“Though [Ludwig] Lewisohn lacked to a remarkable degree the ability to look beyond his own ideas,” wrote the literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin, “he had at least one paramount service to perform, and he failed in it as much for reasons beyond his control as through his own rigidity of mind and supreme lack of humility. For what Lewisohn was always declaiming, out of his self-consciousness in America and his Hebraism, was . . . that if a writer is not rooted in a native culture, if he does not belong or find happiness in his belonging, he is nothing.”See Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), pp. 280–281.