Books

“This People” is Ludwig Lewisohn’s sensitive study of five types of Jews, most of whom, lost in but not absorbed by the Gentile world, re-discover their identity with their race and re-assert it, at least in death. Although the form is fiction, the intention is, in effect, to restate imaginatively and with variations the individual problem which Mr. Lewisohn has solved for himself—re-identification with the people of his blood, a process which, many feel, has been accomplished with the passionate shrillness of a convert.

The first of these long stories of Jewish personalities facing, or evading, the problem of spiritual adjustment is called The Saint. It is the story of one Leon Birnbaum, born into a home creedless, prosperous, “emancipated” and unhappy, a home reminiscent of Mr. Lewisohn’s “The Island Within.” The story of Leon is the story of a new form of rebellion, wherein the young man turns against a home which lacks an abiding faith; it is a new version of a middle-class “prince,” or heir, who goes amongst the poor, to teach and to heal their wounds, living in humility and poverty, and finding a final spiritual adjustment as the husband of a pious rabbi’s daughter and the father of Jewish children. The story of Leon is either poetry or nonsense. It is, for Mr. Lewisohn himself, a lovely wish-fulfillment of the young man he himself would like to have been, or of the son he would like to have.

The second portrait-biography is that of the permanently unadjusted Jew, the Jew who dies not knowing that he is unadjusted or a Jew. The story is called Bolshevik, and therein Lewisohn shows the subtle process by which a hated and despised individual learns to spew hatred upon a world to which he cannot belong.

“He thought he must be hateful to others, so he hated himself for that.” Into the mouth of Masha, the Berlin street-walker, Lewisohn puts his interpretation of the tragedy of Jan Zorn, the Polish Jew, born Goldfarb, who became an apostle of hate because he could find adjustment in the world neither as Jew or human being. For the problem of the boy was racial as well as personal. He was malformed in spirit because he was malformed in body. Into the revolution Jan Zorn threw the energies and the impulses that he was thwarted from fulfilling in those human expressions that center about home and faith. Mr. Lewisohn becomes somewhat psychoanalytical in this chapter on a man who fulfilled himself in hate.

In the light of the present situation in Germany, we quote a parenthesis out of this chapter, a fragment relating to the Jews from Poland and the Ukraine, the rootless ones, who came into Germany during the post-war years of hunger:

They [the Eastern Jews] also infuriated the German Jews, most of whom had sold out their souls and hearts and tradition and history and self-esteem for the ##dging tolerance granted to ##ccessful mimicry and who were ### afraid of being confused and ##nfounded with this alien folk #me out of Poland and the Uk##ine.In “Writ of Divorcement,” one of ### least successful stories, Mr. #ewisohn excoriates the assimilated #pe of American Jew, feminine #nder; the type which, by its #evered quest for social acceptance ### Gentiles, wishes to suppress in #elf any sense of Jewishness. The #ndency of the social-climber Mr. #wisohn links with the almost neu##tic aversion, as expressed in his #male villain, to home and family. It is to be hoped by his best friends and well-wishers that Mr. Lewisohn will eventually liberate himself from the oppressive memory of his own undoubtedly unhappy marriage. That #emory continues, I think, to color ### good deal that he has been writing ### the subject of marriage.

“The Romantic” is the story of a #pathian nobleman, nominally a ##tholic, an exile from his home in #oreign capital because of his op##sition to the vicious Fascist government in power. He is a lover of ### and justice. Tricked into returning to his home, he is arrested and charged with treason. He discovers finally that despite three generations of assimilation, despite his nominal Catholicism and the fact that he is a member of the nobility and of the right clubs, he does not “belong” in the essential sense. He is a Jew and a stranger and, as such he dies. The story is as romantic as the title and can exercise but slight hold on the average American Jew for the simple reason that we cannot refer the incidents in the story to any reality whereof we know.

“By the Waters of Babylon” is a lovely re-telling of the story of Esther, Mordecai and Haman, but the loveliness of the story is not derived from any poetic license exercised by the author. I think that the individual accent in Mr. Lewisohn’s version of the Biblical story lies in the manner in which he depicts Mordecai subtly manoeuvering to awake in the bitter heart of Esther a sense of identity with her own people, whom eventually she saves.

I think it is possible that in such stories as “By the Waters of Babylon” will Mr. Lewisohn, as a Jew, find his emotional metier, if we may link such words. I recall “The Last Days of Shylock,” wherein, with rare imaginative power, Mr. Lewisohn carried on the story of the Merchant of Venice from the point where Shakespeare left it. In Mr. Lewisohn Jewish story and legend has an artist worthy of their potentialities.