George Steiner, critic of Israel and literature, dies at 90
George Steiner Image by Getty/BERTRAND GUAY/Staff
By PJ Grisar February 4, 2020
George Steiner, the celebrated and polarizing literary critic whose work was shaded by the specter of the Shoah, died February 3 at his home in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He was 90.
A contemporary of Harold Bloom, a defender of the Western Canon and a fierce advocate of what he termed “Old Criticism,” Steiner was unique in his cohort of public intellectuals for his facility with languages — he was raised speaking French, German and English — and his fluency with disparate ideas and literary traditions.
“His bracing virtue has been his ability to move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph,” the critic Lee Siegel wrote in a piece for The New York Times for The New York Times, noting that this same facility was also “his irritating vice.”
Steiner was born in Paris on April 23, 1929 to Austrian parents who emigrated to escape anti-Semitism. The well-off family encountered the French strain of prejudice early in Steiner’s life, and he later recalled hearing cries of “Kill the Jews” from outside his apartment. “This is called history, and you must never be afraid,” his father, Frederick, told him as they looked on at the mob outside. The family moved to New York City in 1940, refugees from an incipient Holocaust.
The sweep of history informed Steiner’s thinking from his early influential essay “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky” (1959), his tribute to an older, philosophically and historically-minded read of literature, to his later work as a fiction writer, where he notably imagined Adolf Hitler surviving the war in “The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.” (1982). Steiner often puzzled over the function of art in a post-Holocaust and post-atomic world, which he termed the “post-culture.”
“We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning,” Steiner wrote in his essay collection, “Language and Silence” (1967), one of his over two dozen books.
While still in his 20s, Steiner filled the eminent seat of Edmund Wilson at The New Yorker in 1966, serving as senior book reviewer and contributing over 200 reviews over 30 years. He also had an accomplished career as a lecturer at the University of Vienna, NYU and Harvard. Throughout his life in letters, Steiner was both celebrated and occasionally mocked for his erudition, which critics believed bordered on pretension and for inaccuracies. In Jewish quarters, he often courted criticism for his views on Israel, claiming that Diaspora Jews had a claim to a more faultless morality.
In an interview with Laure Adler, from her and Steiner’s book “A Long Saturday: Conversations” (2017), Steiner elaborated on why he was “fundamentally anti-Zionist,” noting his belief in the “nobility” of pre-state Jews, “a people that has never humiliated another people” as he believed Israeli Jews did “necessarily” for their defense.
“I can only explain what I perceive as the Jew’s mission: to be the guest of humanity,” Steiner said, quoting, controversially, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger’s statement “We are the guests of life.” But then Steiner, provided a fundamentally Jewish outlook akin to tikkun olam.
“What must a guest do?” Steiner said. “He must live among people, wherever they may be. And a good guest, a worthy guest, leaves the place where he has been staying a bit cleaner, a bit more beautiful, a bit more interesting than he found it.”
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].
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