Sacvan Bercovitch, an influential scholar in the field of American studies and a translator of Sholem Aleichem and other Yiddish writers, died Dec. 9 at 81.
Bercovitch’s early works — “The Puritan Origins of the American Self” (1975) and “The American Jeremiad” (1978) — quickly established his reputation as a transformative and provocative scholar. In a memorial essay, the Harvard Gazette called Bercovitch “his generation’s foremost scholar of Puritan America and of the cultural echoes that puritanism bequeathed to modernity.”
Born in a Jewish ghetto in Montreal on Oct. 4, 1933, Bercovitch was the third child of parents who had immigrated to Canada in 1926 after surviving poverty and pogroms in their native Ukraine. His parents became fervent Marxists who, their son said, maintained utopian socialist ideals throughout their lives. (His mother joined the Red Army in 1917 and was wounded in action in 1919.) Their son’s first name was an amalgam of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-born anarchists who were executed for murder in Massachusetts in 1927.
Bercovitch’s childhood was one of poverty and strife; after his painter father left the family in 1942, he lived in foster homes until graduating from high school. Bercovitch briefly attended college before attending the New Jersey training farm of the Hashomer Hatzair, a left-wing Zionist youth organization with which he had been affiliated in high school. From there, he became a dairy farmer on Kibbutz Nachshon, in Israel, where he met his first wife, Hanna Malmquist. In the late 1950s, the couple moved to Montreal, where Bercovitch worked at a grocery store while attending night school. In 1961, he earned his bachelor’s degree at Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University), where he said he discovered the joys of literature. In 1965, he completed his doctoral degree at Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University) in Southern California.
Over the course of his career, Bercovitch held faculty positions at Columbia University, Brandeis University, Princeton University and UC San Diego. From 1983 until his retirement in 2001, he was the Charles H. Carswell Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University; he held a parallel appointment in Harvard’s department of comparative literature, in part because of his continuing work in Yiddish literature. From the mid-1960s on, in addition to Aleichem, Bercovitch translated works by Solomon Ary, Itzik Manger and Yaacov Zipper. At the time of his death, he was working on a cultural history, “The Ashkenazi Renaissance, 1880-1940.”
Bercovitch served on countless professional boards and councils, including as president of the American Studies Association, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004, Bercovitch completed a 20-year project as general editor of the multivolume “Cambridge History of American Literature.” His books were translated into many languages, including Chinese, Hungarian, German and Italian.
Bercovitch is survived by his wife of 26 years, Susan L. Mizruchi; sons Eytan and Sascha; and sisters Sylvia (Solomon) Ary and Ninel Segal.
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