PROOFTEXTS 37, 2019, 463–468. Copyright © Prooftexts Ltd. • doi: 10.2979/prooftexts.37.3.10. ❙ 463 An Invitation to Polemical Enthusiasm and Near-Native Close Reading In Memory of Alan Mintz Saul Noam Zaritt Harvard University I always shared my work in progress with Alan. I’ve written very little since I began my academic career that he didn’t weigh in on. And I knew each time that, beyond his reliably incisive questions and comments, I could expect a singular plea: I shouldn’t forget Hebrew. By the time I arrived at the Jewish Teological Seminary as a graduate student, I had largely left behind my initial research in Hebrew liter- ature and begun to focus my studies on Yiddish, and Yiddish in the United States. But Alan would not be deterred. Over the course of my doctoral studies, he would repeatedly remind me to leave room beyond Yiddish to rethink what he often read, through the Hebrew poet Avraham Regelson, as the “deep structure of Jewish civ- ilization.” 1 For Alan, Hebrew fgured as a bridge between the Jewish past and the fractured Jewish present, a “quasi-erotic” and “quasi-religious” instrument for artis- tic creation and scholarly insight and, most importantly for Alan, a “portable com- ponent of the Jewish national idea.” 2 Saul Bellow famously tells of a meeting he had in the 1960s with S. Y. Agnon in which Agnon made sure to ask Bellow if any of his works had been translated into Hebrew, because only then would his artistic legacy be secure. 3 Alan’s afnity for Agnon and immersion in his literary universe over this last decade or so have much to do with this sense of security and homecoming in the Hebrew language. In urging me to continue working on Hebrew literature,