Piques and Kvetches

On the Fatuity of Professional Whinging

Every now and then something piques my professional soul.  It either happens to me when I read an essay that talks about things I wrote about a long time ago as though the author were the first person in the world to broach the topic or to find some new detail worth discussing.  After searching the footnotes and bibliographical references and not finding my name at all, I trace the little hollow feeling in my stomach when it turns to a lump of disgust; then it passes away, not completely—it has happened too often to let it fester—but sufficient to make me alert for the next instance. 

This same feeling comes back when the months and then the years go by after a book of mine has been published and there are no reviews, or there are one or two and they seem to miss the point altogether: such as someone who accuses me of being a post-modernist and therefore obviously of having no sense of humour, when the text they are supposedly dealing with is long witty exposition of a problem unsolvable by post-modernist jargon and conceptual formulæ, with my title proclaiming the joke for all to see, and then a series of long footnotes explaining, as one ought not to have to do, how the Witz works.  Or when someone rants on about some trivial typographical error, misspelled word or infelicitous phrase in translation, but never puts the argument in context or sees the interwoven process of midrashic explication.

Too often I find authors and their publishers claiming to be dealing with subjects for the first time when in fact my own work has long preceded theirs. sometimes by decades.  They may have different views, occasionally access to information unavailable to me, and perhaps better arguments: however, they are not the first or the only ones, and as proper scholars it is their job to be aware of what has gone before and then to indicate why they are going back over the old turf.

I know exactly why these scholars skip over my work—books and articles or edited collections.  (1) I am not there (wherever "there" may be, in Europe, North America or in Israel) so have no prestige or influence to be dealt with.  (2) My work has often been published in "obscure" journals or by "little" publishers, and yet these are relative terms and it only means that any "literature search" has been sloppy and incomplete.  (3) I have not toed the party line, whether of some supposed political correctness or of traditional protocols; and yet, in a significant number of instances, what the "established" academic writes is really no more than I have, some sometimes misses key points I made which are still valid after 20 or 30 years. 

Of course, to complain is to be a crank, to prove my lack of professional seriousness, and to confirm the futility of any endeavour to correct the fault.  Sometimes I have written lengthy  reviews of the books that neglect my work, but these comments have been neglected—one might as well flush the argument down the drain.  Sometimes I have tried to contact the author and ask what is going on, but there is neither no response or some temporizing or fatuous comment that we could discuss this somewhere or other beyond my ability to travel—my flying days are over. 

So I am speaking to you, my dear reader or perhaps readers, however many of you there are that for some reason or other look into my blog.