In Memoriam

Mark Jay Mirsky, Professor of English, Founder of Fiction Magazine

Professor Mark Jay Mirsky, a novelist, longtime professor of English, and founding editor of influential literary magazine Fiction, whose five decades of teaching at the City College of New York inspired generations of writers, died in New York City on Friday, December 5, 2025. He was 86. The cause was apparently a heart attack. 

As a writer, Mirsky drew from a wide ranging intellectual curiosity and a deeply honest approach to the creative process, shaped by lasting friendships and exchanges with prominent writers of his generation, including Donald Barthelme, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates. Two of his early novels, Thou Worm Jacob (1967) and Blue Hill Avenue (1972) are darkly comic community portraits drawing heavily from his childhood in a decaying Jewish Dorchester and America in the 40’s and 50’s, as waves of humanity from the old world crashed onto American soil and mixed in the wake of the Second World War. Both novels were Boston bestsellers, and Blue Hill Avenue was recommended in the New York Times. Proceedings of the Rabble (1970) used an evangelical right-wing political crusade as a frame for a Gonzo depiction of the pressure cooker of rage and paralysis building in American democracy. 

Over a career that included more than a dozen books, Mirsky moved easily among genres. His scholarly works included The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; studies of Jewish mysticism such as The Red Adam and Dante, Eros and Kabbalah; and memoir, notably My Search for the Messiah. He also co-edited The Jews of Pinsk, 1881–1941. A significant part of his scholarly legacy involved his editing of the diaries of Robert Musil, the Austrian modernist best known for The Man Without Qualities. His work on the diaries helped illuminate Musil’s intellectual development and bring greater attention to one of Central Europe’s most challenging literary figures.=

In 1972, he founded literary journal Fiction with Donald Barthelme and others, dedicating it to innovative writing. As its editor for more than 50 years, he cultivated it as a spotlight for unconventional prose, publishing both well known authors and emerging voices and maintaining it as a home for experimental literature even as the wider publishing landscape shifted. 

Born in Boston in 1939, Professor Mirsky graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and later earned an M.A. from Stanford University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. From 1962 to 1968, he served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

He joined the faculty of the City College of New York in 1967, in a turbulent period for the school, and quickly became a central figure in its English Department. He later directed the M.A program in creative writing and served as department chair for both English and Judaic Studies. Students experienced him as exacting but deeply committed – a teacher who demanded seriousness of purpose and treated their writing with the respect of a fellow writer. He loved to teach, and taught his last class the evening before his passing. 

Professor Mirsky is survived by his wife, Inger Grytting, and by his children, Israel and Ruth

James deJongh, Professor Emeritus City College, the Graduate Center

We have just learned the very sad news of our former colleague James deJongh’s passing yesterday. Jim was Professor Emeritus at City College as well as at the Graduate Center, and a scholar of the Harlem Renaissance, diasporic literature, modernism, and contemporary drama. Among his works are Vicious Modernism, published by Cambridge University Press in 1990, and Do Lord Remember Me, a play based on the first-hand memories of formerly enslaved peoples, recorded in the 1930s under the Federal Writer’s Project. A crucial member of IRADAC, the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean, Jim’s work and influence utterly transformed our thinking about African-American literature, including the ways we measure its global origins and global reach. We were lucky to work with such a scholar and teacher, and will miss him greatly. 

Leonard Kriegel. Professor, CCNY English. September 25, 2022

We mourn our colleague Leonard Kriegel (1933-2022), whose influence in the NYC world of letters and contributions as a novelist, critic, and essayist remain important and deep. His memoir The Long Walk Home, published in 1964, describes a childhood battle with polio which left him unable to walk but failed to shatter his spirit. His work on disability, urban education, and modern masculinity—as well as numerous essays in journals like Harpers and The Sewanee Review–was characterized by anger and honesty, insight, love, and tenderness. His colleagues and students at CCNY acknowledge Prof. Kriegel’s generous gifts as a scholar and thinker, and we send our deepest condolences to his family. ​​

Paul Oppenheimer, Professor, CCNY English. July 28, 2022

Our cherished colleague Paul Oppenheimer, 83, died on July 28, 2022. A poet, writer, dreamer, pedagogue and prankster, he taught as a professor of English at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center for over 50 years. He published on widely ranging subjects such as “Evil and the Demonic,” “The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet,” guilt, four collections of poems, “A Pleasant Vintage of Till Eulenspiegel,” studies of the lives and work of Peter Paul Rubens and Niccolo Machiavelli among them. Scores of students enjoyed his classes, and audiences for his poetry, novels, and criticism span the globe. Paul will be greatly missed, but his influence is vast and lasting.

He is survived by his wife, Assia Nakova, daughters, Julie and Rebecca, from a previous marriage, and two granddaughters, Audrey and Hazel, sister, Miriam Bernstein and brother, Anton.

Donations in his name may be sent to the English Department of The City College of New York.