The Rise of David Levinsky Read Online Free

Ultimately he was to tell the story of an individual and a people: the East European immigrant Jews in the United States and “the life they found and made,” in Irving Howe’s splendid phrase. In doing so he held in balance celebration and criticism-a difficult balancing act, for which he had practiced most of his lifetime.
    In its final, deepened, and much expanded version, Cahan wrote a book that, as John Higham so perceptively observed, combines the American theme of success with a Jewish subject and a Russian artistic sensibility. 9 The result is a major American work, standing at the beginning of the great development of Jewish-American literature in this century. Its central character is frequently as puzzling but as interesting and significant as one of the titans of industry drawn by Theodore Dreiser—another author contemporary with Cahan fascinated by the dazzle of American life and with people of humble origin who aspire to success and all its ambiguities.
    Ronald Sanders has suggested in his excellent work that Cahan’s vision darkened after 1913, and a great strain of melancholy and sadness develops in the final version of David Levinsky. 10 This increasing pessimism in Cahan’s outlook can be traced to a number of significant historic events. First, the Leo Frank case made news in Georgia in 1913 and came to its grim conclusion in 1915. Frank was a New York Jew who was business manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta when a young Christian girl employee was found brutally murdered. Largely on the testimony of a black handyman at the factory, Frank was convicted. After his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the governor, he was dragged out of jail and lynched. Cahan and the Forward covered the case in great detail—over two hundred of the final pages of his autobiography are devoted to the trial and its consequences—with Cahan himself interviewing Frank in jail in 1914. There was also the case of a Russian Jew named Mendel Beiliss who by 1913 had already been in jail for two years in Kiev. He was being investigated for the murder of a young Christian boy (he was subsequently acquitted), presumably for the purpose of using his blood in a Jewish ritual—the horrible “blood libel” against Jews begun in the Middle Ages. As Sanders so cogently observes, such clear evidence of anti-Semitic frame-ups in both the country he had left and the one he had come to must have made Cahan pessimistic about the destiny of Jews in both places.
    In addition, the hope for a socialism capable of uniting the world’s working people toward a common goal of uplifting humanity suffered a grievous blow with the assassination of Jean Jaurés, head of the French socialists, and the voting of war credits to the Kaiser by the German Social Democrats, which in large part made possible the First World War. The war in Europe had by 1917 trapped millions of Jews in Eastern Europe, inflicting terrible suffering upon them. The Forward was deeply concerned with this, becoming for its anxious readers a key source of news about their relatives and friends there. It was also caught in conflicting loyalties between Anglo-American interests and its long-standing anticzarist position. The entry of America into the war in 1917 and the Russian Revolution fully resolved that problem, but the stresses and strains of those years were inescapable.
    On the other hand, when we look at the text itself, the melancholy of Levinsky is mixed with a great deal of self-satisfaction and brio, especially when he is telling in detail the story of the ready-made garment industry and his rise to success in it. In those portions of the work the novel provides an unparalleled inside look at the origins of this great industry and the dynamics by which East European Jews replaced German Jews as its leaders. Cahan gives us much more as well along these sociological lines. He shows the lively street life of the immigrant quarters, with vivid portraits