The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan

First published: 1917

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1865-1915

Locale: Czarist Russia and New York City

Principal Characters:

• David Levinsky, a successful clothing manufacturer
• Matilda Minsker, who helps David go to America
• Max Margolis, a peddler who befriends David
• Dora, Max’s wife, with whom David falls in love
• Meyer Nodelman, who helps David start his business
• Fanny Kaplan, to whom David becomes engaged
• Abraham Tevkin, a Hebrew poet and real-estate broker
• Anna Tevkin, his daughter, who rejects David as a suitor

The Novel

In 1913, in response to a request from the popular McClure’s magazine for articles describing the success of East European immigrants in the U.S. garment trade, Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward and also a successful English-language novelist, wrote several short stories instead. Subsequently published as a novel, these pieces of fiction permitted Cahan to explore problematic aspects of the process of Americanization, produce vignettes of immigrant Jewish life, and describe the development of a major American industry.

The Rise of David Levinsky purports to be a memoir written thirty years after young David Levinsky arrived in the United States in 1885 with four cents in his pocket. Now the owner of a leading cloak-and-suit factory, he has accumulated more than two million dollars, but he is not a happy man. The novel is divided into fourteen books, each of which consists of several chapters.

The first four books, approximately one-sixth of the total pages, deal with Levinsky’s life in Russia. Orphaned at the age of three, he grew up desperately poor in the small Russian town of Antomir. Encouraged by his mother, he entered a Yeshiva as a scholarship student at the age of thirteen and studied the Talmud for the next seven years. One Easter, on the way home from the synagogue, David was beaten by a group of young boys. His mother, rushing out to confront his attackers, was killed by a Gentile mob. David lost his enthusiasm for study and, aided by Matilda Minsker, a secular-minded young woman who was attracted to him, decided to join the Jewish exodus from Russia to America.

Books 5, 6, and 7 describe Levinsky’s early years in New York City. Finding his way to the Lower East Side, he attempts to sleep in a synagogue, as he had in Antomir, but he discovers this is forbidden in America. He is befriended by a pious old Jew who buys Levinsky some American-style clothes, finds him a room, and gives him a few dollars. David tries to support himself as a peddler but is unsuccessful, even though Max Margolis, another peddler, teaches him the tricks of the trade. David’s lifestyle erodes his religious habits, and he finally shaves his beard. Studying English in a public evening school arouses David’s ambition to attend City College. He learns to operate a sewing machine and saves most of his wages, planning to attend school full time.

The next three books describe Levinsky’s business success, interweaving commercial details with a description of his unsuccessful love affair. He becomes a boarder in Max Margolis’s apartment, where he falls in love with Max’s wife Dora. David slowly wins Dora’s affections, but when he succeeds in consummating the affair, she insists that he leave immediately and never return. Angry over an insult by his employer, Levinsky decides to entice the firm’s outstanding designer to join him in a business venture. Meyer Nodelman, a successful manufacturer whom David had tutored in English, provides help and useful advice on how to get started. Though beginning in a fit of spite, David soon feels a sense of adventure. The few dollars he had saved for college are quickly used up, and David abandons all thought of continuing formal education. Trying to dress and act like a genteel American, Levinsky imitates the buyers of his merchandise, but he always feels inferior to his American-born customers.

The final four books describe Levinsky’s continuing business success along with his failure as a human being. He survives the Depression of 1893, expanding his factory in the prosperous years that follow. Meyer Nodelman and his wife introduce Levinsky to a variety of unmarried young women, but none appeals to him. When attractive Matilda Minsker arrives in New York to raise money for Russian revolutionaries, Levinsky approaches her only to find that she is repulsed by his expensive fur coat and bourgeois bearing. Seeking to start a family, David becomes engaged to Fanny Kaplan, daughter of a well-off Orthodox Jew whose lifestyle David admires. Yet David does not love her. During a brief stay at a Catskill resort hotel, he meets the vivacious Anna Tevkin and falls in love with her, only to find that she does not return his affections. David pursues her by becoming a friend of Anna’s father, praising his Hebrew poetry and investing in real estate with him. This wins David regular access to the Tevkin household, where the children vigorously debate Zionism and socialism, but Anna still spurns his love. Although proud that he helped build one of the great industries of the United States and can now live in a luxurious hotel suite, Levinsky laments that he is a lonely, unhappy man, without a family and cut off from his roots.

