Jules Chametzky

Jules Chametzky (born in Brooklyn, 1928) is an American literary critic, writer, editor, and unionist. His essays in the 1960s and 1970s on the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to American literary culture anticipated the later schools of New Historicism and Cultural Studies in American letters. Chametzky was a founder and long-time editor of the Massachusetts Review, an editor of Thought and Action, the journal of the National Education Association, as well as the third President of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the faculty/library union at the University of Massachusetts. He was also a founding member of the Coordinating Committee of Literary Magazines (CCLM, now Council of Literary Magazines and Presses) and its first secretary. Chametzky was married for over fifty years to the writer, editor, and educator Anne Halley (1928–2004).

Chametzky was born in Brooklyn, in 1928. His parents were immigrants who came to New York State from Eastern Europe, his father Beny from the Russian province of Volhnyia in 1913, and his mother Anna from Lublin, Poland. Both were Yiddish-speaking and working-class; his father worked in, and later owned, a butcher shop, and his mother worked in a sweater factory. His older brother Leslie enlisted in the infantry in 1940, participated in the North Africa invasion, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. Later freed by British and North American troops, he went on to take part in the Sicily campaign. Chametzky studied first at Brooklyn Tech, an engineering school, and then Brooklyn College, where he began writing plays, graduating in 1950. In 1948, he joined the American Labor Party, and became a member of the Labor Youth League and the NAACP two years later. He did his graduate work in English at the University of Minnesota, where he studied with Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith and read Saul Bellow's Yiddish-inflected English for the first time. In 1953, Smith asked him to become an editor for the journal Faulkner Studies. He received his Ph.D. in 1958, and, with the support of Leo Marx, began teaching the following year in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was tenured in 1961, at the age of thirty-three. He was a Fulbright professor in Copenhagen, Tübingen, and Zagreb, as well as head of the University of Massachusetts program in Freiburg. He has also taught as Visiting Professor in Venice and at the Kennedy Institute (Freie Universität) and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

...
Wikipedia