The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan

Pioneering realist novel of a Jewish American immigrant’s experience

The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917, is a semiautobiographical novel by Abraham Cahan, a Jewish American writer who founded the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. The book is a realist novel about a Russian Jewish immigrant who overcomes the struggles of assimilating into American society to become a successful businessman. (His success is revealed in the first chapter, so that’s not a spoiler). David Levinsky is born in 1865 in Antomir, a city in what was then part of Russia but is now Lithuania. His father dies when he is three years old, and David and his mother live a life of poverty. With some charitable assistance, David is able to attend school, and he becomes a scholar of the Talmud. After his mother’s death (a shocking event of unexplained brutality), David decides to emigrate to America. Barely scraping the money together for his passage, he arrives in New York with almost nothing. His dream is to attend college and become an educated man, but the demands of survival drive him into a career in business. Like many of his fellow Jewish immigrants in New York, Levinsky enters the garment trade, becoming a manufacturer of cloaks.

Historically, European and American literature has not been kind to the Jews, so by 1917 it was about time a Jewish writer got to tell a story of his own people, or at least that of a subset of Jewish society: the Jewish-American immigrant. Cahan doesn’t merely dip the reader’s toe into these waters; he provides a full-immersion view into the Jewish experience in New York. In this novel, emigration is a great leveling force that puts former aristocrats and paupers on equal footing in the New World. Orthodox ways are forgotten amidst the full-time American pursuit of making money. The candidness with which Cahan reveals the working, religious, romantic, and family lives of the Jewish community, its interior class struggles and the challenges of anti-Semitic discrimination, is an eye-opening experience for the non-Jewish reader and a valuable time capsule of Jewish life in America a century ago.

One of the most remarkable things about the novel is that Levinsky, its narrator and protagonist, isn’t really all that good of a person. He lies to friends and business associates in order to trick them into lending him money. He chases after married women. He sleeps with prostitutes. He disregards union rules and hires scab workers during a strike. He is an atheist who sometimes exaggerates his Jewish faith in order to get in good with other Jews. Levinsky is not a villain, but he does engage in selfish and unethical behavior, the kind that many people are guilty of in real life. It may not be unusual to find such honestly flawed characters in today’s literature, but it was certainly uncommon in American novels as early as 1917. It makes one wonder how autobiographical this novel is, since the portrait Cahan paints of Levinsky is not entirely flattering. It’s probably safe to say that the stuff about Levinsky’s youth in Antomir and his Talmudic studies is a reflection of Cahan’s own life, but everything having to do with the garment industry must be fiction, since Cahan was not a tailor but a writer, editor, and publisher.

Some portions of the novel drag on a little too long; Levinsky’s love affairs in particular. There is a weekend at a Catskills resort that feels like it lasts all summer long. Any lag in pacing, however, is made up for by the uncompromising realism of the work. The ending of the novel is especially frank and unromantic. The Rise of David Levinsky is an important work not only because of its pioneering view of Jewish life in America but also because it breaks so many old rules about what a novel should be or how a rags-to-riches story should be told. This is a groundbreaking work of American literary naturalism that deserves to be better known and more widely read.
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