from Adam Sachs

I'd like to mention the voice. Ala -- sorry -- Professor Lebowitz (I could never get used to the first-name thing) would read us choice bits of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and after that it was impossible to hear those writers in any other voice. Much later I came across a recording of the real Hemingway talking and it was like listening to an Alvin and the Chipmunks record. Lebowitz stood at the front of the room and stretched the words thin: "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?" My roommate Darin was in the class and we repeated this so relentlessly that another friend of ours took to mimicking it like an oppressed parrot. Sixteen years later the friend, never prompted, does a creditable Lebowitz-Hemingway.

I don't -- not can't, just don't -- remember much about my Medford years but I do hear that voice clearly. I heard first when I'd cornered Lebowitz trying to talk my way off the waiting list for Hem-Faulk-Fitz. Sorry -- class full.

"But I spent my summer reading Absalom, Absalom!" I'd shouted. Shouted not because there's an exclamation in the title but because I was a crazed young person and because I really, truly wanted to take that class. Alan turned back and sized me up. He had what later I'd recognize as a grin but took then to be a sneer.

"Is that how you get your kicks?" the voice asked. I thought he might punch me. "OK, come by on Thursday and we'll see what we can do."

In the group therapy of the fiction writing workshops the voice was forgiving, precise, encouraging, easily amused. It helped talk us down from our self-invented ledges. I heard the voice again on my last official day as a student. I'd lined up, shaken hands with a stranger, accepted what I think was my diploma in a pleather pouch and was descending into the fields of nachas when I heard my name called again. It was Lebowitz, standing up in his own gown, crossing over to greet me at the bottom of the stairs and shake my hand -- probably the single nicest gesture of my academic career. So, Profess -- OK, Alan: Thanks for that and for the voice that guided so many of us through so many books and years. I think I thought at the time that the teaching of literature was about words and sentences; I understand now it is about people.

Adam Sachs ('92)