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The Dynamics of Erasure: Anti-Semitism and the Example of Ludwig Lewisohn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Gordon Hutner
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Extract

“A recent experience has shown me how terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position. I had always suspected that it was a matter worth considering, but I had not known how widespread and strong it was. While we shall be glad to do anything we can for you, therefore, I cannot help feeling that the chances are going to be greatly against you.” These words, in 1903, imputed to the chairman of the English Department at Columbia University effectively put an end to Ludwig Lewisohn's dream of becoming a professor of English. The humiliation was so severe that Lewisohn spent most of the next fifty years examining the role of the alien in a gentile country, the Jew in America. He transformed the hatred and shame he suffered into a writing career, of some forty-three volumes, remarkable for its productivity, variety, frankness, and occasional distinction. A critic, journalist, cultural analyst, scholar, translater, polemicist, drama reviewer, editor, and memorist, he perhaps delighted most in being a novelist. A few of his ten novels were celebrated, most especially The Case of Mr. Crump (1926), for which Thomas Mann provided an introduction and which Sigmund Freud hailed as a masterpiece depicting the “tyranny of sex” (as the novel was retitled after being banned in the United States for twenty years), and Island Within; (1928), for some readers as fine a novel of Jewish immigration as has been written. As a literary critic, however, Lewisohn's most significant achievement was surely Expression in America; (1932), the first fullscale psychoanalytic history of American literature, a monumental study of artistic personality and the effect of milieu, later reprinted as The Story of American Literature (1939).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 16 , October 1991 , pp. 391 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

NOTES

1. Lewisohn, Ludwig, Up Stream: An American Chronicle (1922; rept. New York: Modern Library, 1926), p. 143.Google Scholar

2. Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 195–207.Google Scholar

3. For a fascinating account of Trilling's career, see Trilling, Diana's memoir, “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia,” in Speaking of Literature and Society, ed. Trilling, Diana (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 411–29Google Scholar. Also see Krupnick, Mark, Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1986), pp. 16–34.Google Scholar

4. Sherman, Stuart, Americans (New York: Scribner's, 1922), pp. 21–24.Google Scholar

5. “I.M.P.”, “Turns with a Bookworm,” in New York Herald Tribune Books, 03 6, 1932, p. 15Google Scholar; Krutch, Joseph Wood, “Great Men of the Past Seen as Contemporaries,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 03 13, 1932, p. 1Google Scholar; Schriftgiesser, Karl, in Boston Evening Transcript, 03 5, 1932, p. 2Google Scholar; and Anon., “Literature and Life in America,” New York Times Book Review, 03 27, 1932, p. 2.Google Scholar

6. Bates, Ernest, “Through Mr. Lewisohn's Glasses,” in Commonwela, 05 11, 1932, pp. 50–51Google Scholar. Bates's praise is very high indeed when one considers the plethora of studies of American literature annually produced during this period. In the years immediately prior to Lewisohn's, there appeared Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925)Google Scholar; Calverton, V. F.The Newer Spirit (1925)Google Scholar; Beer, Thomas, The Mauve Decade (1926)Google Scholar; Mumford, Lewis, The Golden Day (1926)Google Scholar; Parrington, V. L., Main Currents in American Thought (1927–1930)Google Scholar; Frank, Waldo, The Rediscovery of America (1928)Google Scholar; Leisy, Ernest E., American Literature (1928)Google Scholar; Canby, Henry S., Classic AmericansGoogle Scholar; and Rourke, Constance, American Humor (1931)Google Scholar. Also published in 1932 were Calverton's The Liberation of American Literature and Bernard De Voto's Mark Twain's America.

7. Lewisohn, Ludwig, Expression in America (New York: Harpers, 1932), p. 354.Google Scholar

8. Brande, Dorothea, “Mr. Lewisohn Interprets America,” American Review 2 (12 1933): 189–98Google Scholar. For an account of how this journal came to replace the Bookman and how the Fugitives found themselves publishing in this reactionary periodical, see Steward, John L., The Burden of Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 176–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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10. Smith, Bernard, Forces in American Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), pp. 361–62.Google Scholar

11. Niebuhr, Reinhold “A Bourgeois Takes His Stand,” in The Nation, 10 17, 1934, p. 455–56Google Scholar; and Arvin, Newton, “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” in The New Republic, 10 10, 1934, p. 248.Google Scholar

12. Lewisohn, Ludwig, Mid-Channel: An American Chronicle (New York: Harper, 1929), pp. 295–97.Google Scholar

13. Trilling, Lionel, “Flawed Instruments,” in Speaking of Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 23–26.Google Scholar

14. Howe, Irving, “The Range of the New York Intellectual,” in Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York, ed. Rosenberg, Bernard and Goldstein, Ernest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 264–87.Google Scholar

15. Kazin, Alfred, “A World of Moral Splendor,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 05 2, 1937, p. 2.Google Scholar

16. Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 277.Google Scholar

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18. Jones, Howard M., The Theory of American Literature (1948; rept. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), pp. 148–50Google Scholar. Jones's remarks are taken from his 1932 Yale Review essay on Expression in America.

19. A notable exception to this treatment comes somewhat earlier in Hoffman, Frederick, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (1945; rept. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957).Google Scholar

20. Aaron, Daniel, “Literary Scenes and Movements,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Elliot, Emory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 735.Google Scholar

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