Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin, author and literary critic, said last night that the "bleak views" many turn-of-the-century American writers held of Jews influenced them and is reflected in their works.

Speaking before a crowd of 150 at Hillel, Kazin, a professor of English at the City University of New York, said that living conditions on New York's lower East Side, home for most of the Jews who immigrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "shocked" such writers as Henry Adams, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain.

Kazin, who joined students for lunch yesterday at Quincy House, called the mass immigration from Europe the "greatest change in modern history," and added that authors of the time were disturbed by what they saw as an influx of people whose "tradition" was greater than their own.

The 1980s marks one century since Eastern European Jews came to the United States, a period "I have lived myself" through memories of an upbringing in Brooklyn by immigrant parents, Kazin said. His study of authors from the years 1881-1914, Kazin joked, has made it difficult for him to reconcile that "some of my favorite writers would have liked to see me dead."

One-time literary editor of New Republic magazine, Kazin has been most acclaimed for "On Native Grounds," which had a profound effect of literary criticism after it was published in 1942. Kazin's most recent book, "New York Jew," is the final volume in a three-part, personal history, which details his life since he began writing as a freelance critic in the 1930s.

Kazin has held special professorships at Smith, New York University and Amherst, was a visiting lecturer at Harvard in 1953 and won a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1977. In most of his work, Kazin has used what critics have called the "traditional" approach, analyzing and discussing relationships between life and history, and history and literature.