“I Shan't Let You Shirk!”: Sidney Nyburg's “The Chosen People” and Reform Judaism of the Early Twentieth Century

Sidney Nyburgs 1917 novel, The Chosen People, has much to teach us about the conflicts facing American Reform Judaism during the first decades of the twentieth century. Compared favorably at the time with Abraham Cahans now-canonical The Rise of David Levinsky, Nyburgs book was called "one of the most discussed of [Jewish] novels," by Joseph Mersands important 1939 study of Jewish American fiction (115). Since then, however, the novel has descended into obscurity, with only a handful of scholars (Stanley Chyet, Jules Chametzky, and David Martin Fine make almost a complete list) taking the time to explore the novel in writing. Partially this is because of the novels setting in Baltimore, outside the most well-documented centers of Jewish life in New York and perhaps Chicago. More important, The Chosen People does not fit into the theme of alienation and despondency that most critics have sought out in fiction of the first decades of the twentieth century. The ironic portraits of Cahan, the poignant melodrama of Anzia Yezierska, and the vivid tirades of Michel Gold have garnered far greater attention and readership, in large part because of their outcry against the poverty and cultural breakdown that accompanied many immigrant lives and that later critics highlighted as precedents for subsequent ethnic fiction of social concern. Critical neglect of Nyburgs novel is unfortunate b cause, while taking nothing away from the importance of Yezierska, Gold, and Cahan, Nyburg s nuanced view of the Jewish community and cultural identity is unique among Jewish writers of this period. The Chosen People represents a singularly insightful position regarding the role of Jews in modern American life, and reflects a position grounded in Reform Jewish ideology that has yet to be fully explored in studies of Jewish American fiction. Nyburg himself was the grandson of Dutch Jewish immigrants, and a member of one of Baltimores elite Jewish families. Alawyer specializing in "corporation and mercantile aw,"1 Nyburg also "conducted the Free Legal Clinic of the Jewish Charities"2 of Baltimore and was, as The Bookman reports, "very active in progressive