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Show Anting Alone Page 205 figure in Dr. Abraham. The old man wouldn't let anybody fire Sam or be mean to him or give him a 7:45 a.m. class. There'd been many occasions in the past when the tides of departmental politicking had turned against Sam, and Dr. Abraham had walked right in on administrative pow-wows and called everybody fools, in thundering tones. "Samuel Edwine has the liveliest, best critical mind in this whole God-damned university," the old man apparently shouted, not even specifying student mind. Aw shucks. Many's the time he had quelled Professors A, B and C's lust for Sam's blood by threatening to quit publishing their little articles on things like "McTeague, Wellspring of all Contemporary Literature." As editor of the respected Kansas Review of the Collective Humanities, Dr. Abraham was in a position to let them simply perish; for nobody else was kind enough to criticize, rewrite, retype, correct the grammar and punctuation and spelling and publish their crap on something more than a sporadic, random basis. This hoary phenomenon not only founded, funded and edited, but typeset and hand-distributed his Kansas Review of the Collective Humanities all by himself, kindly refusing the volunteered copyreading services of every male and female grad student in the whole place; for he loved the work as he would have loved the children that his barren wife, Zeitl, had failed to provide. He drove back-seatsful of the fine publication, all by himself, clear out to the newsstands in his hometown. The tiny, vulnerable, touching little Jewish community was full of his brothers and nephews and cousins, who loved to read - Jewish farmers being more literate by deep tradition than their Christian counterparts, who only look at the "pitchers" in Field |
