Ira Bruce Nadel (born July 22, 1943) is an American-Canadian biographer, literary critic and James Joyce scholar, and a distinguished professor at the University of British Columbia. He has written books on the twentieth-century Modernists, especially Ezra Pound and Joyce, biographies of Leonard Cohen and Leon Uris, and on Jewish-American authors. He has won Canadian literary awards, and has edited and written the introduction to a number of scholarly books and period pieces. He is a critic of the Olympic torch relay as a legacy of the Nazis.
Life and career
Nadel was born on July 22, 1943, in Rahway, New Jersey, the son of Isaac David and Francis (Sofman) Nadel. He received a BA in 1965 and an MA in 1967 from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a PhD in English in 1970 from Cornell University. He joined the University of British Columbia as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 1977, and then to professor of English in 1985. He was chair of the Department of English graduate program from 1992 to 1995. As of 2004, he was a coeditor of the David Mamet Review, an advisory board member of The Journal of Modern Literature and Joyce Studies Annual, and an editorial board member of English Literature in Transition and Autobiographical/Biographical Studies. He is known in British Columbia as a long-serving book critic for CBC Radio's afternoon show.
Personal life and views
Nadel's first marriage on June 5, 1966, ended when his wife died on February 23, 1975. He has two children from his second marriage, on July 4, 1976, to Josephine Margolis, a lawyer. He has protested the use of the Olympic torch as a legacy from the Nazis. Nadel considers the torch relay a fabrication by the Nazis in 1936 in Germany, and not associated with the ancient Olympics.
Work
Nadel's book, Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, was the first full-length biography of Uris. It was based on the archives at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin and interviews with Uris's family. Nadel saw Uris's work as attacking antisemitism with a fictional heroic Jewish past, but broadening the appeal to a non-Jewish readership. Nadel revealed that Uris lived the life he described in a fictional setting, with many war experiences and travel to dangerous spots.
Nadel published Joyce and the Jews in 1989, the first book to appear in print tackling the topic. The book explored both Joyce's personal relations with Jews and the influence of Judaic motifs on his writing. Nadel also looked at references to the Talmud in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. As a critic focusing on the influence of Jews and Judaism on Joyce, Nadel did not address the centrality of the Jewishness of Leopold Bloom, one of the central characters of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses.:4 Nadel did note the shared impact of the concept of exodus on Jews and on Joyce, a voluntary exile from an Ireland then under the dominion of England.:268
Nadel's biography of David Mamet, David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre, the first such, qualified the playwright's own description of an unhappy childhood. It also tried to place Mamet's prolific output as an artist in a sociobiographical context, in an expanding arc from immediate family to Euro-American cultural influence.:285 Nadel has also published a biography of Leonard Cohen, the singer, songwriter, poet and novelist, titled Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. He has also written about Ezra Pound.
Nadel co-edited The Victorian Muse, Gertrude Stein, The Making of Literature and a collection of previously unpublished Ezra Pound letters. He has also edited the Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, and organized conferences about the work of Joyce. He has edited an Oxford reprint of the American classic, The Education of Henry Adams, and Iolani: or, Tahiti as it was, by Wilkie Collins. Nadel is also the author of Tom Stoppard: A Life, on the prolific British theater playwright.