Ludwig Lewisohn’s 1927 book found an unexpected reader nearly a century after it was published: an Indian lawyer and trade unionist, writing a review of it by hand from inside a Mumbai jail cell. The review, published in The Wire in August 2020 under the title “Ludwig Lewisohn’s 1927 Book Has Lessons for Indian Minorities Today: A Review From Jail,” is a genuine piece of literary journalism connecting a German-Jewish writer’s interwar reflections on culture and barbarism to present-day debates about minority rights in India.
A Review Written by Hand in Byculla Jail
The reviewer was Sudha Bharadwaj, a lawyer and trade unionist who had worked for over three decades with labor and land-rights movements in Chhattisgarh. In August 2018, Bharadwaj was among a group of lawyers, writers, and activists arrested under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in what became known as the Bhima Koregaon, or Elgar Parishad, case. Bharadwaj was born in Massachusetts in 1961 to an academic family, trained in mathematics at IIT Kanpur, and moved to Chhattisgarh in the 1980s, where she spent decades working with the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, a trade union and workers’ rights organization, before qualifying as a lawyer to represent labourers and land-rights activists in court. She spent more than three years in pretrial detention before a special court granted her bail in December 2021. According to the review’s editorial note, she wrote the piece on Lewisohn by hand in Mumbai’s Byculla Jail a month before publication, while family and friends typed up the handwritten text for submission, and while she was also being treated for a heart condition discovered during her incarceration.
Who Was Reading Lewisohn, and Why
That a detained Indian activist chose to spend her limited time and resources on a nearly century-old book by a German-Jewish American writer says as much about Lewisohn’s subject matter as it does about her own circumstances. The review’s framing, an exploration of Jewishness written well before the Holocaust that shows how fraternity and solidarity are necessary to overcome majoritarianism and fascism, treats Lewisohn’s interwar observations as directly relevant to a contemporary Indian audience thinking about how minority communities survive periods of political pressure.
Ludwig Lewisohn, From Assimilation to Zionism
Lewisohn himself lived exactly the kind of identity journey his books explored. Born in Berlin in 1882 to an assimilated, upper-middle-class Jewish family, he emigrated with his parents to South Carolina as a child and was raised largely outside organized Jewish life, attending a Methodist Sunday school and integrating into a Methodist community. It was a professional humiliation that redirected him: in 1904, newly graduated from Columbia University, he was told plainly by his academic advisers that no American university would hire a Jew to teach English literature. That rejection pushed Lewisohn back toward Judaism and, over the following decades, turned him into one of the most outspoken literary critics of American Jewish assimilation, eventually making him an honorary secretary of the Zionist Organization of America and, later, editor of the Zionist journal New Palestine.
He built a substantial literary career around that trajectory, working as drama critic and then associate editor at The Nation through the 1920s, teaching German and comparative literature at Ohio State University and, from 1948 until his death in 1955, at the newly founded Brandeis University. His fiction, including the celebrated 1928 novel The Island Within, drew admiration from figures including Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, even as his increasingly open Zionist and Jewish subject matter cost him standing in parts of the mainstream American literary world.
The Island Within in particular traced a Jewish American family across generations as it negotiated the pressures of assimilation, a subject close enough to Lewisohn’s own biography that critic John Chamberlain predicted at the time it would rank among the finest American novels of its decade.
Writing in Commentary magazine decades later, critic Norman Podhoretz went so far as to argue that Lewisohn became something close to a nonperson in American literary circles once he began writing openly and sympathetically about Jewish and Zionist subject matter, a judgment echoed earlier by novelist Meyer Levin, who counted Lewisohn among a small group of American Jewish writers whose careers were constrained by an industry with limited appetite for explicitly Jewish material. Lewisohn also worked as a translator, bringing the German-language work of Gerhart Hauptmann, Jakob Wassermann, and Franz Werfel to English-language readers, further situating him as a bridge figure between German literary culture and an American Jewish readership increasingly aware of the political currents building in Europe.
