soldiers, “the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then.”
Though still a leftist, he said that his brush with Labour Zionism turned him into a lifelong skeptic of the identity politics and left-wing -isms that seduced his contemporaries. Zealous and impractical idealism draws his rancor as much as expedient politics.
He nonetheless engages in a bit of both in the book he’s writing on social democracy. “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” he asked in his October talk. From his perspective, the problem is that the United States and the West in general have become so obsessed with efficiency and productivity that they have forgotten the importance of other moral considerations, like justice, fairness and individuals’ well-being.
At the same time he recognizes that the far better world one might imagine can lead to the terrifying disasters of the past century. In this age of insecurity, he argued in his talk, a “social democracy of fear” is all one can aim for. “Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.”
It is an observation that can serve not only as Mr. Judt’s prescription for America, but as a daily watchword for himself.
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