The Rise of David Levinsky (2 page)

He promised to tell in a subsequent volume of the autobiography how the book-length and final version of
The Rise of David Levinsky
developed from these sketches. That story, alas, was never written, though Cahan lived for twenty more years after the final volume of his memoirs appeared. Much intervened in the years between the composition of the sketches and the novel—but at this point perhaps we should step back and look somewhat more fully at who Abraham Cahan was, what he had achieved, what he represents. Then I will discuss some problematic matters connected with the publication in
McClure’s,
prelude to a discussion of the major themes and significance of the final novel and its importance as a great Jewish-American and American classic.

 

 

Abraham Cahan was born on July 7. 1860, in a small village near Vilna in Lithuania, a center of Jewish learning as well as a crossroads of several cultures (Polish, Lithuanian, German) and then part of czarist Russia. His grandfather was a rabbi, his father a clerk and teacher of small children. After some years of traditional Jewish education, Cahan taught himself enough Russian to attend the Vilna Teachers Institute from 1877 to 1881; he was certified upon graduation as a teacher in the Jewish Folk Schools (established by the Russians, where the language of instruction was Russian). At the Institute he had abandoned traditional religion and been converted to socialism, and he joined a group that read the revolutionary anticzarist literature of the day. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by a terrorist group produced a wave of repression throughout the Russian empire. Fearing imprisonment, Cahan left his provincial teaching post, crossed the border illegally, and joined a group of Jewish immigrants bound for the United States, where he arrived on June 6, 1881—at the very beginning of the great mass migration of East European Jews to America.

After a short period of work in a cigar factory (in which Samuel Gompers also worked) and then a tin factory, Cahan, ever the Russian radical-intellectual, became caught up in the swirl of radical politics, journalism, and the growing trade-union movement of New York’s Lower East Side. His activities were protean throughout the 1880s and 1890s: He edited and wrote for various socialist journals in English and Yiddish (a language he’d given up in Russia but returned to in the U.S. in order to reach the mass of Yiddish-speaking Jewish workers); he was active in party politics; he helped organize the first garment workers’ unions; he wrote articles for a newspaper in St. Petersburg and for several mainstream American newspapers; and he taught English in night school. With articles on the Dreyfus case, Jewish holidays, czarist oppression, and the Russian radical movement, he became a prime interpreter of Jewish and immigrant life to the wider American public as well as a chief interpreter of American life to his Yiddish readers. This period was capped off by four years at the
Commercial Advertiser
(1897-1901), under the editorship of Lincoln Steffens. This association was important in Cahan’s movement from a rather doctrinaire socialism toward a more pragmatic and evolutionary position and a commitment to “human interest” journalism.

His journalistic career is most often associated with the
Jewish Daily Forward.
That paper began in 1897 as an organ of the Jewish socialist movement in New York, with Cahan as one of its founders and an early editor. Factional disputes and a growing desire to seek a more literary career impelled him to leave the rather claustrophobic world of East Side politics and journalism until 1902, when he was asked to return to the
Forward
and assume full control. This he did, in 1903, and he served, with increasing imperiousness, as its editor until his death in 1951—although actual control had passed to his managing editor in 1946, when Cahan suffered a stroke.

In 1903 the Forward’s circulation was 6,000, and the paper was “moribund, deep in debt,” according to a contemporary account.
³
Within a few months Cahan had tripled the circulation. By 1910, the year of a great jubilee at Carnegie Hall honoring Cahan upon the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, it had become the largest Jewish daily in the world, with a circulation of 100,000; and by the time he began his David Levinsky series it had a circulation of 130, 000. By 1924, the year of the Johnson Act that effectively cut off immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe with its racist quota system, it had reached its highest circulation: about a quarter of a million. The newspaper was probably read, therefore, by over a million people daily.

This growth was due in part to the phenomenal increase in Jewish immigration to the United States during those years. About one and a half million East European Jews entered the country between 1881 and 1910, with the total reaching a little over two million by 1924. But the growth was also due to Cahan’s transformation of the Forward from a sectarian journal to one that could reach masses of people in a familiar language and with features close to their daily concerns.

