|
|
|
|
Reginald Zelnik
For 40 years we were close friends and colleagues, meeting as Rhoda and I stood in line with Reggie and Elaine for the Chancellor’s reception for new faculty in 1964. Reginald E. “Reggie” Zelnik, 68, a leading scholar, classroom teacher, and mentor, died on May 17, 2004 when a delivery truck accidentally backed into him as he was walking to a meeting on campus. He joined the faculty in 1964, served as chair of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies from 1977 to 1980, and as chair of the Department of History from 1994 to 1997. His teaching and research field was Russian and Soviet History, but he also made his mark on this campus by his relentless defense of civil liberties and student rights. During the Free Speech Movement, in his first year at UC, Zelnik came to the defense of students protesting a ban on political activity (in support of the civil rights movement) on campus.
We shared the same love of teaching, the same interest in sports (sitting for many games in the shadows of the goal posts in Memorial Stadium), the same politics and commitment to social action. We played softball together, we marched together, and we occasionally shared the same speakers’ platform. It is difficult to think of Reggie in the past tense. He was so alive, so vibrant, so much in love with life. What made him so special, so memorable was his imposing presence and his camaraderie, his marvelous wit and spirit, his fairness, his compassion, his sense of justice, the intensity of his intellectual engagement, the depth and consistency of his commitments. He held steadfast to his belief in social justice, even as so many others--the politically stylish--fell by the wayside of compromise, indifference, and accommodation. He exemplified in many ways the slogan popularized in 1968 by French students in the streets of Paris: “Soyez realistes, demandez l'impossible.” (Be realistic. Demand the impossible). In his respect for our common humanity, in his willingness to disturb complacency and undermine old dogmas and assumptions (even as he questioned new ones), in how he confronted the human experience with the play of his imagination and his appreciation of irony, he made our lives, the University, and the study and teaching of the past brighter, more alive, and far more humane.
It is precisely these qualities that moved him into the forefront of the Free Speech Movement, as a liaison between faculty and students. When we honor the University of California, we celebrate with good reason its academic renown and achievements. But we need to recall as well those like Reggie Zelnik who struggled through the years to make UC a true marketplace of ideas, a campus tolerant of a diversity of views and expression within its faculty and students. That was not easily done. He cared deeply about UC. That is why he fought so hard to compel it to become what it had long claimed to be, and to defend the rights of students and faculty to subject the University, as well as the nation, to critical scrutiny. With Robert Cohen, he co-edited in 2002 an anthology entitled The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on a Campus Rebellion. His essay in the collection assessed the role tha he and other faculty members played during the free speech movement. Chancellor Robert Berdahl captured his importance when he called Zelnik’s death “a terrible tragedy for the campus” and praised him as a teacher who “courageously defended students during the Free Speech Movement.” Reggie not only said “Go Bears,” he spent his years here giving UC a meaningful direction--toward a freer and more open and diverse campus.
In 1966 the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg, was invited to UC to receive an honorary degree. He also agreed to a public debate on the War in Vietnam. An opponent of that war, Zelnik was asked to preside over the debate and he resolved that Goldberg be given the opportunity to present his case to a hostile audience of some 7000 in Harmon Gym. That was consistent with his belief that the real test of free speech, if it stands for anything, is the right of others to speak out on behalf of what we believe to be wrong, freedom of speech for those with whom we are least comfortable or find most distasteful. It was an unforgettable moment, a triumph not only for free expression for the speaker but for the audience. After the debate, Zelnik polled the audience. He asked those who favored and then those who opposed the war to stand up. Needless to say, Goldberg had a sobering message to bring back to Washington, D.C.
As a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Zelnik made important contributions, not only as a remarkable teacher and mentor (he recived the American Historical Association’s Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Awarad in 1996) but for his solid scholarly work. He succeeded in his books in humanizing the history of workers in Tsarist Russia, in exploring the origins of the Russian labor movement, and in illuminating labor struggles that would culminate in the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century. He also translated and edited the autobiography of a radical worker in Tsarist Russia.
A native of New York City, Zelnik graduated from Princeton in 1956, served two years in the Navy, and then earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at Stanford. He is survived by his wife, Elaine, his daughter, Pamela, his son Michael, his grandson, Jaxson Zelnik Stuhr, and his brother, Martin. A memorial was held on August 29 on Faculty Glade. The Reginald Zelnik Memorial Fund has been established to support graduate training in Russian history. Contributions to the fund may be sent to: Reginald Zelnik Memorial Fund, Dept. of History, 3229 Dwinelle Hall #2550, Berkeley, CA 94720-2550. Please mark envelopes c/o Chris Egan and make checks payable to "Reginald Zelnik Memorial Fund."
