In appropriating the title of the 1972 Rolling Stones album for his scholarly book, Julian Levinson makes a funny allusion and a serious point: In America, voices interact and blend—the voices of various media, the voices of high and low culture, and the voices of different languages and traditions. Joining the growing number of scholars who study in particular how Jewishness and Americanness have interacted, Levinson argues in this superb study that Jewish American writers and American literary culture have often met advantageously, resulting in new understandings of Jewish identity and, in turn, aesthetic and political innovation. Levinson has been crafting and refining his argument since 2000, when he completed his Columbia dissertation on postwar Jewish American literature. The book's riches and wisdom reflect its long development, while its language reads with the clarity and wit of a fresh take. Levinson traces the encounters of self-identified American Jews with American literary culture from Emma Lazarus to Irving Howe, a range that embraces Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, and Alfred Kazin. The book is divided into four chronological sections.

Part 1 focuses on Emma Lazarus and Mary Antin, two founding mothers of Jewish American literature. Both were influenced by transcendentalism, whose emphasis on the private self corresponded with Victorian associations with femininity and, for women, did not compete, as it did for Jewish men, with rabbinic culture. Lazarus's early writing, encouraged by Ralph Waldo Emerson, emphasizes inspiration and nature and matures to an engagement with Jewish history, Hebrew, and the Jewish Bible. Levinson shows that Lazarus's work begins in the Emersonian mode and ends in the Hawthornian—locating a deity not in the present and nature, but in history and religion. In his study of Antin, Levinson shows that this poster child for assimilation, whose writing was influenced by Emerson and Walt Whitman, in fact gained a deeper Jewish sensibility as she wrote her spiritual autobiography, The Promised Land (1912). And Antin sought in her fiction to express her ambiguous feelings about the shtetl life of her past.

Part 2 concerns Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, and Anzia Yezierska, all of whom spoke out politically and creatively in the interwar period. As a teenager, Lewisohn considered himself a Southern gentleman and a believing Christian. He transformed into a Jewish New Yorker after facing antisemitism at Columbia University and subsequently befriending the “Young American” writers of Greenwich Village, among them Waldo Frank. Lewisohn publicized his own Jewishness in the somber autobiography Up Stream (1922) and became a culture critic and novelist, urging Zionism and praising the unassimilated foreigner as exemplifying American idealism. Similarly, Waldo Frank entered college as a self-described “Jew without Judaism,” and he found in Greenwich Village and American literature—especially in the work of Whitman—a prompt to embrace and merge Judaism with cultural criticism. Though Frank's published writings on Judaism are few, Levinson mines them and Frank's private notebooks for strong evidence that Frank saw the Jew as a mystical prophet, one whose mission overlapped with that of the model American, “the spiritually awakened believer in democracy and human solidarity.” Frank sought in his novels—for instance, Rahab (1922)—to convey Jewish mysticism in a lyrical, modernist form similar to that of Virginia Woolf. Anzia Yezierska's writing shares the political subversion and experimental aesthetics of Lewisohn and Frank, though her life paralleled the immigration experience of her contemporary Mary Antin. Levinson explores Yezierska's relationship with John Dewey, and he shows that she associated Judaism with striving, intensity, and prophecy. The chapters in Part 2 on Frank and Lewisohn are especially strong, and they go some way toward giving these writers the attention they merit.

Part 3 presents a brief history of Yiddish poetry in America, concentrating on the translations of Walt Whitman into Yiddish and of abundant Yiddish literature into English. Levinson demonstrates that Yiddish poets, lacking a long literary ancestry, redeemed the situation by drawing on other literary traditions to forge a unique voice. For example, I. J. Schwartz drew on his familiarity with Whitman and the Bible to write a Yiddish epic called Kentucky (1925), about a Jewish pioneer in the American wilderness. Levinson's sensitive translation and close reading of certain passages illuminate this striking work.

In Part 4, Levinson assesses postwar Jewish literature by deemphasizing the sociological context and instead studying the deliberate creative processes of Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. In so doing, Levinson follows the method of Kazin himself, who argued in On Native Grounds (1942) that literature should be read on its own terms, independent of any critical orthodoxy, and that American literature has always been one of revolt against any limitation. Levinson traces Kazin's voice of protest from the latter's literary criticism to his 1943 appeals in The New Republic on behalf of Eastern European Jewry, to his 1951 lyrical memoir, A Walker in the City. Levinson identifies Kazin's spirituality as one of “Romantic Judaism,” shared by Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Howe, and based on “inwardness, spiritual agon, emotional intensity, and striving” (168). Levinson's language, always elegant, in this chapter ascends to the poetic. In one moving passage, he celebrates “Romantic Judaism” as a counter to T. S. Eliot's concern with cultural breakdown and crisis. Levinson writes, “Romanticism, with its secularized language of transcendence, offers … a way to reaffirm the relevance of Jewish tradition even for contemporary Jews for whom conventional forms of belief and practice have become untenable. And with this reaffirmation, they gain a purchase on some kind of permanence, a stay against apocalypse” (170).

While Kazin's romanticism emphasizes transcendence, Howe's emphasizes the Jewish past. After World War II, Howe turned from writing about Southern regionalism to promulgating the literature of Yiddishkayt, in which he saw themes common to Southern American literature: the dignity of failure and the aesthetic fertility of a dying culture. He also found in Yiddishkayt the humanity and fraternity he had sought in the socialist movement. With Eliezer Greenberg, Howe published A Treasury of Yiddish Stories and several subsequent anthologies. Levinson explains that Howe believed that “when the shtetl begins to break apart … this period of breakdown is a uniquely productive and dynamic period in Jewish history, in a which a secular literary culture began to take shape” (181).

Kazin's emphasis on the “productive,” the fruits of a culture clash rather than the losses, coincides with Levinson's own emphasis. “Productive” is a word that recurs in the chapter and book, as, for instance, when Levinson writes that the burst of fiction resulting from Jewish American writers' involvement with Howe and Greenberg's work indicates “the productive role of translation in the unfolding of Jewish literary culture in America after the war” (188). Other affirmative words abound, including reclaim, recover, reaffirm, transform, and their noun equivalents. As the re- prefixes of many of these words suggest, what Jewish writers often found productive in the American experience was a prompt to return to Judaism—to remember the Jewish past and its literature and to draw on it for aesthetic inspiration and political guidance. Although the writers in this book understand Jewishness with differing regards for spirituality, morality, race, and Zionism, all understand Jewishness as involving a sense of history and continuity. And while some of Levinson's subjects occupy the role of Emersonian visionary (Lazarus, Antin, Frank, Schwartz), and some occupy the role of “Jewish Romantic” (Howe, Kazin), all occupy the biblical role of prophet—in other words, an exile calling to the crowd on Main Street. These writers “triumph over amnesia,” writes Levinson, “to instill a sense of hope” (198).

This book is a welcome celebration of the relationship between America and Jewish American writers. Each reader will think of writers whom Levinson might have addressed (I think of Arthur A. Cohen, a theologian and novelist on whom Levinson has written elsewhere). But this proves the book's strength, not its weakness: the thesis is so strong as to inspire extension. And extension there will surely be, for Exiles on Main Street provides an absorbing education that will endure.