Cahan created a paper that people could understand and appreciate. He introduced a letters-to-the-editor column, which continues to this day and whose replies (Bintel Brief, or “a bundle of letters”) have become famous as “a book of life”; a page devoted to locating missing or deserting spouses; reports on bread and butter issues, along with crime, violence, and exotica. He balanced efforts at education and improvement with the most blatant sensationalism. The Yiddish used was “plain,” replete with Americanisms that infuriated purists and some high-minded comrades; but the paper also translated major writers (Howells, Flaubert, Tolstoy) and introduced major figures in a Yiddish literature that was just beginning to flourish (from Peretz and Sholem Aleichem at the turn of the century to Sholem Asch, I. J. Singer, and his brother I. B. Singer in the 1920s and 1930s). As the strong-willed editor of the most influential and widely read Yiddish-language newspaper in the world Cahan played a crucial role in the acculturation of the large body of Jewish immigrants.

The socialism Cahan espoused from the late 1890s to the end of his life became watered down, a matter of ideals and inner spirit (a memory trace, perhaps, from the heady days of comradeship and devotion to ideals he’d experienced in his student days in Vilna) rather than anything programmatic or strictly ideological. In formal political terms, he moved from an anarchist and Marxist stance in his early days toward a right-wing social democratic and reformist position. He welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917 but turned against it in 1921, opening the pages of the Forward to anti-Communist material when the murderous policies of the Bolsheviks toward social democracy became unmistakable. He pursued a vigorous anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist position thereafter and became embroiled in many bitter disputes throughout the 1930s. It must be noted, however, that well past the age of seventy he went to cover the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in New Jersey, personally calling in his reports daily from a public telephone. He was a newspaper man of the old school to the end.

 

 

 

In the midst of his busy career as an active public man, Cahan had begun in the 1890s to aspire toward a literary
career—belles lettres,
as he always called it. Literature, especially the works of the great Russian realists who most influenced him (Tolstoy and Chekhov, chiefly), seemed to deal with life more resonantly and to answer a deep spiritual need that was not found in the other parts of his life. Starting tentatively in 1891 with a Yiddish story (which he later translated and published in English), he produced over the next twenty-five years an impressive quantity of long and short fiction, most of it written in English (the language of his literary self, as opposed to the Russian and Yiddish of his intellectual and daily selves), which received respectful attention in its time.

In 1896 he published his first novel—a novella, really—
Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto.
It was a ground-breaking story about an immigrant Jewish garment worker on the Lower East Side, where most newly arrived Jews settled, making it then one of the most densely populated regions in the world. The novel had been encouraged and then warmly reviewed by William Dean Howells, who hailed Cahan (along with Stephen Crane) on the first page of the New York World’s literary section as “a New Star of Realism.”
Yekl-the
basis for the 1977 film
Hester Street—made
Cahan a celebrity briefly, but despite its favorable reception it did not sell well. At the turn of the century realism was not the favored fare of the growing American reading public, who made best-sellers of historical romances, swashbuckling costume melodramas, and sentimental and moralizing fiction.

Nonetheless, Cahan was able to publish a second volume in 1898, a collection of five stories called
The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York.
He published six additional stories in English in leading periodicals between 1899 and 1902, when he returned to the
Forward.
All of these stories deal with the effects of immigration and cultural dislocation. The later ones, especially, sensitively probe immigrant (mostly, but not exclusively, Jewish) feelings of loss, displacement, a yearning for inner authenticity—themes powerfully amplified in
The Rise of David Levinsky.

In 1905 he published his most ambitious novel up to date,
The White Terror and the Red,
about the 1881 assassination of the czar. Of special interest is Cahan’s exploration of the consequences within the Russian radical movement, especially among Jewish intellectuals and revolutionaries who faced existential choices, forced to redefine their positions as the extent and significance of Russian anti-Semitism became evident. The book was prophetic, appearing shortly after the Kishinev massacres and in the wake of the failed 1905 revolution, during which the regime once again fomented anti-Semitism as a diversion for the masses. The events of 1881 and 1905 reaffirmed Cahan’s and many Jewish radicals’ connection to a specifically Jewish fate: an inescapable “particularist” position despite their commitment to universalist ideals. He wrote no more English fiction until asked in 1913 by the editors of
McClure’s
to write his pieces on Jews in business, the genesis of his last and best work of fiction,
The Rise of David Levinsky
(1917).

