Thursday, February 9, 2012
Retrieving American Jewish Fiction: Ludwig Lewisohn
D. G. Myers
Ludwig Lewisohn is nearly forgotten today, but in his day he was a literary celebrity. He was so well-known, in fact, that his marital scandals—multiple divorces, an accusation of bigamy, flight to Europe with a decades-younger woman, a second wedding interrupted by a hysterical jilted lover—made national headlines. Through it all, he kept writing, publishing 35 books by the time of his death in 1955. A passionate champion of sexual freedom, Lewisohn was equally zealous to promote Zionism and "Jewish self-realization." The novel The Island Within (1928), based on his own Jewish reawakening, was a polemical summons to American Jews to return to their "native tradition."
