The Island Within

The novelist and critic Ludwig Lewisohn was born in Berlin but came to the United States in 1890. He was raised and educated in Charleston, South Carolina, where he adapted to Southern ways and became a Christian. While doing graduate work in English literature at Columbia University, he was told that he would never teach in an English department in the United States because he was a Jew. His bitter disappointment, as well as the anti-German prejudice he faced during World War I, led him to embrace his Jewishness and become a harsh critic of American Jewish assimilation, a central theme in his memoirs and his best-selling novel The Island Within (1928). In Europe in the mid-1920s, to which he had fled with a young woman half his age, leaving his wife behind, he became a Zionist and was analyzed by Sigmund Freud. He was appointed professor of comparative literature at Brandeis University at its founding in 1948.