The Rise of David Levinsky

by Abraham Cahan, Seth Lipsky (Introduction)

Overview

The Rise of David Levinsky, written by the legendary founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, is an early Jewish-American classic. According to the scholar Sam B. Girgus, "The novel is more than an important literary work and cultural document. It forms part of the traditional ritual of renewal of the American Way."

First published in 1917, Abraham Cahan's realistic novel tells the story of a young talmudic scholar who emigrates from a small town in Russia to the melting pot of turn-of-the-century New York City. As the Jewish "greenhorn" rises from the depths of poverty to become a millionaire garment merchant, he discovers the unbearably high price of assimilation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375757983
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/13/2001
Series:	Modern Library Classics
Edition description:	MODERN LIB
Pages:	556
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Seth Lipsky is the founding editor of the Forward, the English-language successor to the Jewish Daily Forward. He edited the newspaper for ten years and is now a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Brooklyn.

Read an Excerpt

Home and School
Chapter I

Sometimes, when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America in 1851 with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.

When I was young I used to think that middle-aged people recalled their youth as something seen through a haze. I know better now. Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be. The last years that I spent in my native land and my first years in America come back to me with the distinctness of yesterday. Indeed, I have a better recollection of many a trifle of my childhood days than I have of some important things that occurred to me recently. I have a good memory for faces, but I am apt to recognize people I have not seen for a quarter of a century more readily than I do some I used to know only a few years ago.

I love to brood over my youth. The dearest days in one's life are those that seem very far and very near at once. My wretched boyhood appeals to me as a sick child does to its mother.

I was born in Antomir, in the Northwestern Region, Russia, in 1865. All I remember of my father is his tawny beard, a huge yellow apple he once gave me at the gate of an orchard where he was employed as watchman, and the candle which burned at his head as his body lay under a white shroud on the floor. I was less than three years old when he died, so my mother would carry me to the synagogue in her arms to have somebody say the Prayer for the Dead with me. I was unable fully to realize the meaning of the ceremony, of course, but its solemnity and pathos were not altogether lost upon me. There is a streak of sadness in the blood of my race. Very likely it is of Oriental origin. If it is, it has been amply nourished by many centuries of persecution.

Left to her own resources, my mother strove to support herself and me by peddling pea mush or doing odds and ends of jobs. She had to struggle hard for our scanty livelihood and her trials and loneliness came home to me at an early period.

I was her all in all, though she never poured over me those torrents of senseless rhapsody which I heard other Jewish mothers shower over their children. The only words of endearment I often heard from her were, "My little bean" and, "My comfort." Sometimes, when she seemed to be crushed by the miseries of her life, she would call me, "My poor little orphan." Otherwise it was, "Come here, my comfort," "Are you hungry, my little bean"or, "You are a silly little dear, my comfort." These words of hers and the sonorous contralto in which they were uttered are ever alive in my heart, like the Flame Everlasting in a synagogue.

"Mamma, why do you never beat me like other mammas do?" I once asked her.

She laughed, kissed me, and said, "Because God has punished you hard enough as it is, poor orphan mine."

I scarcely remembered my father, yet I missed him keenly. I was ever awake to the fact that other little boys had fathers and that I was a melancholy exception; that most married women had husbands, while my mother had to bear her burden unaided. In my dim childish way I knew that there was a great blank in our family nest, that it was a widow's nest; and the feeling of it seemed to color all my other feelings.

When I was a little older and would no longer sleep with my mother, a rusty old coat of my deceased father's served me as a quilt. At night, before falling asleep, I would pull it over my head, shut my eyes tight, and evoke a flow of fantastic shapes, bright, beautifully tinted, and incessantly changing form and color. While the play of these figures and hues was going on before me I would see all sorts of bizarre visions, which at times seemed to have something to do with my father's spirit.

"Is papa in heaven now? Is he through with hell?" I once inquired of my mother.

Some things or ideas would assume queer forms in my mind. God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning, forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the form of an oblong box.

I was a great dreamer of day dreams. One of my pastimes was to imagine a host of tiny soldiers each the size of my little finger, "but alive and real." These I would drill as I saw officers do their men in front of the barracks some distance from our home. Or else I would take to marching up and down the room with mother's rolling-pin for a rifle, grunting, ferociously, in Russian: "Left one! Left one! Left one!" in the double capacity of a Russian soldier and of David fighting Goliath.

What People are Saying About This

John Higham

"The Rise of David Levinsky belongs not only to the genre of immigrant fiction but also among the best novels of American business...Cahan also wrote, in the guise of fiction, a critically important chapter in American social history."--John Higham, from the Intorduction

Reading Group Guide

1. The novel opens with David Levinsky's declaration that "the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle." What motivates the narrator's transformation from devoted Talmudic scholar to passionate student to his final incarnation as a driven businessman? What additional themes contribute to Levinsky's dramatic metamorphosis?

2. How would you characterize the differences between the Orthodox Jews and westernized Jews of Antomir? Later, when the story moves to America, how does Cahan contrast Eastern European Jews with German Jews? And what may be gleaned from Cahan's depiction of the relationship between turn-of-the-century Jews and gentiles?

3.  "The United States lured me not merely as a land of milk and honey, but also, and perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, of marvelous transformations," recalls David Levinsky. Drawing on the novel's vivid depiction of Jewish immigrants from all levels of society, which of them share the narrator's rosy view of America? Does David Levinsky retain his deep enthusiasm for the United States, or do his feelings shift over the course of the novel?

4. The Rise of David Levinsky has been hailed as an important novel of American business. How does Levinsky's enthusiasm for social Darwinism and "the theory of the Struggle for Existence and the Survival of the Fittest" affect his business practices? Considering Cahan's depiction of the conflicts between Capital and Labor, what might you infer about the author's own views on the subject? Is his portrayal evenhanded?

5. In examining Abraham Cahan's portrayal of women and marriage, the scholar Susan Kress notes that the author "avoids stereotyped portraits, frequently expresses the woman's perspective, and creates a series of memorable female characters." Do you agree?

6. According to the literary critic Sanford Marovitz, "[Levinsky's] ideal Woman, a union of Mother, Wife, Harlot, and Princess . . . floats ever-present in the recesses of his mind, an impossible dream that can nowhere find substantiation in the light of common day." Is this a satisfying explanation for Levinsky's ultimate failure to find a suitable romantic partner? Discuss.

7. At the end of the story, Levinsky declares, "I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher's Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak-manufacturer." What has the narrator sacrificed in order to attain financial success in America?

Editorial Reviews

"It is one of the best fictional studies of Jewish character available in English, and at the same time an intimate and sophisticated account of American business culture."
—Isaac Rosenfeld

From the Publisher