The Rise of David Levinsky - nothing short of a miracle - devoid of significance

Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) is an immigrant rags-to-riches novel.  Levinsky comes to America “with four cents in my pocket,” an orphan, and by the end is “worth more than two  million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States.”  His memoir, though, is about his “inner identity,” which has not changed.  On the one hand, he has gone through changes that are “nothing short of a miracle;” on the other they are “devoid of significance.”  All of these quotations are from the novel’s first paragraph.  I have never read a Horatio Alger novel, but I assume that Cahan differentiates himself from one in a few lines.

Cahan’s novel is dated in a couple of ways.  His character explains a lot about Judaism and his culture:

A Talmudic education was until recent years practically the only kind of  education a Jewish boy of old-fashioned parents received.  I spent seven  years at it, not counting the several years of Talmud which I had had at the  various cheders.

What is the Talmud?  (Book II, “Enter Satan,” Ch. 1)

And then he explains what the Talmud is.  Not that we do not still need novels, or whatever, that tell gentiles what the Talmud is, but I think there are many more books with this educational aspect than were available in 1917.

Second, there are a number of scenes, especially early in the novel when Levinsky arrives in America, describing Jewish New York, mostly the Lower East Side, that are a delight but are in some sense now historical.  There are now many descriptions of the time and place.  We have translations from Yiddish writers now, for example, the plays of Jacob Gordin or Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son or poets like Moishe Leib Halpern – or literary histories like Ruth Wisse’s Little Love in Big Manhattan, about those poets – making Cahan’s Jewish New York more familiar.

The art of the novel lies in its voice, which curiously means in its simulation of artlessness.  Cahan’s short stories from twenty years earlier, the AmericanizedChekhov of The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York (1898) were more artful in their language, detail, and imagery.  But why would David Levinsky, who runs a garment factory, write as well as Abraham Cahan?  Levinsky is intelligent and educated, however narrowly, but he does not write as if he has made his living by writing for forty years.

A late section set in the Catskills is an exception, with Levinsky finding a more poetic, metaphorical style, but that is because he is in love.  His tone when writing about his business is entirely different.  Much of the art of the novel is in how Cahan matches Levinsky’s rhetorical mode to his psychological state at any given time.

Levinsky is not exactly an unreliable narrator, in that he is never dishonest and never seems to deliberately hide anything, but there are plenty of times where he seems to have trouble hearing himself.  The novel is a clever exercise in readerly sympathy.  In his business practices,  especially, Levinsky is pretty ruthless, without much investigation of his own ethics.  In business, in sales, in relations with his employees, anything goes.  He can be self-pitying, a braggart, a bit of a schlemiel with women.  He is kind of annoying.  He is an artful character, but some of that artfulness is conceptual.

Readers like me will enjoy how his life is ruined, or saved, or anyways permanently changed when he is given a copy of Dombey and Son and has to rearrange his job, his life, everything, so that he has time to read it.

D. G. Myers’s review fills in some of my gaps.

Abraham Cahan brings Chekhov to the Lower East Side - A nightmare of desolation and jealousy choked her

I ended 2016 with some of Chekhov’s last stories, astounding things.  Make sure your collection has both “Peasants” and “In the Ravine.”  Maybe you’ll need more than one book.  That’s fine.  Read them together, and write a blog post; it will likely be among your best.  I don’t have anything else to say about these stories, but you will.  I look forward to reading it.

I will do something easier and write about imitation Chekhov.  Abraham Cahan, the titanic Yiddish-language journalist, was a champion of Chekhov’s in the United States, long before Chekhov was translated.  Cahan’s first book of English-language fiction, Yekl, A tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) was pretty good, but he is sharper and sadder in his second, The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York (1898), and maybe one reason is that he lets himself imitate the best.

In “The Imported Bridegroom,” Flora is assimilating quickly – “She sat in her rocker, in front of the parlor stove, absorbed in Little Dorrit” – “the only girl of her circle who would read Dickens, Scott or Thackeray.”  Her father returns to Russia to visit the graves of his parents, and in a fit of piety buys his daughter a husband, a great scholar, a prodigy.  The bidding scenes are worth seeing – the bridegroom, a rare and valued specimen, is sold at auction.

Flora wants to marry a doctor, not a Talmudist; the father wants a son-in-law to say Kaddish; the prodigy is maybe not as interested in the Talmud as he first appears, not once he learns English and discovers the Astor Library.  Yes, he will study to be a doctor, and Flora gets her husband, but by the end of the story the prodigy is already moving on, now to socialism.  The ending could be from Chekhov:

A nightmare of desolation and jealousy choked her – jealousy of the Scotchman’s book, of the Little-Russian shirt, of the empty tea-glasses with the slices of lemon on their bottoms, of the whole excited crowd, and of Shaya’s entire future, from which she seemed excluded.

