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

Abstract

“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).