The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn by Ralph Melnick

Author:Ralph Melnick [Melnick, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures
ISBN: 9780814326923
Google: kVulUT-HfTcC
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 1998-01-15T15:59:45+00:00

15

Teshuvah

LUDWIG AND THELMA BEGAN their return from the East as they had ended it, boarding the westward train from Jerusalem to Cairo on November 8, 1924. Arriving in Cairo that evening, he sent a note of thanks to Gershon Agronsky, Jerusalem journalist and that city’s future mayor, asking that he pass along their appreciation and thanks to all who had befriended them during their visit. Having failed to meet Colonel Frederick Kisch, a former British soldier now serving as head of the Jewish Agency’s political department in Jerusalem, he further asked Agronsky to send him the title of Kisch’s well-received Hebrew textbook.1 Ludwig’s life had, indeed, been transformed. “Every Jew can find himself,” he wrote in concluding Israel. “I have done so. Not everyone need go on so long a pilgrimage,” though, clearly, his journey had had an inestimable impact upon him. “But everyone can come home to himself and to Israel.”2

Two days after leaving Jerusalem, they disembarked in Trieste, then passed through Austria (perhaps briefly visiting their new Viennese friends), and arrived in Czechoslovakia on November 12.3 After an unrecorded period of further travels, they came to Rome to visit historic sites made obligatory for Ludwig by his journey to Jerusalem. “There are three ways of life in the Western World: the Pagan, the Christian, the Jewish,”4 he wrote four years later when tracing the spiritual progress of those days. He had seen the land in which the latter was rooted, and, as if to confirm the vision of himself within it, now sought out what he believed to be the most authentic expressions of those two other traditions he had once tried to make his own.

That Ludwig again recalled his Charleston days while in Rome, as he had in Tel Aviv weeks earlier, was not surprising. How else might his imaginative powers have reconciled his past without somehow placing himself within it? Thirty-five miles north of Rome, while passing through the town of Orvieto set along the Tiber, “there stole into my mind a forgotten and now suddenly recovered hour of long ago. I saw a bright Queenshaven college classroom; I saw the faces, blurred and a little featureless as in a dream, of my classmates and heard across the years the high slightly hoarse voice of our professor: ‘Credat Judaeus Apella!’”5 Here were all the elements for a breakthrough of Freudian proportions—Queenshaven, the city of his mother, the one person who provided his only link to an otherwise discarded tradition; the college, opening Western civilization to him for study, but not as a place in which he could reside; his classmates, who recognized his brilliance but found him socially unacceptable; and the professor, whom he held in highest regard but who looked upon the best student of his teaching years as a challenge of recreation, remaking the Jew into a higher Christian form. And finally, there were the words of Horace, whose writing Ludwig had chosen and had so ably and conscientiously translated as his high school

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