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.
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.
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.
Kinship of all Species 