Reader Responses to The Banality of Kindness

Prof. Emeritus Anthony Molho’s recent memoir about a distant event leads by example in showing that individual accounts really do count in our collective understanding of historic events. What I cannot tell is whether recent Brown alumni know the contribution a young Professor Molho made … when he joined the faculty in the mid-1960s. In his courses on the Renaissance and then the Reformation, his lectures were intense, and the discussions he fostered were engaging.… My own recollection (with gratitude) comes from early October 1967, in his HIST 107 course, The Renaissance, at an early-morning class meeting when he announced he was suspending his planned formal lecture to shift to reading and discussing with the class a student’s essay. Much to my surprise he chose to read aloud my short essay on the shift from the waning of the Middle Ages to the new stature and tone of intellectuals in the Italian Renaissance. His original approach to undergraduate teaching and writing influenced many Brown students, including me, that “history matters” with scholarship and teaching seriously as a genuine vocation and lifelong commitment. Thank you, Professor Molho—across a half century.

While I was at Brown in the early 1970s, I rarely heard about the Holocaust, though classmates must have had survivors in their families. In subsequent years as I began to investigate the Shoah, I wondered why I hadn’t heard more about it at Brown. The deeper I went in pursuing information about what had happened, the more I discovered the reticence of survivors to talk about their experiences. I am deeply grateful for individuals like Professor Molho determining that, as they age, their testimonies are far too important to not endure the pain of sharing them.