Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture »

Julian Levinson is the Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture — in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman — led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.

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Levinson's well-researched book makes a significant contribution to studies of Jewish American literature and Jewish cultural continuity. . . . Highly recommended.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
Breathing Free in the New World: Transcendentalism and the Jewish Soul     13
Songs of a Semite: Emma Lazarus and the Muse of History     16
Ecstasies of the Credulous: Mary Antin and the Spirit of the Shtetl     37
Battling the Nativists: Mystics, Prophets, and Rebels in Interwar America     53
"Pilgrim to a Forgotten Shrine": Ludwig Lewisohn and the Recovery of the Inner Jew     56
Modernist Flasks, Jewish Wine: Waldo Frank and the Immanence of God     76
Cinderella's Dybbuk: Anzia Yezierska as the Voice of Generations     93
Yiddish Interlude     119
From Heine to Whitman: The Yiddish Poets Come to America     121
"Orating in New Yorkese": The Languages of Jewishness in Postwar America     143
"My Private Orthodoxy": Alfred Kazin's Romantic Judaism     147
The Jewish Writer Flies at Twilight: Irving Howe and the Recovery of Yiddishkayt     171
Conclusion     192
Notes     201
Index     225