His colleagues and friends, both in and outside the University, have mourned the loss. “He was such a beloved teacher, a mentor, a colleague, a family member,” recalled John Gjerde, chair of the History Department. “He was a mainstay of the department, both administratively and in terms of teaching undergraduates.” Nick Salvatore, a professor at Cornell who received his Ph.D. at U.C. in 1977, recalled how “Reggie made you feel comfortable--welcomed--from the first moment you met him, whether you were talking about history, contemporary issues, or who should play at third in a decades-long weekly softball game. He recognized you immediately in this sense because he was so deeply grounded himself, and his sense of openness was immense.” Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, described his lifelong friend as “an academic star, a man of passion, integrity and action, a dedicated scholar for whom teaching and scholarship were not competing priorities but complementary ones. A generation of scholars and students have been beneficiaries of his generosity, his solidarity, friendship, and wonderful sense of humor.” At the same time, Gregorian observed, despite Reggie’s “academic stature, his major accomplishments, and his popularity, he was a very modest and humble human being even though he had no reason to be.”
Reggie Zelnik left us a precious heritage. The way to remember him is to stand up to irrational authority and to act on the commitments he made, the concerns he voiced, and the vision of an egalitarian society he embraced and struggled to achieve.
--Remembered by Leon Litwack ’51,
Alexander F. and May T. Morrison
Professor of American History
Thom Gunn
The British-born poet Thom Gunn lived in San Francisco for 40 years, taught at Berkeley from 1958 to 1966 and again from 1973 to 1990, and was considered by many to be one of the best living poets in the English language. He died at age 74 on April 25, and is survived by his partner of 52 years, Mike Kitay. He is remembered here by fellow poet Robert Pinsky.
Thom Gunn’s great accomplishment as an artist was reflected by a great human quality: a contained, calm energy where dignity and confidence overlap. He knew he was good, and that unshowy knowledge let him carry with grace his contradictory selves: leather boy and sensible Englishman; formalist and iconoclast; ruthless artist and conscientious teacher.
I have talked to many Cal undergraduates who knew they had a wonderful poetry teacher but had no idea that Thom wrote poems--let alone that he was one of the masters of our time. He didn’t need them to know, didn’t clutter his teaching with letting them know--in a time when many writers strive to make their students into disciples and customers, Thom was above and aside from such promotional activity. And he didn’t need it.
He scorned pomposity, preferred a catlike grace about what he did; so the author of Moly and The Man With Night Sweats and Boss Cupid rode the bus across the Bay from his beloved San Francisco neighborhood and (having declined tenure, going to meetings, all the baloney of professorial life) did his work magnificently well.
In the great work of poetry, too, Thom chose not to run with a crowd, evading with leonine ease all attempts to put him into a school or a camp or a tendency. The givers of titles and prizes couldn’t be sure if he was an American or a Brit. In his poems, he entered the imagination of Jeffrey Dahmer and of King David, took a cool sympathetic view of street whores and of scholars, in both finding something of himself. Perhaps most memorably, he found ways to write as himself among others: with a sense of himself in relation to other people that combined surgical accuracy with theatrical panache, cloaked in his own suave understatement.
In his great poem “Lament,” beginning “Your dying was a difficult enterprise,” the understatement widens out into the word “enterprise”--a little as though this hard death were a mere business venture. Yet the word has a somewhat Shakespearean bravura to it as well, a flair emphasized by how the poem circles back to this same noun as a concluding note. In “In Time of Plague,” another kind of understatement highlights the drama of the suicidal, attractive, lurid risk of two men offering their heroin needle:
Their mind is the mind of death.
They know it, and do not know it,
And they are like me in that
(I know it and do not know it)
and like the flow of people through this bar.
Clear all the way through, with a ruthless clarity. The plainness of such writing, the meaning of such understatement, contrasted with the pull of the extreme, signifies that the poet is not different from other people, certainly not superior to other people-- except in that gift of clarity, a clarity stopping at nothing.
When I was in college, I fell in love with the cadences of Thom’s poems in his first book Fighting Terms. I got “Tamer and Hawk” by heart. Later, in my twenties, I studied “On the Move” and “The Annihilation of Nothing” for a quality he catches in his title The Sense of Movement. When Thom and I were colleagues at Cal in the 1980s, I learned from the subtle movement in his grave, formal poems on the AIDS epidemic. Prose like his marvelous essay “Thomas Hardy and the English Ballad” has guided me in a way almost no literary criticism does. Like so many poets, I too have been his student, and though I miss him I will continue to be his student.
--Robert Pinsky taught at Berkeley from 1980 to 1989.
The U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, he currently teaches
in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.
|
|
