The Rise of David Levinsky (4 page)

Levinsky’s relations with women, almost invariably unsatisfactory and unfulfilling, threaten to dominate the other stories in the novel—that of the immigrant and of business. The “Dora” chapters comprise the longest section of the book, though they were not included at all in the original series. In their careful development of Dora’s seduction by Levinsky and their sympathetic understanding of the situation of a young immigrant mother—“a very womanly woman,” attractive and aspiring but caught in an implacable cultural and historic situation—they are among the novel’s best. The early relationship with Matilda in Antomir is equally well realized: The depiction of the inept Yeshiva
bocher
(young man) being introduced to romance by the semisophisticated
barishnaya
(educated Russian woman) is alive and witty. The depiction of Gussie, the working-class girl, and her dignity and intelligence as she deals with Levinsky’s effort to manipulate her, is movingly well done. His engagement to Fanny Kaplan, whose settled Orthodox family life appeals to Levinsky as he recoils in hatred from radicals he feels beleaguer him, is rather shadowy, as is the Gentile friend who declines to cross the religious chasm between them toward the end of the book. Anna Tevkin, however, is carefully drawn, a quick presence in Levinsky’s life and in the novel, although largely seen as a projection of Levinsky’s need. Other lively vignettes abound: his various landladies; Mrs. Chaikin. the impossible wife of the designer; Mrs. Nodleman; Argentine Rachael, the whore from Antomir who befriends him and enlightens him about the real nature of American politics. As in Cahan’s earlier stories, he depicts a rich variety of individuals and types, none sentimentalized or harshly stereotyped, real presences coping with a real world. Cahan is the great forerunner in the development of Jewish-American literature in this century; but many of his male heirs in that line were not as realistic or broad-gauged as he in the depiction of Jewish women. Among them stereotypes of a sentimentalized “Yiddishe Momma” and spoiled Jewish-American Princesses have been created and exploited badly. Cahan was never guilty of that. The powerful emergence of Jewish-American women writers in recent years should help lay those pernicious stereotypes to rest.

The great presence in the early part of the story is Levinsky’s mother—who literally lives and dies for him—as she is the great absence in the rest of it. It can be argued that his Oedipal longing for the mother, doomed to remain unfulfilled, is the source of all his sense of loss, yearning, loneliness, the “discrepancy” in his life between a past and a present that “do not comport well.”
¹³

Certainly the way in which he describes her death at the hands of Gentile hoodlums when she rushes to his defense—from the outside, as a report (no scene is presented), and in highly literary language—seems to muffle the emotion. It does not “comport well” with—that is, it is curiously distanced from—the strong hold she and the event have upon him, as he claims. (The anniversary of her death is for him “a feast of longing and spiritual bliss,” her voice in him “like a Flame Everlasting.”) His search for an identity, a true, unfragmented self, is entwined with his problems with eros, traceable to those early formative years. Sexuality—especially female sexuality—was a taboo subject then, and Levinsky’s sexual identity is frequently unclear: He misses his student friend Naphtali “like a sweetheart,” he is smitten with the “girl-like” handsomeness of Jake Mindels, “he loved Reb Sander passionately,” and he even loved God “as one does a woman.” Later he talmudically analyzes his sexual drives and arrives at a characteristically dialectical distinction, in this case between lust and love. Freud observed the need in certain of his male patients to divide women into the good and the bad, calling it “the greatest degradation of erotic life,” and the ability to achieve full sexuality only with the “bad”—the non-Mother figure—no doubt haunts Levinsky.

This unresolved problem may account for his inability to fully yield himself to any woman—he always remains analytical and removed. After all, he could win Dora from Max simply by confessing the affair to him; but he declines to do so, almost absentmindedly, as if, having had their brief consummation, he has lost interest in the affair or the relationship. Sex and love (and with it marriage) simply do not go together. His relation to Max and Dora is like a child’s in an Oedipal family triangle—perhaps the reason he finally refuses to displace and become the husband-father when his relation to Max is reversed and Max begins playing the child.

The deep personal enigmas in Levinsky’s personality are joined with cultural dilemmas familiar to immigrants generally, however, and insofar as America is “a nation of immigrants,” his fate is therefore important as an American phenomenon. The story is irreducibly American in its focus on “making it”—rising in the world in material terms whatever the price—and appeals to the national fascination with success stories. The title consciously echoes Howells’s
The Rise of
Silas
Lapham,
and like that novel, Cahan’s raises too the inevitable question of the moral price to be paid for success in those terms. Is it worth it? Can money buy happiness? These cliches, and the myth of the unhappy millionaire, are a staple of popular culture.
¹⁴

There is much in Levinsky, a great egoist, that is self-serving as well as deluded, so he may not be an entirely reliable narrator. When he asks in the final chapter “Am I happy?” and answers predictably in the negative, we could regard it as an only half-sincere gesture in the direction of those myths, the feeling that he should have chosen a more spiritually satisfying path—science or literature, say—than business an unctious rationalization. This may be a final jab by Cahan at Levinsky, since Cahan had, as he says elsewhere, spent all his life in reading books, study, and writing: Cahan
had
chosen a life morally superior to this rich man’s. Or there maybe, despite that, an unconscious identification by Cahan with Levinsky’s sense of the unbridgeable disparities in his life, because Levinsky’s final words, however much we may regard them as mere self-dramatization, have the “thrill of truth” that Cahan the writer always sought. Something in Cahan may have felt the strength of these words as well, as he contemplated the varieties and discrepancies and dashed hopes in his own life:

 

 

Levinsky’s sense of disjunction when confronted with the incredible changes in his life is understandable. The sense of loss that hovers over it is comprehensible, too: the loss of his mother’s warmth (and her language and culture) and the loss of values embodied in the religion of his spiritual father, Reb Sander, who had warned him that the rewards of this world are ephemeral (“only good deeds and holy learning have tangible worth.... Beware of Satan, Davie.”) are irreplaceable in Levinsky’s present condition. His pursuit of success and wealth in the new land may be an extreme case of abandoning everything in his embrace of Satan. After all, many others accommodated or integrated their old values with the new. But there is a broadly relevant Americanness to this recognition of disjunction between one’s past and present.

