I teach at a wonderful liberal arts women’s college in New York City that is dedicated to teaching anti-racism and the ongoing project of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). I specialize in an area that will be under pressure, in which I will likely have a role as we undertake the English major review and reform: Seventeenth-century English literature, the period of John Milton.

People more often think of Milton as the author of “Paradise Lost,” the epic of “the Fall of man,” than as the defender of liberty of conscience, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. Milton’s political writings influenced the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and The Declaration of Independence, now criticized (as Milton has been) for the implicit exclusion in its idea that “all men are created equal,” because who counted as all men? Obviously, not women or enslaved black people. The Declaration of Independence - America’s founding document, which was radical at the time - voiced an ideal that has never been realized.

And, in a curriculum review, the questions will come up (they already have in some institutions) whether and why we should continue to teach early modern writers, but also Enlightenment writers and thinkers, the creators of “liberalism.” Personally, I have always taught these writers and their texts critically. But is that enough? What do we do about teaching literature, especially earlier formative texts that have been made to bear responsibility for some of our current problems?

So much has changed since I came to Barnard College almost seventeen years ago. We now have a far more diverse student population, thanks to the college’s efforts, which include need-blind admissions. These are some of my best students, many truly exceptional, intellectually as well as personally. In our entering class for 2021, more than half identify as people of color.

I think back to many years ago when I was an undergraduate who never saw anyone among the faculty like me. No one was Jewish, there were practically no women and certainly no Jewish women. There just wasn’t anyone I could imagine myself being. That’s why I understand students today who want a diverse faculty and a curriculum that includes their voices, even as I think education should be expansive, not simply reinforcing an already-formed identity.

Now as a senior professor, teaching and writing about seventeenth-century English literature and culture, I’m wondering what will happen to my courses when we do reform our curriculum. But is it “my literature” or “my culture” to reform?

That is complicated. With my weird name, difficult to place or pronounce, I was not someone who obviously belonged as an English major, studying the so-called White European canonical tradition. As a Jew and a woman, a first-generation student with an immigrant father, English literature was an alien field; I was an outsider. Yet some of English and American literature spoke to me, deeply and personally, as well as intellectually. A wonderful Professor at Indiana University, the late Owen Thomas (an Americanist, who taught Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne, but also linguistics and Chomsky’s transformational grammar), urged me to go to graduate school, helped me get in to UCLA, the school from which he had earned his Ph.D. But in the middle of my second year, the senior Americanist (a powerful white man with the pedigree of an old Anglo-Saxon name) kept me from specializing in nineteenth-century American literature (a field I had planned on), by failing me on the qualifying exam, though years later I found out he thought I’d plagiarized my essay believing it was too good to be written by me. That professor made it clear there was no place for me. It never occurred to me at the time that he would think this young woman he didn’t know, with a foreign name, could not possibly be an expert in his field. I now know the history of how Jews (and women) were excluded from Ph.D. programs at elite universities. I was devastated at the time, thought I would surely never go on, but the faculty—and then the field—embraced me. That was the beginning of my career in the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England.

It wasn’t “my” literature or culture, except in so far as it had become part of the culture of America. It was Christian literature—actually, Protestant Anglo-Saxon literature. Yet, over the years I made it “mine.” As I gained professional successes and tenure, as well as confidence in my voice, I found a freedom to think and write about it differently, to make Milton mine in a way that allowed me to understand and critique the limitations of his vision, his prejudices (the greatest Hebraic writer,v but not tolerant of Jews, or Catholics), even while celebrating his virtues and expanding his notions of liberty and tolerance.

My long experience and struggles for acceptance make me sympathize deeply, indeed identify, with those students and faculty seeking changes and release from curricula that might seem to have contributed, even indirectly, to the social injustices that we are trying to reform. I chafed under feeling that, as a Jewish woman, it could never be fully my culture. Jewish literature and culture was not what I wanted to study. It was not all of me. I wanted a larger world. I still cling to a belief that each of us can feel both “universal” and “particular” identities. If that is not possible, we are then as human beings… lost.

There is much to be said for a long perspective, for wide and broad reading, for reading things that are not narrowly “ours,” for inclusions and additions, rather than exclusions. I don’t think I could say it better than Cornel West and Jeremy Tate did in their brilliant, impassioned opinion piece in The Washington Post (April 19, 2021) on the announcement that Howard University would be abolishing its Classics department: “The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices.”

Well, finally it’s done, and I feel I’m turning a corner. The sun rises higher in the sky and the days get longer and brighter.

