The May issue of Poetry magazine featured my little essay on the poetry of nostalgia, in which I characterized myself as being “[m]ore susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me.” I had in mind both the stream of my own experiences and the larger current of history. One tends to flow into the other, and they did so last week. On May 20, the day my twins turned four, my friend Oscar Mandel passed away. It was, initially, purely personal memories of our meetings that caught me in their undertow. Yet Oscar, who was just shy of 100, had been a witness to history, and soon I was again drawn into thoughts of what his life had been like long before he and I met in 2009. Born in Belgium to Polish Jewish parents in 1926, Oscar escaped the Nazis in 1940, mastered half a dozen languages, earned a PhD in English at Ohio State, and taught literature for decades at Caltech. Indeed, he was the backbone of the humanities at that largely left-brained institution, a position he…
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