Irving Litvag. Commodore Levy: a Novel of Early America in the Age of Sail. Edited by Bonny V. Fetterman. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014. 672 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-89672-881-3.
Reviewed by Marc Leepson (Lord Fairfax Community College)
Published on H-Judaic (November, 2014)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus (University of Cincinnati)
Imagining Uriah Levy
Uriah Phillips Levy is perhaps the most celebrated member of one of the nation’s most celebrated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jewish American families. Levy was born in Philadelphia in 1792, a fifth-generation American. His great-great grandfather, Dr. Samuel Nunez, was among forty-two Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition who arrived in Savannah, Georgia, in 1733.
Uriah Levy’s maternal grandfather, Jonas Phillips, joined a Philadelphia militia unit during the American Revolution, and later petitioned the Continental Congress for religious freedom for Jews. One of his daughters, Rachel Phillips, married the German immigrant Michael Levy in Philadelphia in June 1787. A description of their wedding—believed to be the first recorded of a Jewish wedding ceremony in the New World—was written in a June 27, 1787, letter by Dr. Benjamin Rush. Levy family tradition holds that George Washington attended the wedding.
Uriah Levy joined the U.S. Navy in 1812 to fight in the war against England. He served with distinction as assistant sailing master of the ship Argus. Levy went on to become the first Jewish American to make a full career as a U.S. Navy officer, reaching the highest rank at the time, commodore, when he died in service in 1862.
Uriah Levy was an intelligent, ambitious, tempestuous, bold, extravagant, physically powerful man who was a success in virtually every endeavor he undertook. He also was quick to take offense, often acted on impulse, and had an exalted opinion of himself that he was not shy about expressing. Levy was court martialed six times (typically, after he responded physically to an anti-Semitic verbal attack) and killed a man who called him “a damned Jew” in a duel. He also was instrumental in having flogging abolished in the navy. An ardent admirer of Thomas Jefferson, Levy purchased Monticello in 1834, and set about making much-needed repairs, saving it from physical ruin.
Levy’s legacy—aside from saving Monticello—includes having a World War II destroyer escort named after him, as well as the Commodore Levy Chapel at the Navy Station in Norfolk, Virginia, and the U.S. Naval Academy's Uriah P. Levy Jewish Center and Chapel in Annapolis. His full-length oil portrait is on display in the Naval Academy’s museum.
Levy’s life has been well told in Ira Dye’s Uriah Levy: Reformer of the Antebellum Navy (2006). His life and work at Monticello are central to my book, Saving Monticello: The Levy Family’s Epic Quest to Rescue the House That Jefferson Built (2001; 2003). Levy was less well served in a 1963 biography, Navy Maverick, by Donovan Fitzpatrick and Saul Saphire, which is filled with speculative and poorly sourced information.
Irving Litvag, a former news writer for the CBS Radio Network and a long-time public relations executive, used the unreliable Navy Maverick as “a road map and guide” (p. 621) for his Commodore Levy, which he describes as “neither biography nor a work of history” (p. 619). Instead, Litvag, who died in 2005, produced a long novel replete with one invented character and oceans of made-up dialogue. Finished with the help of Bonny V. Fetterman, the book gets most of the important facts of Levy’s long life correct. Since this is a historical novel with large amounts of fanciful writing, it would be unfair to expect a completely true picture of the man’s life. Even so, while a certain amount of leeway should be allowed a historical novel, there simply are too many imagined conversations, too much labeling of emotions, and far too much speculative scene setting.
For example, there is a made-up scene in 1833 in which Levy goes to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to see a man named Thomas Hall, who “was endeavoring to raise money to put Monticello back into the hands of Martha Randolph” (p.436). Levy gives Hall a year to buy the place (which had been sold in 1831) or, he says, “I will do all I can to be its owner” (p. 438). Not only is there no evidence that this event ever took place, but there was no Thomas Hall. The Randolphs were approached by a man only identified in family letters as “Mr. Hart,” but never trusted the man and spurned his offer to help them financially.
The book contains at least one important inaccuracy: Litvag devotes an entire chapter to Levy’s imprisonment at the infamous Dartmoor Prison in England, where some 1,500 American and French prisoners died during the War of 1812. The chapter contains lots of dialogue and a long letter that the author imagines Levy wrote to his mother. The main problem is that Levy was not imprisoned at Dartmoor, as Ira Dye’s research proved conclusively. The Dartmoor fiction comes from the unreliable Navy Maverick, and has been repeated in virtually every other secondary source that recounts this episode in Levy’s life. It’s a compelling story of survival and part of the iconography of the life of Uriah Phillips Levy, but is not true. Levy was captured by the British, along with his other shipmates, but he soon was released and spent the rest of the time on parole in a small English town of Ashburton, along with several hundred other American and French officers.
Another flight of fancy involves Litvag’s apologetic handling of the issue of Levy’s slave owning. Levy purchased several slaves in Virginia after he took control of Monticello. Litvag, clearly a Levy champion, explains this less-than-heroic episode by inventing the following dialogue between Uriah Levy and his mother Rachel, whom he moved to Monticello to live out her days in 1836:
“Uriah, must you keep slaves here? Oh, your grandfather would be so unhappy over this … and your father as well.”
“Mr. Jefferson kept slaves, Mama.”
“But you are not Mr. Jefferson, or have you forgotten that? You belong to a tradition that regards slavery as evil.”
“I know, Mama, I have kept only a small number of them, the ones who have lived here all their lives. These people are better off staying here and working for me than trying to find new places. And I need them to care for the estate” (p. 443).
It is not certain exactly when and where Uriah Levy’s marriage to Virginia Lopez took place. Even Navy Maverick doesn’t hazard a guess, saying only that the wedding took place in “the autumn of 1853.” Litvak sets his detailed imagined wedding scene on “the last Sunday in October” of 1853 in “the grand parlor of Uriah’s house on St. Marks’ Place” (p. 535). On that occasion, Litvak writes, the room “was crowded beyond comfort with family members and friends.” Levy wore “his magnificent captain’s dress uniform,” and Virginia “began to cry softly and continued to do throughout the brief ceremony” (p. 537).
That chapter and many other parts of this book are very interesting--if, as Gertrude Stein reputedly said, true. This, therefore, is not the book to go to for a completely factual look at Uriah Levy’s life. As far as its literary merit is concerned, Litvak did a credible job. It’s not War and Peace, but contains well-imagined vignettes that highlight the often dramatic life and times of a noteworthy figure in Jewish American history.
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Citation:
Marc Leepson. Review of Litvag, Irving, Commodore Levy: a Novel of Early America in the Age of Sail.
H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42313
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