This chapter begins with the book’s point of departure, the love affair my mother had with Philip Greenberg, who adopted the pen name Philip Rahv. It presents the book as part biography, part history, part literary analysis, part cultural studies, and part memoir. It identifies the key components of the book: textual analyses woven together with historical accounts, genealogy, memoirs by Rahv’s colleagues, friends, and associates, interviews with persons who knew him, and the abundant body of secondary scholarship devoted to the New York intellectuals, the history of Partisan Review, and Jewish studies. In keeping with the feminist notion of positionality, this chapter addresses the issue of what it means for a 21st-century woman to write about an author who unquestionably belongs to “the world of our fathers,” to use the title of Irving Howe’s magisterial study of Eastern European Jews in America.
Motherhood in crisis in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta Trilogy