This reader was momentarily put off by the title of this
fascinating book. Clement Greenberg was like no one else,
and he held fast to his opinions. He was in no sense a
“czar.” Nor would he have wished to be so described. The
word “czar” is now applied primarily to metropolitan
gangsters by people who see it almost as a backhanded
compliment. Like many a strong and sometimes peremptory
character, Greenberg had his detractors. But if a “czar” had
turned up at his front door, Greenberg would have given him
the bum’s rush.

Nor did Greenberg have “a fall.”
As Ms. Marquis tells it, Greenberg in the last years of his
life was “stripped by a larcenous accountant” of some
$750,000. That was not “a fall,” but it was a considerable
misfortune.
Two days after his death on
May 4th, 1994, he was described by Michael Kimmelman in The
New York Times as “the most important art critic that the
United States had produced.” If that is “a fall,” others
would stand in line to get it.

Greenberg’s mother had arrived in New York in 1899, when she
was eleven years old. The Greenbergs came from a Lithuanian
Jewish enclave in northern Poland. More than 163,000
refugees from Europe arrived in the United States in 1899,
and when Greenberg’s father, aged twenty, arrived in 1904,
the year’s arrivals numbered 322,000.

New York was acquiring its distinctive and endlessly
rewarding character.
The Greenbergs described themselves as