Joshua Kunitz
Joshua Kunitz (December 18, 1896-March 2, 1980) was an American professor and journalist.
Biography
Kunitz was born in Russia, where he was educated at the Slonimskoye Realnoye Uchilishche.{{Cite journal |date=March 1949 |title=The Russian School |url=https://archive.org/details/mls_f6.03slscatalog.1949/page/n51/ |journal=Middlebury College Bulletin |volume=XLIV |issue=2 |pages=52}} After immigrating to the United States, Kunitz received his doctorate from Columbia University, entitled Russian Literature and the Jew.{{Cite book |last=Wald |first=Alan M. |title=Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |isbn=9781469608679 |pages=127}} By the 1930s, Kunitz was active in the Communist Party. He was briefly expelled from the Communist Party because of his opposition to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, but was reinstated in 1932.{{Cite book |last=Smith |first=Gerald Stanton |title=D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890-1939 |date=2000 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=9780198160069 |pages=289}}He visited Moscow in the spring of 1930 and again five years later, describing his second trip as "one continuous gasp of wonderment"{{Cite journal |last=Aaron |first=Daniel |date=1961 |title=A Decade of Convictions: The Appeal of Communism in the 1930's |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/25086741 |journal=The Massachusetts Review |volume=2 |issue=4 |pages=736–747 |jstor=25086741 |issn=0025-4878}} The first trip was as a participant in the 1930 Kharkov Conference of Revolutionary Writers, organized by the International Union of Revolutionary Writers.{{Cite book |last=Coiner |first=Constance |title=Better Red : The writing and resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur |date=1998 |publisher=University of Illinois Press |isbn=0252066952 |pages=22}} He was part of a group of international writers touring Central Asia, with Kunitz and Louis Lozowick the only Americans invited.{{Cite book |title=The Avant-garde frontier : Russia meets the West, 1910-1930 |date=1992 |publisher=University Press of Florida |editor-last=Roman |editor-first=Gail Harrison |pages=270 |editor-last2=Marquardt |editor-first2=Virginia Hagelstein}}
Kunitz taught courses in Marxism and literature at a school organized by the John Reed Clubs.{{Cite book |last=Homberger |first=Eric |title=American writers and radical politics, 1900-39 : Equivocal commitments |date=1986 |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=0333391764 |pages=130}} Kunitz was critical of the presence of party functionaries in the Clubs, who he thought did not contribute to the intellectual activities.{{Cite book |last=Kutulas |first=Judy |title=The Long War: The Intellectual People's Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930-1940 |date=1995 |publisher=Duke University Press |pages=56}} Due to his academic background, Kunitz was regarded as the American Communist Party's expert on Russian literature.{{Cite book |last=David-Fox |first=Michael |title=Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 |date=2012 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=9780199794577 |pages=307}} He served on the editorial board of New Masses.{{Cite book |last=Wald |first=Alan M. |title=Exiles from a future time : The forging of the mid-twentieth-century literary left |date=2002 |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |isbn=9780807853498 |location=Chapel Hill |pages=121}} He covered the Moscow Trials in a 1936 series of four articles for the magazine.{{Cite book |last=Kraditor |first=Aileen S. |title="Jimmy Higgins" : the mental world of the American rank-and-file communist, 1930-1958 |date=1988 |publisher=Greenwood Press |pages=88}} In his reporting, Kunitz expressed some skepticism about the Trials, and the subsequent controversy lead to the expulsion of New Masses editor Joseph Freeman from the Party.{{Cite book |last=Wald |first=Alan |title=James T. Farrell : The revolutionary socialist years |date=1978 |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=0814791794 |pages=170}} Kunitz published Dawn Over Samarkand in 1935, a book based on his travels to Russia and describing the emergence of Communism in Central Asia and the Far East after the Russian Revolution.{{Cite news |last=Kramer |first=Samuel J. |date=June 7, 1935 |title=Dr. Kuntiz Records the Birth of Communism in the Far East |url=https://newspapers.com/image/52611861/ |work=Brooklyn Daily Eagle |pages=28}} He was also a member of Partisan Review
Kunitz was appointed as a Russian teacher at Cornell University's Intensive Russian Language and Culture Program, a move that attracted criticism because of his Communist sympathies.{{Cite book |last=Altschuler |first=Glenn C. |title=Cornell: A History, 1940–2015 |date=2014 |publisher=Cornell University Press |isbn=9780801471889}} He replaced Vladimir Kazakevich in the role, after Kazakevich was deported{{why?|date=March 2025}} to the Soviet Union.{{Cite book |last=Keefer |first=Louis E. |title=Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II |date=1988 |publisher=McFarland & Company |isbn=9780899503462 |pages=113}} In 1948, after breaking with the Communist Party, he was appointed to the Middlebury Russian School as the assistant to the director.{{Cite book |last=Freeman |first=Stephen Albert |title=The Middlebury College foreign language schools, 1915-1970: The story of a unique idea |date=1975 |publisher=Middlebury College Press |pages=141}}In 1953, Grace Lumpkin testified that Kunitz had threatened to "break [her] as a writer" if she wrote anything the contradicted the Communist Party's line.{{Cite news |date=April 3, 1953 |title=Reveals State Department Library Has Pro-Red Book |url=https://newspapers.com/image/914616594 |work=The Roanoke Times |pages=20}} Kunitz died in Rochester, New York on March 2, 1980.{{Cite news |date=1980-03-07 |title=Dr. Joshua Kunitz Is Dead at 84; Authority on Russian Literature |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1980/03/07/archives/dr-joshua-kunitz-is-dead-at-84-authority-on-russian-literature.html |access-date=2025-02-05 |work=The New York Times |language=en-US |issn=0362-4331}}
Personal life
Kunitz's sister Sarah was also involved in the Communist Party during the 1930s and inspired Howard Fast to join the Party.{{Cite book |title=Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 |date=2019 |publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing |isbn=9781350102590 |editor-last=Freedman |editor-first=Kirrily |pages=206 |editor-last2=Munro |editor-first2=John}} (She later married journalist Alexander Kendrick).{{Cite book |title=The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives |date=2001 |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |isbn=0684804921 |editor-last=Jackson |editor-first=Kenneth T. |volume=3 |pages=300}} Granville Hicks described Kunitz as "quiet and scholarly, gentle and dependable".{{Cite book |last=Hicks |first=Granville |title=Part of the Truth |publisher=Harcourt, Brace & World |location=New York |publication-date=1965 |pages=120}} Kunitz was also the uncle of journalist Edith Efron.{{Cite book |last=Chamberlain |first=John |title=A life with the printed word |date=1982 |publisher=Regnery Gateway |pages=96}}
Bibliography
- Russian Literature and the Jew (1929)
- Voices of October: Art and Literature in Soviet Russia. (1930) Co-editor, with Joseph Freeman and Louis Lozowick.
- Dawn Over Samarkand: The Rebirth of Central Asia (1935)
- Russia, the Giant that Came Last (1947)
- Russian Literature Since the Revolution (1948)