The short stories in the book share some of the themes – “A Providential Match,” “A Sweatshop Romance” – and settings.  Hopes are dashed; people discover they are weaker than they had realized.

In “A Ghetto Wedding,” a grindingly poor couple have a lavish wedding in the hope that they will come out ahead on the gifts.  It does not work out.  It is a painful piece of comedy.  They cannot even take a cab to their new, empty apartment.  They are almost assaulted on the street.  Only the author is still with them at the end of the story, giving them this final little gift:

A gentle breeze ran past and ahead of them, proclaiming the bride and the bridegroom.  An old tree whispered overhead its tender felicitations.

Yes, the book ends with one of Chekhov’s sentient trees, another gift from one writer to another.

the gibberish spoken by the men - Abraham Cahan's Yekl - immigration and assimilation

Abraham Cahan was a giant of Jewish journalism and politics but he also wrote English-language fiction, most famously The Rise of David Levinsky (1917).  I just read his first novel, written twenty years earlier, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896).

Jake has been in New York for three years, working, hanging out at the “dancing academy,” spending time and money on the ladies.  Jake’s a dog.  Back in Russia, though, he was Yekl, and still is to his wife and young son.

During the three years since he had set foot on the soil… he had lived so much more than three years – so much more, in fact, than in all the twenty-two years of his previous life – that his Russian past appeared to him as a dream and his wife and child, together with his former self, fellow characters in a charming tale, which he was neither willing to banish from his memory nor able to reconcile with the actualities of his American present.  (Ch. 3)

The next chapter begins at Ellis Island.  The family is here, old world peasants, a wife in a wig, which means Yekl is somehow back, too.

Presently, however, the illusion took wing and here he was, Jake the Yankee, with this bonnetless, wigged, dowdyish little greenhorn by his side!  That she was his wife, nay that he was a married man at all, seemed incredible to him.  (Ch. 4)

The psychology of Jake / Yekl, his identity problems, is pretty interesting, as is that of his poor wife who finds herself reunited with a stranger.  Their story is even more valuable given how few stories of immigrants we have from this period.  The settings – the dancehall, the “new tenements,” the textile shops – are of high interest, too.

Yekl is of more sociological and historic than artistic interest, yes, that’s right.  Artistically, it is a second-tier William Dean Howells novel in a new setting and with more vigorous speech.  Readers allergic to dialect had better stay away:

“Shay, Mamie, give dot feller a tvisht, vill you?”

“Dot slob again?  Joe must tink if you ask me I’ll get scared, ain’t it?  Go and tell him he is too fresh,” she said with a contemptuous grimace.  Like the majority of the girls of the academy, Mamie’s English was a much nearer approach to a justification of its name than the gibberish spoken by the men.  (Ch. 2)

I thought the Yinglish, or the simulation of it, about makes the novel, but I know some readers hate that stuff.

Cahan published a novella and some short stories around this time, collected in The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories (1898), which I hope to try soon.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 3 - Dybbuks, postcards, and King Lear

More early Yiddish writers, on stage and in America.

S. Ansky (1863-1920), a scholar and ethnographer, wrote The Dybbuk (1914), a landmark in the Yiddish theater. The Dybbuk and Other Writings is the book I'll look at first, but his account of the Russian Army's devastation of the shtetls during World War I, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, sounds fascinating.

The Yiddish theater seems to have been most active in the United States. For example, Jacob Gordin's The Jewish King Lear (1892), which is not quite just what it sounds like, but pretty close. This play was only recently translated - Stephen Greenblatt's review of it in The New Republic several months ago is one of the spurs to this project. God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation includes another Gordin play, and who knows what else. An older collection, Six Plays of the Yiddish Theater, may also be worth a look.

The short story writer Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948) may push too far out of the 19th century. On the other hand, he seems to be amazing. Last year's The Cross and Other Jewish Stories is the place to go. Wyatt Mason posted an entire story in July.

I'd like to read Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) someday - The Rise of David Levinsky, or Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto - but I think he wrote in English. We'll see. I have to draw a line somewhere.

How about poetry? The earliest Yiddish-American poets I know of, Mani Leib and Moyshe Halpern, start their careers just a little too late, I think. If I change my mind, Ruth Wisse's study A Little Love in Big Manhattan will fill me in.

Wisse also edited a collection called A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas. No idea what's in it. Or in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present. Or in Great Works of Jewish Fantasy. I could go on.

Two books of photos look interesting. Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1947) contains photos of ghetto life in the 1930s, mostly in Poland. As one might guess, the book was published as an act of remembrance. But what Yiddish-related book is not an act of remembrance now. For example, Yiddishland, which collects actual shtetl postcards. See left. Amazing.

Please fill me in on your favorites - literature, history, art, criticism. I've told you everything I know, almost. I've listed more books than I will actually read. Point me in the right direction.

Update: David Bergelson was a major omission from the original post.