Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent and critic for the New York Times, whose deep knowledge of Asia and Europe illuminates the reference from Tiananmen Square in Bastille and who wrote things as he saw in 10 books leading from the unconditional spiritual curiosity, died on Monday. He was 80 years old.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by pancreatic cancer, diagnosed less than eight weeks ago, said his son Elias Bernstein. Mr Bernstein lived in Brooklyn.
Over more than two decades in times, Mr Bernstein has brought deep historical knowledge, a polite style of writing and a persistent controversy in issues as various such as the concept of the French Revolution, the nature of Chinese authoritarianism, the “multitude of clones” in the 1993 worldwide and 1993.
Writing about the Danube in 2003 after a 1,750 -mile trip along it, Mr Bernstein observed: “Rivers are symbols, you cannot think of Mississippi without also thinking about the American drama of the tribe.
As for the water in which it slipped from the long forest to the Black Sea, it was “the river of excellent cities of the former Austria -Hungarian Empire”, “Blue Valtez” by Johanan Strauss, the Holocaust of the Holocaust.
His journalism had wiped, a tested sense of tragic inherent in human affairs and often a subtle creation of arguments that have a thorough reference to the ground. Mr Bernstein, who maintained something of his nervousness and ability for the Wonder of A Cub Reporter throughout his lifetime, is never tired of working hard.
“I honestly do not like books that start with the condition that the issues are too complicated to allow any generalizations,” he wrote in “Fragile Glory”, the rich portrait of France in 1990, a country “somewhere in the middle between a particular persistent dream and immovable reality”. It was a nation, for Mr Bernstein, who tried to “shine with the flame of culture itself”, even when he fell over his “military and moral collapse in front of the Nazis”.
If he overcomes the inevitability of pain, Mr Bernstein was also optimistic. The first generation son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Belarus, grew up on a chicken farm in the agricultural Connecticut, where he learned to classify small, medium, large, very large and jumbo eggs and trained in Scrappy.
The clothes were handmade. Hanukkah Gifts, Moderate. The family rule was corn in the garden could not get until the water was boiled. At the age of 9, sitting in his father’s arms, he would drive the farm truck to collect eggs in chickens.
From this experience he made a disappointment on attitude, a suspicion of fashion, a taboo impatience and a deep faith in the American possibility. He believed in a fair shake for all, including his journalistic issues. In his view, he was in America as a post -war power in Asia and Europe, which was responsible for protecting and expanding the freedom from which his family had benefited.
“A Jewish spiritual from a chicken farm has never fallen from his attachment to what America should support,” writer Kati Marton said in an interview.
In a mission from Beijing, where he was sent to report shortly after the massacre of student protests on the night of June 3-4, 1989, Mr Bernstein mentioned a saying used in the imperial China to persuade people to inform the traitors: “for the sake of the great cause.”
He returned, with the assurance of a Chinese scholar, to ask if, in this light, the violent violent murder of the Chinese Liberation Army was “a product of 20th century totalitarianism” or reflecting the long tradition of the cruel imperial sovereignty. As often as Mr Bernstein, it was an attempt to get beyond the news in the deeper historical currents of events.
His conclusion was that there was something new and unique in the bald refusal of the government for what had happened and in the “completely modern campaign of the uninterrupted propaganda” against the “criminals”, as the government called its victims.
“The idea here is that any contradiction with the government is not just a mistake,” he wrote. “She is criminal, treacherous, counter -revolutionary, and those who have led her are neither respectful nor human treatment.”
A Democrat sometimes conservative views, Mr Bernstein struggled with the ideological shift of America long before the cancellation of culture, gender wars and today’s angry fracture of the country on policies for diversity, equality and integration.
In a gentle joke “On Language” in the New York Times magazine since 1990, he wrote about an academic conference that he had attended that he was advertised as a “post) contemporary and (post) colonialism” and observed that the brackets were a way to make the readers.
“The parentheses were placed not only around words but also around words,” he wrote. “There was a paper entitled” Identifying the UN (re) obvious desire: narrative transformations and postmodern man “. Another was” not (suspension) until it was published (ed): (post) modernism and terrorist terrorism “.
Designing from this conference, he continued to note that our “core values ​​were now” usually called “the dominant reason”, or even “the overall reason”, whose famous disasters were made more than those outside the structure of power “.
Links to those who are increasingly challenged and more challenged by basic American values, if they know their need to evolve, gave expression to his concerns in the “dictatorship of virtue: multiculturalism and the battle for the future of America”, published in 1994.
It was a book that won Mr Bernstein more enemies than friends, even when it caused ideological cracks intended to grow. He never shrunk by the difficult issues: in 2009 he published “the East, the West and the Sex: a story”, an exploration of the gender and power relationship called through the meetings of Western explorers, traders and conquerors with eastern cultures.
“He believed in the truth, no matter where the chips fell,” said David Margolick, a journalist and writer. “No one had delivered anything. His integrity was absolute. He wrote what he thought without looking over his shoulder.”
Richard Paul Bernstein was born in New York on May 5, 1944, the first of the two children of Herbert and Clare (Brown) Bernstein. The family soon moved to a poultry farm at East Haddam, Conn., After the Jewish agricultural society, an organization founded to provide the exploitation of rural immigrants, gave his father.
Richard watched an Orthodox synagogue-“an old old building aired over a tiring near the soda store”, according to the words of Donald Berwick’s lifelong friend-and graduated from Nathan Hale Gymnasium in the nearby Moodus, before attending a Ba.
Wanderlust already had a handle on him. He continued to win a MA at Harvard University in East Asian History and Languages, a lesson that was partially selected because it offered the ability to move to Taiwan to study Mandarin. A passion for Asia was born that never left him. This led to jobs as a stringer and later a correspondent for Beijing for Time magazine before entering the Times in 1982, initially as a journalist covering Metropolitan New York.
Mr Bernstein later served as head of the United Nations Office, head of the Paris Office, a national cultural correspondent, book critic and head of the Berlin Bureau before leaving the Times in 2006.
Judy Peritz, his younger sister, recalled that their father had given him a bb weapon when he was 11. He would shoot at the birds and one day hit one and was terrified to see how the bird fought and suffered from what he had done. “He never used the gun again,” he said.
A deep kindness accompanies Mr. Bernstein in the end. Although not religious, he joined a Torah study group late life, intention to explore the concept of his Jewish.
In addition to his son and sister, Mr. Bernstein survives his wife, Zhongmei Li, a famous Chinese classic dancer and choreographer.
“We all know that death is coming,” he told Mr Peritz shortly before he died. “I would like to have more. But now I understand that I will not accept it and I am not afraid. I have lived a truly wonderful and interesting life.”
