Brandeis Magazine

I was delighted to read the charming piece by Caroline Leavitt ’74 in the “Character Development” feature (Winter 2023/2024). How unlike Professor Alan Lelchuk and me, separately, to have persuaded a student — however subtly — NOT to go to Paris! (It’s the only time I’ve done that.) Caroline’s final decision certainly paid off.

I did want to add a note about the fate of my notorious cape she mentions in the essay. I bought the cape from a secondhand shop on Cape Cod in the late 1960s, for $20. It was a “Bobby” cape that somehow made its way from the London police force to the Cape. I always referred to it as my “Cape cape.” Not at all fashionable, it was wonderfully warm in winter (100% wool, and quite heavy and thick). I wore it for decades, but it eventually succumbed to an evil infestation of British-hating moths in one of my later apartments. I miss it.

I’m now 89 years of age, and it’s really lovely to be remembered by Caroline in so generous and charming a recollection. Thank you! 

Alan Levitan
Associate professor of English, emeritus
Boston

I very much enjoyed reading Caroline Leavitt’s essay about my adviser Alan Levitan. In the early 1960s, he was not yet a legend, but he used the same gentle indirection Caroline describes. I was wondering whether to pick Henry James for my thesis study. “He baffles me,” I told Professor Levitan. “Well, why not go deeper?” he responded.

After Professor Levitan lit a fire under me, I needed a faculty member to direct my study. I asked Professor Ira Konigsberg, who was happy to reread almost all of Henry James’ novels with me over the semester. His first question about the first book — “Did you like it?” — just about knocked me over. I had permission not to like important works of literature?

Professor Levitan was an amazing teacher as well. When my non-English-major boyfriend (now my husband of almost 60 years) came to visit from Atlanta, I dragged him to my Chaucer class to hear Professor Levitan read aloud in Middle English.

These days, I give garden tours at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C. In the Star Garden is a quote from Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’ “De Consolatione Philosophiae”: “O thou maker of the whele that bereth the sterres and tornest the hevene with a ravisshing sweigh.” I love showing off my Middle English, and I think about Professor Levitan every single time I do.

Charlotte Glazer Baer ’64
Washington, D.C.

The first paragraph of “Brandeis Reacts to the Israel-Hamas War” (The Brandeis Brief, Winter 2023/2024) describes Hamas as a “Palestinian political and militant group,” not a terrorist group. The article has no byline, but obviously the magazine editors approved of this description. President Ron Liebowitz is quoted a few paragraphs later as condemning terrorism, and the ruthless murderers of Deborah and Shlomi Matias (z”l) are referred to as terrorists, but that was already too little and too late for me.

Then the last two paragraphs classically seek to blame the victims. As if “how Israeli intelligence had missed the signs of an approaching Hamas attack” is the first and most important question to ask or that anyone would possibly know the answer to that question already.

I expected better from a Brandeis publication. 

Dr. Shira Sanders ’85
Israel