The Island Within (Ludwig Lewisohn, 1928)

Ludwig Lewisohn wrote this 95 years ago. It amazes me, the will of instinct. 

Lewisohn was from a very assimilated Jewish family that settled in the Midwest. His ”pintele yid” was small, on the verge of disappearing. You know when the embers after a fire are about to die out, extinguished from lack of fresh wood that would sustain the fire. Sometimes they grow a little just at the point of dying. This is what happened to Ludwig Lewisohn. Only he managed to make it grow.

He got ”reinvolved with his Judaic background” (a phrase I once heard composer Steve Reich utter in the Concert Hall of Stockholm when introducing his piece Tehillim) after a low-key antisemitic episode. Lewisohn was told by faculty that, because he was Jewish, he could never teach English at university. This led to an entire reorientation of priorities for him. He started writing on Jewish matters, became involved in the Zionist cause and wrote several books on the subject. This book is most likely inspired by his own life and thoughts. It tells the story of Arthur Levy (the very name a mini-conflict), a grandchild of highly assimilated German-Jewish immigrants who becomes a psychiatrist and who makes discoveries about himself in relation to the Jewishness and non-Jewishness of the world. This book struck a chord in me, because I harbor some of these thoughts too.

Reissue by Syracuse University Press, in their series “Library of Modern Jewish Literature”, 1997

The book follows Arthur’s family history from Vilnius to mid 1800s Germany to America (the end also anticipates a trip back over the Atlantic to Romania). But what it ultimately is is an attempts to examine the place of American Jews in the 1920s. It deals with assimilation, internecine squabbles, mixed marriages, questions of heritage. It asks how one can approach and affirm the “island within”, which refers to the Jewish spark which Arthur tries to reignite.

I think I found out about Ludwig Lewisohn and this book through a list of reprints of lesser-known American Jewish writers. It offers an overview of American Jewish identity issues from a hundred years ago, which is quite fascinating. A lot of what Lewisohn writes about hasn’t changed a bit. It also differs from most Jewish novels of that period that has survived, because the majority of them come from a very working class, sometimes communist perspective and were written by first or second generation writers who came during the big wave of immigration (writers like Michael Gold, Anna Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth). Lewisohn has a different background, coming from this very assimilated background. He came up against the hydra of antisemitism which propelled him to rethink his place in the world and became a fervent defender of the Jewish people. The book also offers a panoply of issues that occupied Jewish Americans during the pre-depression 20s. For us 21st century people, aware of what would happen shortly thereafter, know that the perspective on the issues in this book would drastically change by the enormity of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Lewisohn is writing in 1928, and was unaware of what would happen 1939-1945, news of the NSDAP party was five years in the future at that point.

German translation by Gustav Meyrink, 1929

Most of the nine chapters are prefaced with a little essay on history, which is an interesting conceit. One is about the origins of Chanukkah, one is about Jews and civilization, another deals with technological change. It is a bildung-story beginning with Arthur’s grandparents and their story in Germany prior to coming to America. It gets to comment on a lot of ideas connected to Jewishness and the sociological position of Jewish people in non-Jewish milieux. I could very much connect to a lot of the things in the book, as I myself have thought about the topic of Jewish assimilation over the years. I think I’ve thought about it a lot in connection to being a way of coping with personal displacement, maybe primarily the most horrifying of displacements that is referred to by the name Shoah. Reading Lewisohn reminds me that of course many of those issues were and would have been there nonetheless.

One part that struck me as particularly interesting was the depiction of Arthur’s marriage and familyforging with Anne, the atheist daughter of a Christian preacher. It gave me insight into the difficulties of what is called a “mixed marriage”. There is an exchange in the book where Arthur repurposes Anne’s ironic Christian phrase “how will our son be saved?” but in the sense of saving his Jewish heritage.

The last chapter of the book involves Arthur reading the story of a horrible episode in Jewish history during the Medieval times where a mass suicide of a Jewish community took place because of persecution. Reading this account contributed to Arthur’s decision to further dedicate himself to helping the Jewish cause. The same Medieval episode is also described in detail in the book “The Last of the Just” by André Schwarz-Bart (1959) which I haven’t read, but I believe it shares some characteristics with this book, but updated to post-ww2 perspectives.

Leaving the Atocha Station (Ben Lerner, 2011)

Breakthrough book by the now fêted writer Benjamin Lerner. The story is an young unnamed writer on scholarship to Madrid where he spends his time avoiding to write, going to museums, and ingesting various drugs. The thing about Lerner is his artful prose and the observations. There is not much by way of plot. The end of the book involves a portrayal of the events of the Madrid Metro bombings of 2004, as seen by a 20-something American abroad. It’s a little bit cringeworthy, but most likely based on Lerner’s real experiences.

The book is full of poetry-like observations and prevarications, most of which are interesting. I have read Lerner’s books in the wrong order, so I started with the one called “11:14” which involves the Hurricane Sandy and the title refers to the exact time when a borough-wide blackout occurred in Manhattan. This means I recognized Lerner’s predilection for incorporating recent catastrophies or news events and giving them a literary treatment. Apart from that, it’s pretty straightforward autofiction. A lot of the story is about courting Teresa and Isabel, and their various travels to Toledo, Granada or the Madrid Hilton.

I could sympathize with the portrayal of what it’s like to be an exchange student in a foreign country. Language problems, certain “paralinguistic” forms of communication, cultural differences – it’s not always a smooth ride. All things said, Lerner is pretty good with words. Here is a representative sample:

When I awoke it was a little after three in the morning and I was perhaps hungrier than I had ever been. I’d been eating very little for two weeks, and the turn of my appetite, I assumed, represented a shift in my body’s relation to the white pills. I ate an entire two-day-old baguette and as I ate I checked my e-mail and there was a message in English from Teresa, who had only e-mailed me once or twice in the past, saying that she had heard I was back from “traveling with Isabel” and that she missed me.

or this weird drug-induced parataxis:

My mouth was dry and I poured myself a glass of white wine and said I didn’t care which poems I read but that I would only read one or two. Teresa said to read the one about seeing myself on the ground from the plane and in the plane from the ground and I said, in my first expression of frustration in Spanish, that the poem wasn’t about that, that poems aren’t about anything, and the three of them stared at me, stunned. I said I was sorry, drained and refilled my glass, noting that Teresa seemed genuinely hurt; I found that to be a greater indication of her affection for me than the fact that she had favorites among my poems. We’ll read it, I said.

Lerner is the son of a feminist psychologist who wrote a noted book in the field in the mid 80s. I see it in second-hand bookstores all the time – it’s called The Dance of Anger.
















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