REMEMBERING PROFESSOR BARTON FRIEDMAN, 1935-2009
Gordon Berg '70, MA '75
When Cleveland State University hired Bart Friedman to chair its English Department, no doubt the selection committee knew it had chosen an award-winning classroom teacher and a scholar of exceptional intellectual breadth and rigor. His vita and a personal interview would quickly reveal as much.
What his new faculty colleagues may not have realized was how Bart, who died in May 2009, much too soon, at age 74, seamlessly integrated these pedagogical skills with a profound moral passion and an abiding appreciation for the social and intellectual ferment that filled academic classrooms and seethed through city streets during the 1960s. That’s when I met Bart, first as a student and later as a friend and confident, on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But all during those tumultuous days of passion and rage, Bart held true to his conviction that there were always important learnings to be acquired outside the classroom as well as inside it.
Bart came to UW after getting his Ph.D from Cornell University and a stint teaching at Bowdoin College. I first heard him lecture on William Butler Yeats and the other lions of the 19th-century Irish Literary Revival in an English literature survey course. There wasn’t a hint of the Old Sod in his voice and I wondered how a Jew from Brooklyn and Rockville Center, NY had come to embrace a group of mostly patrician Anglo-Protestant gentlemen who, collectively, provided the imagination for an armed insurrection in 1916, the culmination of a political revolution that had been convulsing Ireland for centuries.
The connection would become clearer as I got to know Bart better. I’d find him, early morning after early morning, having coffee and a pastry while reading the orange State Journal sports section in the Rathskeller of the Memorial Union, overlooking bucolic Lake Mendota. In those days, the Rat was a favorite hang out for student radicals and radical wannabes. After dark, its denizens could as easily find themselves sharing a table with local anti-war activists as with Joan Baez, Eldridge Cleaver, or Abbey Hoffman.
Bart, a consummate creature of habit and an easily spotted "Rat" rat, would generously share his free morning time before class and discuss literature, history, politics, or baseball with anyone who stopped by. More and more often, that anybody was me. By the fall of 1968, we often found ourselves walking together up Bascom Hill to Bart’s classroom, the unmistakablely pungent odor of tear gas lingering in the turning elms. But all during those tumultuous days of passion and rage, Bart held true to his conviction that there were always important learnings to be acquired outside the classroom as well as inside it. He left no doubt that the contemporary world could, and should, come through the classroom door and he always encouraged his students to boldly venture forth and meet it.
Bart’s years at Cleveland State brought their own unique challenges and rewards. CSU Press published a volume of his poems based on the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, the honorable but star-crossed bums whom he idolized as a youngster. He expanded his literary interests by investigating how the language of literature and the language of science employed many of the same conceits. In retirement, he indulged his passion for studying the Civil War, probably generated by a cherished family photo showing his great grandfather, Abraham Friedman, at the dedication of the memorial to the 9th New York Volunteer Cavalry on the battlefield at Gettysburg.
How best to say goodbye to a man whose rich life has touched me and so many others in so many ways? My choice is to hope that Bart Friedman’s spirit flies with the Sidhe, Ireland’s fairy host, as they soar between dark and daylight for all eternity between the tomb of Maeve, queen of Ireland’s fairies, on Knocknarae Mountain, and Ben Bulben, under whose rocky face in County Sligo’s Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is buried.
A Tribute to Bart Friedman: Cleveland Public Theatre's Open Mind Firmament: An Evening of WB Yeats
Cleveland Public Theater (CPT) has created an original performance work celebrating the work of William Butler Yeats as a memorial to Professor Friedman, who joined the Cleveland State University faculty in 1978. The show will draw from Yeats' poetry, two one-act plays, folklore, biographical information, and the interpretive writings of Professor Friedman. The show will also incorporate music and visual imagery. An Evening of WB Yeats will premiere Saturday, May 15, 2010.