 

 

The problem alluded to earlier in the publication of the four pieces in
McClure’s
has to do with the vexing question of whether the portrait Cahan presented of his successful businessman was anti-Semitic and grossly unflattering to Jews, confirming stereotypes held by those hostile to the Jewish presence at the time in American life and business. The problem is not easy to resolve completely, for it appears his portrait was used to confirm certain stereotypes and attitudes, though that was not Cahan’s intention, nor was he complicit in certain distortions that occurred in the presentation of the series.

Anxieties about and hostility toward the so-called “new immigration” after 1880—the vast influx of peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe—had been mounting steadily among some “old stock” Americans. An Immigration Restriction League was begun in the 1890s by disgruntled Brahmins; anti-immigrant legislation began after the Senate’s Dillingham Commission Report in 1908, culminating in the severely restrictive legislation of 1920 and 1924.
⁴
One of the chief sources of anxiety and hostility was the increasingly visible immigrant Jewish population crowded into New York’s ethnic neighborhoods, where they seemed so ineffably foreign—alien in speech, manners, values—and a threat to hundred-percent “Americanism.”

Cahan’s earlier work was largely an attempt at explanation, demystifying the newcomers’ “foreignness,” and removing the sense of threat to the wider culture. Indeed, as a recent collection of his journalism in English demonstrates, Cahan was an extraordinary reporter of the variety and richness of the newly emerging multicultural nature of American life, which was to be welcomed rather than feared and which he presented from a warmly sympathetic (though not sentimental) perspective.
⁵

The charge that he’d portrayed a less than flattering portrait of a Jew had appeared earlier in response to Yekl, when certain Jewish readers—chiefly “uptown” German Jews, or
Yahudim,
as Cahan called them—complained that there were, after all, more admirable and smpathetic types among Jews than the rather callow central figure in Yekl. That is certainly true. And it is also true that David Levinsky clearly displays objectionable qualities and characteristics in both the 1913 and 1917 versions. Among these are his sharp business practices (though they seem rather mild and quite comprehensible in contemporary terms), exploitative and cynical labor relations, a frequently unattractive side in his relations with women, and his constant anxiety to become “Americanized” in speech and general deportment, achievements of which he is inordinately proud—the latter the mark of a parvenu.

To all of this Cahan (and we ourselves) could respond with the classic argument of a confirmed realist, which he was from start to finish, in the Russian and American tradition: A concern with depicting people as they are—unidealized, mixed bags of faults and virtues—was the proper stance of a serious and mature writer and his or her public. But the matter cannot lightly rest there, though the argument seems to me a completely valid one.

In fact the plan for the series, as conceived by McClure‘s, appears to be less innocent and even-handed than Cahan’s memoir suggests. At the time it approached him, the magazine had undergone a change in management, and serious reform-inspired social reporting tended to become subordinate to more bottom-line considerations of sales.
⁶
In 1905—that is, in the heyday of an almost national obsession with muckraking news reporting—the magazine had published an article called “The Rise of the Tailors, by Ray Stannard Baker. That essay and its accompanying illustrations are noteworthy for their sympathetic and humanistic approach to the Jewish garment workers’ efforts to organize union shops in the industry—despite succumbing occasionally to stereotypes about Jews not uncommon to progressive reformers. But in March 1913, the month before Cahan’s pieces began to appear, McClure’s published a long piece called ”The Jewish Invasion of America,” by Burton J. Hendrick, the title alone indicating what the article presents in the name of factual reporting. The sequence of subheads reveals the article’s focus, tone, and slant: ”The Conquest of the Clothing Trades,” “Business Completely Transformed by the Jews,” ”Intensity of Jewish Competition,“ ”Jews the Greatest Owners of Land,” “The Jewish Middleman in Real Estate,” “Jews in the Civil Service,” “Protestant and Catholic Children Now Taught by Jewesses,” “Jewish Policemen and Firemen,” “Jewish Control of the Theaters,” “Commercializing the Theater,” “The Most Perfect Trust in the Country,” “Syndicate Broken by Russian Jews,” “Millions Made in the Theater,” “Jews’ Control of the Big Department Stores,” “Small Beginnings of the Big Department Store Men,” “Jews Control the Whiskey Business,” “Great Profits in the Mail-Order Trade,” “Jews Control the Trade in Leaf Tobacco,” “Jews as a Great Power in American Railroads,” “The Rise of Otto Kahn.” A typical sketch depicts an urbane but somewhat hood-eyed plump-faced man over a caption that reads ”A distinctive type—the successful aggressive Jew. It is this class of Jew that dominates the clothing business and kindred enterprises.”