Staying Jewish in America

By ERIKA DREIFUS

THE ISLAND WITHIN
By Ludwig Lewisohn
280 pages. Syracuse University Press. $19.95.

Ten years ago I found myself searching for a final paper topic in a course on Jewish-American Literature.  Much as I’d enjoyed our assigned readings, which emphasized the Yiddish tradition, my own heritage was equally rooted in cities along the Rhine and villages on the edge of the Black Forest.  It inspired me to ask the professor to recommend a particularly German Jewish-American writer to investigate for my final paper.  Almost without hesitation, she named Ludwig Lewisohn's The Island Within. 

Within pages I was hooked.  I told almost anyone who’d listen about this remarkable book, about its unusual format—with essays introducing the more clearly fictional sections—about its protagonist Arthur Levy.  I spoke (more selectively) about the uncanny echoes that resonated, still, so many decades later; even near the end of the twentieth century I concurred with a critic in the Menorah Journal who had acknowledged back in 1928:  “Any American Jew reading [The Island Within] will recognize it as true talk about ourselves.”

I intend this article as a memorial of sorts, coming as it does one decade after my first encounter with the book, 75 years after the novel’s publication, and 120 years after the birth of Ludwig Lewisohn in Berlin, on May 30, 1883.  The Lewisohn family immigrated to the United States—to South Carolina—six years later.  Educated in the Methodist tradition and dreaming in his early adult years of becoming a scholar in the finest Anglo-American style, Lewisohn, in The Island Within and in other works, issued a violent argument against assimilation.  The novel itself pleads for Jews to accept and take pride in their spiritual heritage, for Lewisohn became convinced—as the novel’s protagonist, Arthur Levy, also comes to believe—that only by so doing can they be truly happy.

The most noticeable element of The Island Within is its emphasis on "a constant sense of the streaming generations, of the processes of historic change." In other words, this is a book about family and community memory, and how such memory shapes individual identity. By the time we read about the birth of Arthur Levy, we’ve experienced about fifty years' and seventy-five pages' worth of narrative (including three of Lewisohn’s essays).  We know and understand Arthur's nineteenth-century relatives at Vilna and Insterburg in a way that Arthur himself simply cannot. 

This epic quality of the novel—in which we understand Arthur not just as a man but as the heir to a family and tradition—is emphasized by Lewisohn's short essays.  In one of these, Lewisohn writes:

The badges of shame were removed; the ghettos were opened; the Jews flooded into the desert of the world […]  The nations said:  Be like us and we shall be brothers and at peace! […]  The Jews have wanted profoundly to be Americans, Englishmen, Germans, even Poles….Can such things be done?  Can they be done without inflicting an inner hurt, a wound to the moral fiber?  Can people in masses, as groups, repudiate their ancestry and its experiences?  Can the Jewish imagination live permanently and gladly as though it had shared in historic experiences which, in fact, Jews watched from without as outcasts and martyrs?

These are examples of those echoes that may resound for “any American Jew,” even today.

If Lewisohn was himself obsessed with the power of ancestral memory, this obsession plays out in the experiences of his protagonist. Even before Arthur’s birth, his parents pave the way for a more fully “American” identity.  Jacob Levy and his American-born wife, Gertrude, while certainly never dreaming of conversion to Christianity, do not maintain the Jewish religious observances their grandparents and parents had followed back in Europe:  “All that lay in a scarcely imaginable past” behind Gertrude Levy, and her husband assumes her perspective, too, because “it represented peace to him and liberation from fear and prosperity.  It represented America.”  Jacob and Gertrude choose not to join a synagogue because “to them the synagogue still smacked of oppression, commonness, recent immigration, the Ghetto…”

Still, Jacob tells his wife even before they become parents that "What I don’t like is Jews who pretend they’re something else.”  Perhaps it is the conflict—between the necessity of self-acceptance and the lure of assimilation—that becomes the source of Arthur’s troubles.  Much as Jacob and Gertrude depart from traditional observances, they retain Jewish culture in their foods and in their speech.  In fact, they still prefer to associate and socialize with their co-religionists.  For their children (Arthur has a younger sister, Hazel), the situation becomes immensely more complicated.

Arthur’s undergraduate years at Columbia University, coinciding with the advent of World War I, provoke some disturbing reflections, particularly after one especially distressing conversation with his non-Jewish classmate Charles Dawson.  Complications multiply when Arthur marries—a Protestant woman, a minister’s daughter, no less.  When Arthur and Elizabeth’s son, John, is born, Arthur finds himself thinking further about the cultural gulf between Jews and Protestants in the United States, and his own sense of alienation: "I and many like me have tried to live as though we were American Protestants, or, at least, the next best thing to that.  And we’re not." 

The marriage fails; Lewisohn effectively has Elizabeth explain why:  “It’s a kind of argument, isn’t it, against mixed marriages?”  Arthur concurs:  “I’m afraid it is…One among many others.”  Elizabeth is not, and cannot be, the Jewish wife that Arthur ultimately comes to value and desire.

Lewisohn evidently felt this sense of ancestral influence so important that he emphasized it earnestly throughout his novel.  A few years later this notion of  “a constant sense of the streaming generations” would emerge again, in his literary criticism.  “The strength and glory and terror of passion,” he wrote in Expression in America, “come from its being implicated with the higher nerve-centers, the whole stream of ancestral memories, with pieties, agonies, exaltations old and forever new as the heart of man itself.” He criticized novelists who did not appreciate this idea, whose work, unlike his own, did not engage with history and ideology.   

Maybe it’s because to a significant extent I agree with Lewisohn, because I feel myself so shaped by the “streaming generations,” because I tend to write about intergenerational situations in my own fiction, that I feel bonded with both this 120-year-old author and his book.  Or maybe it’s because I am less averse to fiction that “instructs” as well as “entertains” (as Milton Hindus described it) than some other readers may be.  All of this contributes to my sense of responsibility, and privilege, in reminding others about Lewisohn and The Island Within.