Mark Shechner (1940–2015), Professor Emeritus of English at the University at Buffalo, was one of the most distinguished and influential critics of Jewish-American literature of his time, a sharp observer of cultural politics: as he wrote, “It is sometimes hard to tell the Jewish literary scene from gang warfare” (After the Revolution 3). He kept up with the changing scene as a frequent participant in the annual symposium on Jewish-American and Holocaust literature and at recent Philip Roth conferences in Venice and in Newark. Since 2007, he was a judge of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, presented annually to a young writer whose fiction is considered to have significance to the American Jew.
All his writing was perceptive and informed by reading both deep and wide. But what made his criticism especially engaging was his effusive wit and lively style. He was constitutionally incapable of writing a dull or...