Cities and Men and the Shadow of Rising Fascism
The specific 1927 book under review, Cities and Men, published by Harper & Brothers, is a collection of literary essays and travel reflections rather than a novel, built around Lewisohn’s observations of European cities including Vienna, Berlin, and Venice. Its best-known section, the essay “Culture and Barbarism,” weighs the achievements of European civilization against the political currents already visible in the mid-1920s that would soon curdle into fascism. Writing years before the Holocaust, Lewisohn was already treating the fragility of minority life under rising nationalism as a subject worth serious literary attention, which is precisely the quality that made the book legible to a 21st-century Indian reader thinking about her own country’s treatment of religious and political minorities.
Scholars have continued to return to that essay long after its initial publication; a 2007 study in the Shofar-adjacent literary scholarship on Lewisohn’s career, examining what its author called “the case of Mr. Lewisohn,” specifically cites “Culture and Barbarism” as a key statement of Lewisohn’s mature thinking on the relationship between European high culture and the political violence that culture proved unable to prevent, a scholarly afterlife that suggests the book’s relevance to Bharadwaj’s 2020 review was not an isolated or eccentric reading but part of a longer pattern of the essay being revisited whenever questions of culture, nationalism, and minority safety resurface.
That pattern extends well beyond academic literature departments. Each time a society debates how far a cultural or religious minority can be pressured to conform before something essential is lost, essays like Lewisohn’s resurface as a kind of common reference point, precisely because they were written by someone who had personally lived through both sides of that question, first as a young man who tried to assimilate away his Jewish identity entirely, and later as a public intellectual who spent the rest of his career arguing that the attempt had been a mistake.
A Longer Argument With Assimilation
Cities and Men did not stand alone in Lewisohn’s body of work; it sat between two of his more explicitly Jewish-themed books, the 1925 nonfiction work Israel and the 1928 novel The Island Within, both of which argue, in different registers, against the idea that Jewish identity should or could be quietly dissolved into a surrounding majority culture. His earlier 1922 memoir, Up Stream, had already made the case autobiographically, describing his own early rejection of Jewish identity and the discrimination that eventually reversed it. Read together, these books form a sustained argument that assimilation offers minorities no lasting safety, only a slower and more painful confrontation with the same exclusion, a theme evidently resonant enough to travel from 1920s America and Europe into a 2020 Indian prison cell.
None of these books argue that minority communities should retreat into isolation. If anything, Lewisohn’s recurring point, echoed in the review’s own emphasis on fraternity and solidarity, is that minorities survive periods of majoritarian pressure not by disappearing quietly into the surrounding culture and not by withdrawing from public life, but by building alliances, cultural confidence, and solidarity with other groups facing similar pressure, a lesson Bharadwaj’s review explicitly extended from 1920s Europe to contemporary India.
Why a Review of a 1927 Book Resonated in a 2020 Indian Jail
The review’s publication drew attention less for its literary criticism than for the circumstances of its writing, and it circulated widely among journalists, academics, and civil liberties advocates following the Bhima Koregaon case, several of whom highlighted it as evidence of Bharadwaj’s continued intellectual engagement while in custody. Bharadwaj was arrested alongside several other lawyers, writers, and academics in a coordinated set of raids and arrests that drew international press coverage, including from the Washington Post, over concerns about the use of a strict anti-terror law against government critics; the Bhima Koregaon case’s investigation was itself later transferred from Maharashtra state police to the federal National Investigation Agency, a move that became part of the broader public debate around the prosecution. Whatever view one takes of the case itself, which remained the subject of ongoing legal proceedings well after her release on bail, the review stands on its own as a piece of literary criticism, one small illustration of how a Jewish writer’s century-old meditation on culture and barbarism found new readers, and new relevance, in an entirely different minority context on the other side of the world.
Further Reading
- Sudha Bharadwaj, “Ludwig Lewisohn’s 1927 Book Has Lessons for Indian Minorities Today: A Review From Jail,” The Wire, August 2020
- Ludwig Lewisohn, Wikipedia
- The Absence of Jewish Studies in India: Creating a New Awareness