Leonard Michaels’ “Time Out of Mind,” published in 1995, is culled from 30 years of the author’s diaries. In it, he writes of his mother taking him to S. Klein, the famed New York discounter, and buying him a pair of puke green corduroys that swish loudly as he walks. Shortly after, he hits a homerun during his neighborhood stickball game.
“Above the rage of traffic and my team screaming for me to run, I heard my shoes slap the asphalt and my green pants whistling to first, whistling to second, whistling to third, whistling home. That’s my life — good hit, horrible pants.”
Michaels, an author and professor at U.C. Berkeley for more than 30 years, died Sunday in Berkeley of complications from lymphoma. He was 70.
Though he was not as well-known as other Jewish writers of his generation like Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud, he did often write on Jewish themes.
“His writing was quirkier and weirder,” than his Jewish contemporaries said Wendy Lesser, editor of the Berkeley-based literary journal The Threepenny Review and a friend of Michaels’ since she attended graduate school at Berkeley in the ’70s. “It’s more fragmented but also sharper and less focused on conveying a whole social world than doing something with the language.”
The son of Polish immigrants, Michaels was born on Jan. 2, 1933, and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
According to The New York Times, Michaels spoke only Yiddish until he was 6, when his mother bought him a set of Charles Dickens. An unpublished essay about his Yiddish-speaking childhood will appear in the next edition of The Threepenny Review, as well as in a book Lesser is editing, called “The Genius of Language.”
He dropped out of two graduate programs in literature, both at the University of Michigan and U.C. Berkeley, but eventually earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1967.
He taught for a few years at U.C. Davis, before returning to U.C. Berkeley as an English professor in 1969.
He was probably best known for his 1981 novel “The Men’s Club,” which was based on his own experience in a Berkeley men’s consciousness-raising group in the ’70s. The book was nominated as best novel of the year by the National Book Critics Circle and was later made into a movie.
But even though that was his best-known work, what he really excelled at was the short story, said Lesser.
“He was known for the terseness and specificity and directness of his writing and the condensation of it,” she added.
“His prose was astonishingly economical and compact,” agreed Alex Zwerdling, a colleague of Michaels in the U.C. Berkeley English department. “It was full of a kind of nervous energy…he paid real attention to the word, sentence and the paragraph, as if words were rationed.”
His stories were widely published in literary magazines, and he won numerous awards, including two Quill Awards, the O. Henry Prize and a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Prize. He also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1969, his first collection of short stories, “Going Places,” was published to high praise and nominated for the National Book Award. His 1992 fictional memoir, “Sylvia,” was about his first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide.
His other works included the short story and essay collections, “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could,” “A Girl With a Monkey” and “To Feel These Things.” He co-edited three collections of essays, including “State of the Language” and “West of West,” an anthology of writing about California.
Lesser described him as extremely funny with a dark sense of humor. “He loved [Franz] Kafka and could read it aloud to make you think it was the funniest thing you’ve ever heard,” she said.
While he wasn’t religious, Michaels was strongly identified as a Jew. Though he lived mostly in Italy with his fourth wife, Katharine Ogden, for the past seven years, “he had this cockamamie notion that the Italians were really Jews,” said Lesser.
Moreover, “you only had to hear him say one sentence to know he was Jewish. He was of the last generation of those Yiddish-speakers with a heavy New York accent with wonderful drawn-out syllables…in a way no one speaks anymore.”
In addition to his wife, Michaels is survived by daughter Louisa Michaels of Berkeley, sons Ethan Michaels of Alameda and Jesse Michaels of Berkeley, sister Carol Foresta of the Bronx and brother David Michaels of Storrs, Conn.
Donations can be sent to The Threepenny Review, P.O. Box 9131, Berkeley, CA, 94709.