The Rise of David Levinsky Read Online Free Page B

beleaguer him, is rather shadowy, as is the Gentile friend who declines to cross the religious chasm between them toward the end of the book. Anna Tevkin, however, is carefully drawn, a quick presence in Levinsky’s life and in the novel, although largely seen as a projection of Levinsky’s need. Other lively vignettes abound: his various landladies; Mrs. Chaikin. the impossible wife of the designer; Mrs. Nodleman; Argentine Rachael, the whore from Antomir who befriends him and enlightens him about the real nature of American politics. As in Cahan’s earlier stories, he depicts a rich variety of individuals and types, none sentimentalized or harshly stereotyped, real presences coping with a real world. Cahan is the great forerunner in the development of Jewish-American literature in this century; but many of his male heirs in that line were not as realistic or broad-gauged as he in the depiction of Jewish women. Among them stereotypes of a sentimentalized “Yiddishe Momma” and spoiled Jewish-American Princesses have been created and exploited badly. Cahan was never guilty of that. The powerful emergence of Jewish-American women writers in recent years should help lay those pernicious stereotypes to rest.
    The great presence in the early part of the story is Levinsky’s mother—who literally lives and dies for him—as she is the great absence in the rest of it. It can be argued that his Oedipal longing for the mother, doomed to remain unfulfilled, is the source of all his sense of loss, yearning, loneliness, the “discrepancy” in his life between a past and a present that “do not comport well.” 13
    Certainly the way in which he describes her death at the hands of Gentile hoodlums when she rushes to his defense—from the outside, as a report (no scene is presented), and in highly literary language—seems to muffle the emotion. It does not “comport well” with—that is, it is curiously distanced from—the strong hold she and the event have upon him, as he claims. (The anniversary of her death is for him “a feast of longing and spiritual bliss,” her voice in him “like a Flame Everlasting.”) His search for an identity, a true, unfragmented self, is entwined with his problems with eros, traceable to those early formative years. Sexuality—especially female sexuality—was a taboo subject then, and Levinsky’s sexual identity is frequently unclear: He misses his student friend Naphtali “like a sweetheart,” he is smitten with the “girl-like” handsomeness of Jake Mindels, “he loved Reb Sander passionately,” and he even loved God “as one does a woman.” Later he talmudically analyzes his sexual drives and arrives at a characteristically dialectical distinction, in this case between lust and love. Freud observed the need in certain of his male patients to divide women into the good and the bad, calling it “the greatest degradation of erotic life,” and the ability to achieve full sexuality only with the “bad”—the non-Mother figure—no doubt haunts Levinsky.
    This unresolved problem may account for his inability to fully yield himself to any woman—he always remains analytical and removed. After all, he could win Dora from Max simply by confessing the affair to him; but he declines to do so, almost absentmindedly, as if, having had their brief consummation, he has lost interest in the affair or the relationship. Sex and love (and with it marriage) simply do not go together. His relation to Max and Dora is like a child’s in an Oedipal family triangle—perhaps the reason he finally refuses to displace and become the husband-father when his relation to Max is reversed and Max begins playing the child.
    The deep personal enigmas in Levinsky’s personality are joined with cultural dilemmas familiar to immigrants generally, however, and insofar as America is “a nation of immigrants,” his fate is therefore important as an American phenomenon. The story is irreducibly American in