MICHAEL WALSH: A FAREWELL TO STEVEN KANFER
https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/24/mazel-and-may-i-add-tov-and
Mazel and, May I Add, Tov . . . and Farewell
EXCERPTS
“Steve Kanfer, who died quietly in his sleep Wednesday night at the age of 85, almost nothing was beyond his expertise, his knowledge, or his talent; the man was not so much a polymath as a poly-abled master of just about anything he tried—writer, essayist, TV writer, wit, bon vivant, host, devoted husband of his wife May Kanfer, father of two, grandfather, mimic, musician, craftsman and one of the titans of Manhattan arts criticism during his heyday at Time magazine, where he reviewed films and edited the Books section with grace and style for decades.”
” He was a man of formidable knowledge—his study in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. was crammed floor to ceiling with books on every conceivable subject. He wrote biographies of Groucho (another spot-on impersonation), Brando, Bogie, and (Lucille) Ball, along with studies of the Jewish Rialto (Stardust Lost) and a history of the Jewish Catskills (A Summer World). And yet, he was always interested in what you were doing, what you were writing, how your family was. He took joy not in his own accomplishments, but in those of his friends. It was entirely characteristic of him that, in the end, he slipped away from us in the middle of the night, without waiting for, or wanting, applause—which we the bereaved must now supply posthumously.
“But he could also be fierce, especially regarding Jewish issues. A close friend of Elie Wiesel, Steve had a clear-cut opinion about the moral rightness of Israel and no patience with attacks on it. Remarkably, for a New York Jewish intellectual, he was a political and cultural conservative, which is to say he believed in the superiority of Judeo-Christian Western civilization and sought to preserve, protect, and defend it from all its enemies, including radical Muslims, cultural Marxists, and the New York Times.”
“He was, as far as I could tell over the course of nearly 40 years, afraid of absolutely nothing and nobody and would take on all comers in the pages not only of Time, but also City Journal, the New Leader, and elsewhere. Thanks to his formidable erudition, he was equally at home debating politics, history, music, as well as literature, especially American literature—and always from the standpoint of a moral humanist, equal parts the Jewish Jesuit Naphta (in his burning intellectualism) and the expansive Settembrini (in his love for people and his appreciation of the human comedy) in Mann’s The Magic Mountain. And we were all Hans Castorp, the “pure fools” learning at his feet.”
“But above else, Steve Kanfer was an American—not just a patriot in the political sense, but an American in the old-fashioned sense. From his Old Country ancestors, he inherited the Jewish love of learning and respect for tradition; from his New York upbringing he had the American skepticism of pigeonholes and categorization, and contempt for arbitrary limits; for Steve, there were no limits to understanding, only a failure of the will and the imagination.”
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