Solitary confinement: Tony Judt thought a great deal about dignity. His final book, written while the author was dying of ALS, is the epitome of it.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: The Memory Chalet - Book review

The Memory Chalet

by Tony Judt

Penguin Press HC, 240 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Tony Judt disliked the grand title "public intellectual," even though he embodied it to the last day of his life. Judt (pronounced "Jutt") was a professor of European history at New York University who died of Lou Gehrig's disease at age sixty-two in August 2010. Before his death he rose to great prominence on two fronts. First, he published in 2005 the magnificent, comprehensive Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a book encyclopedic in its learning yet engagingly written and argued. The pinnacle of his career, it quickly became one of the most celebrated works of history in recent years. Second, Judt contributed dozens of bracing, relentlessly clear, and frequently provocative essays to the New York Review of Books, his intellectual home. His audience was more receptive to some of his arguments than others. Judt's harsh critiques of unrepentant communist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawn and Louis Althusser, and his championing of European-style social democracy, put Marxism firmly in its place while articulating a strong, practicable vision for the left. Yet his equally withering assessment of the Middle East crisis--"two peoples, each sustained by its exclusive victim narrative, competing indefinitely across the dead bodies of their children for the same tiny piece of land"--earned him an excommunication from the New Republic and the enmity of many of his fellow Jews. Judt thrived on debate and, when attacked, swung as hard as anybody. Yet no matter how strong his opinions, he never seemed shrill or defensive, and always retained a scholar's eye for evidence, precision, and clarity.

Writing toward the end of his abbreviated life, Judt appraised his own contradictions:

As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a dew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for "Jewishness" in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of "rootless cosmopolitan." But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages. Those heritages shine through in the many books and essays of Judt's final years. There are shadows of postwar England, France in the 1960s, and life in New York City, as well as Europe's trains, bad English and Jewish cooking, and an austere school life. Unsurprisingly, Judt's heritage was intellectual as well as geographic: he was strongly influenced by liberal, anti-totalitarian writers like Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, and George Orwell. By the standards of the academy, Judt called himself "a reactionary dinosaur" who "[has] little tolerance for 'self-expression' as a substitute for clarity; regards effort as a poor substitute for achievement; [and] treats my discipline as dependent in the first instance upon facts, not 'theory.'" His book Past...