Sudha Bharadwaj, who was imprisoned in Mumbai’s Byculla Jail for a month, wrote the following critique by hand. Bharadwaj was diagnosed with heart disease as her friends and family were typing the text for potential publication. Appeals for her bail are still pending while she remains imprisoned in an overcrowded prison based on disputed allegations related to her alleged role in the Elgar Parishad case.
When Ludwig Lewisohn’s philosophical novel The Defeated arrived from the jail library, I was desperate for reading material. I didn’t recognize the title or the author. The chronicle of numerous generations of Jews traveling from Russia to Germany and America was first published in 1927. It speaks with great empathy, pain, and sensitivity not so much of Jewish society as of the inner struggles of individuals of successive generations as they deal with the continuing discrimination they face in various forms; how they try to cope with their “Jewishness” in various ways – through mimicry, self-hatred, flights of fancy, cutting off their roots, anger, and religious conversion; and how the ultimate protagonist, Arthur, comes to terms with his Jewishness by accepting it.
Source: https://www.thewire.in/books/ludwig-lewisohn-the-defeated-sudha-bharadwaj