The Characters

With the exception of David Levinsky, who is drawn with much personal insight, the other characters in the novel remain stock figures. Although given distinctive individual characteristics, their function is to illustrate various common aspects of the Jewish experience in Russia and the United States. David’s mother sacrifices everything to help her son become a renowned Talmud scholar. Matilda is the typical young, secular Russian Jewish intellectual, sexually liberated and full of revolutionary fervor. Dora Margolis, easily the most sympathetic character in the novel, holds her family together, although she is unhappily married to a crude husband and regretfully watches her young daughter’s command of English and adaptation to the American environment far exceed her own. The Kaplan family, an Orthodox household transplanted to the New World, reminds David of his heritage and leads him to become engaged to Fanny, although he does not love her. Abraham Tevkin abandons the Hebrew poetry that made him famous in Europe, becoming a real-estate salesman in America.

In contrast, Levinsky is drawn with considerably more nuance and complexity. Cahan, who was a leading Jewish socialist, does not make his capitalist protagonist wholly attractive. Levinsky’s egotism, his chauvinism, and his driving materialism are presented realistically, but Cahan also describes Levinsky’s pain and frustration as an inexperienced immigrant, unsure of the customs and mores of his new environment. Early in his business career, Levinsky invites a customer to lunch at a luxury restaurant, but he has to ask his guest how to read the menu and how to use the elaborate array of glasses, knives, and forks placed before him. Even as a wealthy man at the end of the novel, he still remains intimidated by supercilious waiters, thinking they are sneering at him. In his business and social contacts with Gentiles and American-born Jews, Levinsky always feels inferior, uncertain whether his gestures and his language fulfill the standard of genteel behavior he tries to emulate.

Levinsky is sexually attracted to women he cannot have and contemptuous of women he can have. The married women he desires are unwilling to accept his attentions even when they are unhappy in their marriages. The single women he approaches find him intellectually and socially unattractive. Girls who are introduced to him as prospective marriage partners seem primarily after his money. For sex he turns to prostitutes, even though he despises their way of life.

Many of the problems Levinsky faces in America stem from the conflict between the values he learned as a child and his American experiences; this discord causes him great inner tension and pain. Levinsky revels in the material comfort that his wealth provides, yet he believes that he would be happier had he entered an intellectual profession and made less money. “My past and my present do not comport well,” he laments in the closing words of the novel. “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.”

Critical Context

In fulfilling the commission from McClure’s, Cahan used his fictional manufacturer to show how, in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s, Russian Jews replaced German Jews at the head of the cloak-and-suit trade. Levinsky, always short of cash during his early years, learned to use unethical subterfuges to postpone payment of his bills. He could undercut major firms on prices because the Orthodox East European Jewish tailors he hired were willing to work longer hours for lower wages in return for not having to work on Saturday. Concentrating his clothing line on a few successful designs, frequently illegally copied from those of established manufacturers, Levinsky achieved an economy of operation that permitted him to sell stylish goods at low prices, a process that made fashionable clothes readily available to the majority of American women.

Critics have favorably compared the social realism of Cahan’s works with that of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. When he turned his McClure’s short stories into a longer work, with far greater depth of characterization and scope of social observation, Cahan created the first major novel portraying the Jewish experience in America. In effect, he also created a new literary genre within which there have been many followers. Such acclaimed writers as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow have continued to explore themes first articulated by Cahan.

Bibliography

Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. This critical study of Cahan’s fiction in Yiddish and English devotes a chapter to David Levinsky, calling it a masterpiece of immigration literature.

Girgus, Sam B. The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Analyzes David Levinsky as a study of the negative aspects of the American Dream that encourage conformity, materialism, and dehumanization.

Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. An outstanding sociocultural history of the East European Jewish migration to America during the years 1880-1924, containing many references to Cahan.

Marovitz, Sanford E. Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne, 1996. A biography of Cahan stressing his English-language fiction. Chapter 6 provides a perceptive analysis of David Levinsky.

Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Sanders organizes a description of the social, cultural, and political life of the Lower East Side around a biography of Cahan.