The Rise of David Levinsky Read Online Free Page A

of peddlers, politicians, prostitutes, and its cafe life, where artistic pretentions and the imperatives of making a living occupy the same table. We get inside the shops of “cockroach manufacturers” like the early Levinsky and the sleek show-rooms of the arrived millionaire. There are scenes involving workers, union activists, radicals at public meetings; others show drummers selling on the road—“a great school of life,” where Levinsky learns about hotels, dining out, train smoking cars; deals and fortunes made and lost on the “curb” in New York’s immigrant-inspired real estate boom. One of the book’s gems is the scene in the burgeoning Catskill summer resorts where a newly emerging Jewish middle class is as eager to display its American patriotism as it is to arrange marriages.
    We also see Orthodox Jews in Old World study halls and in the New World, and we register the changes that ensue. Traditional ways erode, like the beards that are inevitably shorn in order to get along in America. Old centers of belief give way to new, as when Levinsky designates the City College as his Temple (but which, despite a sentimental yearning, he for-goes with apparent ease for Business—which was actually the truer path, historically, for Jewish upward mobility). 11 The early portions of Levinsky’s life, in a less than idyllic shtetl existence and then down and out in New York, are especially vivid examples of Cahan’s honest realist’s eye. As he explores the lower depths, seeing corruption in the political wards, in sex, among pushcart entrepreneurs, he becomes “a greenhorn no longer. ” The New World reveals itself as heartless at times but interesting and full—where “an American day seemed far richer in substance than an Antomir year.”
    Almost no dimension of Jewish-American life of the time is left out. We learn about an incipient Jewish intelligentsia, devoted to various “-isms.” The Tevkin family includes Zionists, Territorialists, various kinds of socialists, aesthetes, and a father who is a failed Hebrew poet covertly introducing some of the old pieties into a secular Passover seder.
    Cahan put everything he had learned into this novel, and mostly it is done with great relish. There are, however, the notes of “sadness,” “loneliness,” “yearning,” and “discrepancy” (these four key words appear more frequently than any others in the book). They are most evident in Levinsky’s failures in love—his emotional life as it is played out with various women—and the sense of dislocation and fractured identity he comments on so poignantly at the beginning and end of his narrative. One splendid recent essay argues that Levinsky is the very prototype of alienated modern man, but I believe the axis of the book’s narrative is along a more personal and a more American line. 12
    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