One could carp that Ludwig Lewisohn always wrote about his own peculiar situation, even when his ostensible subjects were social movements, ancient eras, or distant lands. Luckily, though, Lewisohn was a thoroughly fascinating personality and a deeply brilliant thinker, so reading about his personal dilemmas never gets tiresome. He grew up in Berlin and South Carolina, received an MA when he was 19, partied with James Joyce in Paris and was psychoanalyzed by Freud. Through all of it—except for a brief assimilationist phase in his youth, which he soon saw as childish folly—he remained passionate and uncompromising about his identity as a Jew and an American. An extraordinarily prolific career as an author, editor, translator, poet, essayist, and lecturer spanning the first half of the 20th century makes him one of the paramount figures of Jewish literature, and Jewish history, in the United States.
The Island Within (1928) is a sensible place to start exploring Lewisohn’s legacy, as it is a wide-ranging grab-bag of many of the themes and motifs that would occupy him throughout his career, tied together by Lewisohn’s stately prose and perspective. The central narrative concerns Arthur Levy, a New York-born stand-in for the author who grows up in a thoroughly assimilated but still Jewish home only to discover, after his marriage to a Christian minister’s daughter, that neglecting his Jewish heritage leads directly to neurosis and anxiety: “It’s a kind of an argument, isn’t it, against mixed marriages?” his wife asks him at one point, and he replies, “One among many others.”
Yet Arthur meets Elizabeth only two-thirds of the way through the book; Lewisohn’s tale begins much earlier, in the year 1840, with Arthur’s pious great-grandfather. Through the generations, Lewisohn tracks the family’s drift from Jewish insularity and religious belief to secular culture and society. In addition, Lewisohn starts each of the novel’s sections with an essayistic meditation on Jewish and world history (“But we have paid two-and-a-half dollars for a story, not for a treatise!” he imagines his readers reacting to the first of these); and Arthur’s decision to join a fact-finding mission on the situation of Jews in Eastern Europe is influenced by an ancient text, belonging to his ancestors, that describes in detail the martyrdom of medieval Jews during the Crusades. In all of these generically diverse texts, stitched together into one more or less coherent book, Lewisohn approaches the question of Jewish distinctiveness and survival from a slightly different direction; and at the same time, Arthur’s work as a psychologist in New York allows Lewisohn to work in Freudian ideas about sex and marriage, and he even finds a little space to discuss German culture in America. Though occasionally pedagogical, Lewisohn acknowledges that there are no easy answers—even the difficult ones he comes up with tend to be somewhat vague at best. His status as a foremost representative of intellectual culture in the U.S., and an indispensable voice of modern Jewish thought, rests on his unflagging commitment to posing and struggling with the crucial questions.