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That his neurotic or paranoiac fictions had a universal appeal does not undermine the extent to which they were the product of a particular Jewish man’s experience of alienation. Like Sholem Aleichem’s Motl, in Motl, the Cantor’s Son, Karl is Kafka’s vehicle for speculating about the question of whether America would be the solution to the world’s, and the Jews’, problems. That a world master addressed this issue, in characteristic form, testifies to the increasing centrality of America in the story of the Jews at the start of the 20th century. Further reading: Kafka’s works, most of which were published posthumously— his novels, The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), and shorter fictions like “The Metamorphosis” (1915) and “The Hunger Artist” (1924)—are prominent among the acknowledged classics of modern world literature. His letters and diaries, available in various collected editions, make captivating reading, too. Biographies of this major figure abound, ranging in approach and depth. Philip Roth’s story “ ‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka” (1973) imagines what might have happened if Kafka himself had ended up in the United States, as does one story, “Receding Horizon,” in Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz’s collection of fictional homages to Kafka, Kafka Americana (1999). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17pThe Island Within By Ludwig Lewisohn HARPER AND BROTHERS, 1928. 350 PAGES. One could carp that Ludwig Lewisohn always wrote about his own peculiar situation, even when his ostensible subjects were social movements, ancient eras, or distant lands. Luckily, Lewisohn was a thoroughly intriguing personality and a brilliant thinker, so reading about his personal dilemmas never grows tiresome. He grew up in Berlin and South Carolina, received a master’s degree when he was 19, partied with James Joyce in Paris, and was psychoanalyzed by Freud. Through all of it—except for a brief assimilationist phase in his youth, which he soon saw as childish folly—he remained passionate and uncompromising about his identity as a Jew and an American. An extraordinarily prolific career as an author, editor, translator, poet, essayist, and lecturer spanning the first half of the 20th century makes him one of the paramount figures of Jewish literature, and Jewish history, in the United States. The Island Within (1928) is a sensible place to start exploring Lewisohn’s legacy, as it is a wide-ranging grab bag of many of the themes and motifs that would occupy him throughout his career, tied together by Lewisohn’s stately prose and perspective. The central narrative concerns Arthur Levy, a native New Yorker and stand-in for the author who grows up in a thoroughly assimilated but still Jewish home only to discover, after his marriage to a Christian minister’s daughter, that neglecting his Jewish heritage leads directly to neurosis and anxiety: “It’s a kind of an argument, isn’t it, against 33 Titles American Jewish Fiction mixed marriages?” his wife asks him at one point, and he replies, “One among many others.” Yet Arthur meets Elizabeth only two thirds of the way through the book; Lewisohn’s tale begins much earlier, in the year 1840, with Arthur’s pious greatgrandfather . Through the generations, Lewisohn tracks the family’s drift from Jewish insularity and religious belief to secular culture and society. In addition, Lewisohn starts each of the novel’s sections with an essayistic meditation on Jewish and world history (“But we have paid two-and-a-half dollars for a story, not for a treatise!” he imagines his readers reacting to the first of these); and Arthur’s decision to join a fact-finding mission on the situation of Jews in Eastern Europe is influenced by an ancient text, belonging to his ancestors, that describes in detail the martyrdom of medieval Jews during the Crusades. In each of these generically diverse texts, which are stitched together into one more or less coherent book, Lewisohn approaches the question of Jewish distinctiveness and survival from a slightly different direction; and at the same time, Arthur’s work as a psychologist in New York allows Lewisohn to include Freudian notions about sex and marriage, while he even finds a little space to discuss German culture in America. Though occasionally pedagogical, Lewisohn acknowledges that there are no easy answers—even the difficult ones he comes up with tend to be somewhat vague at best. His status as a foremost representative of intellectual culture in the United States, and an indispensable voice of modern Jewish thought...

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