Isaac Kramnick

1938 - 2019

Isaac Kramnick

New York City - Isaac Kramnick died in New York City on December 21st, following a brief illness and surrounded by the family he loved. To his wife, children, grandchildren, and close friends, he was an unforgettable and beloved figure who returned the love they gave him many times over. He was a mix of foibles and passions, of intense likes and dislikes. He was a lifelong poker player, who didn't mind if he seldom won a game, because the conversation and fellowship of his friends drew him out even on a cold Ithaca weekday night. He was a life-long Red Sox fan, claiming they never failed to break your heart, even after the cycles of hope and despair ended with a World Series victory. He sang Gilbert and Sullivan though he couldn't read music and didn't mind that he forgot his lines in the middle of a patter song. He volunteered to help in an Ithaca mayoralty election just to see if he could be useful.

He was a scholar and a gentleman, an unabated foe of the philistinism of corporate life especially if it lurked in the university to which he cheerfully gave most of the years of his professional life; he was someone who detested hypocrisy and cant, whether it came from the left or right in political life, someone who never forgot his working-class immigrant roots and never forgave the arrogance and inhumanity of those who preferred the wealth of the market over tikkun-olam, the Hebrew injunction that we must repair the world. He wrote important intellectual biographies of Henry St. John Lord Bolingroke and Edmund Burke, theorists who took center stage in 18th century Britain. He wrote a biography of Harold Laski, the English Jewish Marxist Labor Party theorist of the mid 20th century. He wrote but never published his own memoir, a life in some manner more interesting than these.

The achievements of his lifetime are remarkable because he won them unassisted by the luck of fortune or birth. His friends called his early childhood "Dickensian". As a newborn in March 1938, he was given up to foster care by the state of Massachusetts when his mother Sarah Sushelsky, undone by mental illness, was confined to an institution, and by Max Kramnick, who labored in a leather factory in Peabody, Massachusetts and was unable to care for him. He was sent to several foster homes until the age of five when he came to live in Millis, a small village twenty miles from Boston, but in some sense leagues away from a city. Helen and Saul Spiro, whom he considered his parents, raised him as part of their extended family of orthodox Jewish cattle salesmen and chicken farmers, who built their own white-frame synagogue and, unaccountably, as Jews, were neither readers nor Democrats.

Thinking he was an interesting risk, Harvard took him in as a freshman with the state of Massachusetts and some part-time jobs defraying the cost of education. There he flourished and found his real home, intellectual and nurturing, fed by caring professors who remained for him the model of teaching he imitated when he was entrusted with the shaping of young students' minds. He would go on to have a rich and successful professional life as a professor at Cornell University, muchly published, muchly honored (to whose website readers more interested in this catalogue are recommended) and, perhaps more importantly to him, muchly loved by generations of students.

But for the full measure of Isaac Kramnick and for some of the sturdiness on which the base of his life rested, his family takes precedence. As graduate students, Isaac Kramnick and Miriam Brody met each other in Boston's Public Garden at its annual art exposition in 1962. They would have almost fifty-seven years of a profoundly loving and companionate marriage, both loving the smell of old books and Indian curries, of the quadrangles of universities, the cold opening of Saturday Night Live, "fivesies" and sunsets at Kelm Lake, and ultimately and always their three adored children, Rebecca, Jonathan, and Leah, the warm and loving sons and daughter-in-law their children brought into their family, Philip, Adam, and Bliss, and the grandchildren Madeline, Anna, Samuel, and Milo, whom they called the "dessert" of life, along with the four-footed ones, dogs, cats, and bunnies. Family included some very wonderful friends with whom Isaac shared regular lunches at Cornell and those younger whose first academic work he felt privileged to read, or those near neighbors who shared a well-trod pathway between kitchen doors. All of these people and more loved him and will miss him. His memory will be for a blessing.

For those who wish to make a gift in his honor, the family asks them to contribute to a fund at Cornell University to defray the expenses of first-generation college students.