From the universal to the particular : Ludwig Lewisohn's imagined community

The American writer Ludwig Lewisohn (1883-1955) was a cosmopolitan man of letters and an outspoken advocate of both Jewish cultural nationalism and sexual freedom. The Island Within (1928) is a family chronicle, tracing the history of the Levy family from Vilna to Prussia, and from Germany to America. Arthur Levy, the first in the family to be born in America, lives in New York and becomes a psychiatrist. As a highly-educated, assimilated Jew, he learns, the hard way, that American cameraderie does not extend, like Whitman’s, to all mankind, or even to all Americans. He comes to understand that to be human one has to be a certain kind of human being, that men are not born as abstract individuals nor as members of the general human family, and he sets out to discover his Jewish past. The Island Within is a critique of intermarriage and assimilation, but also a manifesto in favour of Jewish singularity, and in the final analysis of all singularity.