In the course of the interwar period ethnic literature proliferated, turned to new themes, and developed a new tone. Among many other influences, Freud, Marx, and Hemingway made their presence felt in some of the new writing. Freudian issues were brought to the fore, for example, by the German Jewish immigrant and critic Ludwig Lewisohn whose marriage-as-hell novel The Case of Mr. Crump (1926) was termed “an incomparable masterpiece” by no less a person than Freud himself; and in his introduction Thomas Mann places Lewisohn – who also published the autobiographies Up Stream (1922) and The Island Within (1929) – “in the forefront of modern epic narrative” and praises him for his “manly style,” his “dry and desperate humor,” and his characterization: “even the woman, Anne Crump, remains human in all her repulsiveness,” Mann comments.

Lewisohn’s little-known novel The Vehement Flame: The Story of Stephen Escott (1930) was a particularly noteworthy attempt to represent the theme of repressed sexuality in the interaction among Jews and gentiles in New York at the turn of the century. The narrator is the lower-middle-class Southern Christian Stephen Escott (who is symbolically positioned between his Jewish immigrant hometown friend David Sampson and the upper-class Oliver Clayton). Stephen and David work as law partners in Manhattan; Oliver is a genteel publisher who is shocked by modernist literature. Their differing attitudes toward sexuality, class-based expectations of life’s rewards, and art come to a head in a traumatic murder trial of the Freud-savvy, avant-garde Greenwich Village poet Paul Glover, who publishes in the Little Review and Poetry, embodies the modern defiance of aesthetic and sexual conventions, yet kills Jasper Harris for having an affair with Paul’s wife Janet.