There is a Jewish tradition called “the unveiling.” When a person dies, we say, “may their memory be a blessing,” or “may their soul be bound up in the bond of life” (leaving it for us to imagine how that might be).  A monument must be placed on the grave as a memorial, something that says, “this person lived and should be remembered.” People who visit the grave put a small stone on the top of the monument, as if to say, “I was here; you are remembered.” The monument should be placed by the end of the first year, often earlier. But nothing has been normal this past year, and certainly for me.

My husband, Tony, died on December 12, 2019, and was buried soon after. For well over a year I have worried about his bare grave, thinking of that dirt mound, marked only with a few clumps of grass and the rubble left after burial. I worried about him lying there, even though I knew he wasn’t really “there.” I have felt agitated, as if neither of us could be at peace until that stone monument was placed on the grave.

But there had been so many obstacles. First Social Security Administration declared me dead as well as him, and I had to fight that for four months. Then I had to select a monument and decide what words to inscribe.  I wanted to add my own drawing of a fountain pen and books, something personal, of mine, and that spoke to the essential Tony, as did the quotation from Mark Twain that I put on a footstone, “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.” Covid, of course, slowed everything down, all those people who had suddenly died; funeral companies were overwhelmed. But then I discovered another problem: I didn’t know which plot was his grave (it being a double grave—and I didn’t want to think of that). Finally “Production” was to begin in October. But not so fast! Covid struck the factory workers who made the monuments. Fortunately, they all recovered, Only at the end of February was the monument completed and set on the grave, ready for the “unveiling,” which was further delayed by storms and snow we hadn’t had earlier.

Finally, on March 21st, I had the unveiling. Two of my brothers would be with me for the short ceremony.

A beautiful day, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. The branches on the trees were already starting to swell, waiting to put forth the first tender green leaves of spring. I got my haircut, which had been growing for several years. Hair the one thing (along with nails?) that continues to grow after death. The unveiling of the monument is supposed to mark the end of the period of active mourning, so it seemed fitting to take off the weight of so many inches of hair, a weight like the heaviness of mourning, hoping that some of my inner-heaviness would lift too.

I’d been thinking about “unveiling.” Such a strange word, a strange concept. The only veil I could think of was the type that covers the bride’s face in a marriage ceremony. I remembered that when we got married in Rowayton, I’d forgotten I needed a veil. At the last minute Mama and I had to drive to buy one the day before the ceremony. Nothing special or fancy; just something to make do. Ceremonies don’t always go well for me.

Being the first to arrive at the little cemetery, I looked for a monument with a paper veil on it. It was hard to find Tony’s, and when I did, there was no veil! Had they forgotten? Perhaps the wind from the recent storms had blown it away. A problem with the veil, much as there was at our wedding.

All of which made me wonder: is the monument like the bride, needing to be covered and then unveiled before the mourners will see a name and words on stone. One ceremony marking the beginning of the bride’s new life, the other marking the ending of a life, no matter whether you are a man or a woman. Finally the same in death.

Forty-seven and a half years before, we’d been married, only ten miles up the road from this cemetery outside Greenwich, Connecticut.  My father (a rabbi, though a heterodox one) insisted that Tony wasn’t Jewish enough, so he told me that he would have to perform the ceremony if I wanted a Jewish wedding. (That’s a story for another time.) Now, Tony had now been buried according to the full proper Jewish ritual, in a lovely Jewish cemetery, and I would complete the Jewish traditions. The two brothers with me were also there for my marriage and we had many amusing memories to share. One had arrived for the wedding on crutches having been injured the night before in a bar; the other had been pressed into service by my father as his helper. Not your normal wedding. My mother (not father) escorted me to the ceremony. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, being married by a father prone to improvise. The neighbor’s black cat slowly wandered across the yard. Nothing can ever be ordinary in my family. And so it would be today, with this veil-less unveiling ceremony, with me reading the Hebrew prayers.

The sun was shining down on us, the young pear tree near the grave was budding, ready to bloom, and on it someone had hung a bird feeder (as yet unfilled with seeds). All these signs of life continuing, even here in this cemetery.  I thought about what a beautiful, peaceful place it is, this lovely old cemetery, surrounded on three sides by woods. But then I heard gunshots.

It turned out that just on the other side of the adjacent woods is a shooting range. Throughout the entire time we were there, guns were continually firing with people practicing how to kill as we were performing the last rites. One of my brothers lightened the moment: “They are giving Tony a twenty-one gun salute.”  But I thought of my beloved seventeenth-century writers John Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, and their meditations on how life and death are closely intertwined. I was disgusted with people who think it’s a fine thing on a sunny spring day to take out their guns. Still, I made the best of it, honoring Tony’s dark humor, “I guess they won’t be disturbing anyone lying here.”