American literature is full of the clash of cultures: city boys and girls in the country, country boys and girls in the city, Westerners in the East, Easterners in the West. In a pluralistic society like our own, many racial, ethnic, and culturally diverse groups struggle for a coherent and secure identity as they relate to each other and to a dominant ethos that may often seem foreign and hostile to their own.

The American life Levinsky and others confront has its hopeful side—indeed, meaningful work and the free development of human potential is held out as a promise, a legitimate goal for the immigrant, the newly arrived, the “marginal.” Yet the green light of an ultimately fulfilling future tends to recede even as we reach for it, as Nick Carraway observes in
The Great Gatsby,
“and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Cahan and Levinsky both make the journey, and we are borne along with them.

In the eighteenth century Crevecoeur wondered what “the new man,” the American, would become, having left “behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners” in order to embrace new ones. Cahan too spent a lifetime wondering and reporting his findings. In
David Levinsky
the question still looms large, and the answer is not yet fully in. It remains a haunting and prophetic book about an American identity that must find a more fulfilling destiny, morally and spiritually, than material wealth if it is to achieve a secure sense of self.
¹⁵

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1
V, 280-288. The translations and paraphrases are mine. Only the first two volumes of Cahan’s memoirs have been published in English, as
The Education of Abraham Cahan, Leon
Stein,
et al, trans.

2
V, 286-288.

3
Joseph Gollomb, “Abraham Cahan,” in
The American Magazine 74
(Oct. 1912), 672-74.

4
Barbara Miller Solomon,
Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972).

5
Moses Rischin, ed..
Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

6
See note to p. 519 in the text that follows.

7
Survey
51:111 (Oct. 15, 1923). A reviewer in
The New Statesman
(21:722 (Sept. 29, 1923]) found his views not far from those of the Ku Klux Klan on labor and Americanization, though he thought the book as a whole “sound.” The
Nation
(117:468 [Oct. 24, 1923]) reviewer said the author displayed the “psychopathic trait of a bigot.” Other reviews are generally favorable—a measure of the tenor of the time.

8
Louis Harap,
Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Literature,
1900-1940s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).

9
John Higham’s introduction to
The Rise of David Levinsky
(New York: Harper & Row, 1960), x.

10
Ronald Sanders,
The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation
(New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

11
Sherry Gorelick,
City College and the Jewish Poor
(New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981).

12
David Engel, “The Discrepancies of the Modern: Reevaluating Abraham Cahan’s
The Rise of David Levinsky,”
in
Modern Jewish Studies Annual
III (1979), 68-91.

13
Sanford E. Marovitz, “The Secular Trinity of a Lonely Millionaire: Language, Sex and Power in
The Rise of David Levinsky,”
in Studies
in American Jewish Literature
(vol. 2, 1982), 20-35.

14
Isaac Rosenfeld, “America, Land of the Sad Millionaire,”
Commentary
(14 Aug. 1952), 131-135.

15
Interpretations of the meaning of
The Rise of David Levinsky
and assessments of its significance have been various almost since its first appearance. A noted critic of Yiddish drama, Nathanael Buchwald, gave it the highest praise in his entry on Yiddish works in
The Cambridge History of American Literature,
calling it “a better reflection of Jewish life in American surroundings than all American-Yiddish fiction put
together
... a monumental work, and surely the most remarkable contribution by an immigrant to the American novel” (Cambridge, 1921, vol. 4, pp. 598-609). In the Oxford
Companion to American Literature,
James D. Hart calls it “America’s greatest Yiddish novel” (New York, 1956, p. 109), which it may be, though it was conceived and written in English (a Yiddish translation did subsequently appear). There have been notably perceptive and favorable evaluations of the book—by John Macy in the Dial when it first appeared, much later by Isaac Rosenfeld and Leslie Fiedler, among others. Critics have also found it undistinguished, a libel upon Jews, the central character repellent, an apology for predatory capitalism, or simply unsavory. Howells wondered why Cahan, “a good man” capable of
Yekl,
was so “sensual in facts” in this work
(Life and Letters.
Mildred Howells, ed., 2 vols. [New York, 1928], p. 375).

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Cahan, Abraham.
Bleter fun Mein Leben (Pages From My Life).
New York: The Forward Association, 1926-1931.

 

 

Chametzky, Jules.
From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.

 

Guttmann, Allen.
The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

 

Harap, Louis.
The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration.
Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974.

 

Howe, Irving.
World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

 

 

Sanders, Ronald.
The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation.
New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

 

Stein, Leon, et
al.,
trans.
The Education of Abraham Cahan.
Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.

The Rise of David Levinsky,
copyrighted by Abraham Cahan in 1917 and 1945, was first published by Harper and Brothers in 1917. No extant manuscript has been discovered.