On Books

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."

Continue Reading "Ludwig Lewisohn"  D. G. Myers,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  SAVE

SAVE "Retrieving American Jewish Fiction: Ludwig Lewisohn"

Rootless Cosmopolitan(s)

 

The search for the Next Big Thing is as endemic in the American literary world as in politics and the clothing industry. When it comes to writers, the itch tends to express itself through the excited serial discovery of identifiably new or neglected "voices," preferably young and often of the ethnic or sexual variety: African-American, or second-wave feminist, or, recently, immigrant Russian-Jewish. Members of this last category are taken to include the short-story writer Lara Vapnyar, the music critic Alex Halberstadt, the literary anthologist Boris Fishman, and Keith Gessen, a founder of the cultural journal n+1 and sometime novelist. Whether or not there is a coherent Russian-Jewish "school" in contemporary American letters is debatable; but there is no question that its star is Gary Shteyngart.

Cool War  Daniel Mendelsohn,  New York.  Welcoming The Russian Debutante's Handbook, a breezily hilarious novel of twenty-something angst and immigrant assimilation.  SAVE

Lenny Hearts Eunice  Gary Shteyngart,  New Yorker.  An excerpt from Super Sad True Love Story.  SAVE

Throwbacks and Pioneers  Val Vinokur,  Boston Review.  On the fiction being produced by young American Jewish writers hailing from Israel and the former Soviet Union.  SAVE

Retrieving American Jewish Fiction: Myron Brinig

 

"For Jews," the historian Jerry Z. Muller said recently, "Jewish economic success has long been a source of both pride and embarrassment." Very few Jewish writers have risen to even this level of ambivalence. The ground note of Jewish fiction has been hostility to business—the prooftext is The Rise of David Levinsky—and the story of Jewish success in establishing banks, department stores, and clothing lines has fallen to strangers (including anti-Semites) to tell.

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