SOURCE: "David Levinsky: Modern Man as Orphan," in TSE: Tulane Studies in English, Vol. 23, 1978, pp. 85-93.

[In the following essay, Lyons examines The Rise of David Levinsky 's broader impact as a novel of modern alienation.]

Those who have acclaimed Abraham Cahan's last novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, as a great immigrant novel, as an exemplary business novel, or as the novel of the Diaspora Jew have all stressed single, usually parochial aspects of the novel and thus pigeon-holed it within a limited genre. Indeed, the novel is deeply grounded in realistic specifics about typical greenhorn experiences, coat manufacturing, and Jewish rituals—about pirated cloak designs, steerage passage to America, and Talmud scholars. But this first person confession of a wealthy unhappy Jewish businessman transcends these specifics; the various strands are united and subsumed in a more universal theme: modern man as spiritual "orphan" in search of his parents, of legitimate authority.

In spite of the obvious differences in fictional technique, Cahan's David Levinsky resembles that central exploration of the modern condition: the story of Stephen Dedalus wandering through Dublin looking for his father. And as Joyce uses Bloom's Jewishness as a metaphor for alienation as well as a literal fact, so Cahan organizes his complex narrative around the multiple meanings and implications of Levinsky's orphaned state: as a man without parents (literally), home, God, or any satisfactory center to give meaning to his life. Reading the novel in light of this central, unifying theme has two important results. First, it gives focus and coherence to the disparate and superficially disconnected aspects, particularly the seemingly unrelated business pursuits and abortive love life. Second, it clarifies the novel's genuine significance for the modern reader by allowing us to see the novel as more than a dusty rambling period piece interesting only in terms of literary history or nostalgia. David Levinsky is a surprisingly modern parable.

Orphanhood was clearly a resonant theme for Cahan. In his other major narrative, Yekl; A Tale of the New York Ghetto, the main character Jake experiences his first sharp spiritual awakening when he learns of his father's death. "Desolation and self-pity" and a shortlived resolve to live a better life mark his powerful reaction to his orphaned state. In Levinsky the orphan theme is announced early in the narrative, for after the death of David's father, his mother calls the boy "'My poor little orphan'" and "'my orphan mine.'" And Levinsky's sadness, self-pity, and curious pleasure in the misery of his orphaned state are adumbrated in the first pages when he kisses his mother passionately and enquires, "'Are people sorry for us, Momma … because I have no papa and we have no money?'." Here at the very beginning of the novel Levinsky's orphaned state is linked to the lack of money—the pursuit of which provides a major strand of the novel's structure.

Actually before his mother's death Levinsky is orphaned only in the sense of having no father; he is spiritually and psychologically secure: beloved by his mother, in harmony with his religion, and a member of a cohesive people. Cahan does not sentimentalize David's native Antomir in the novel; it is an impoverished, desperate place inhabited by imperfect, complex people. Nonetheless, it offers a life with coherence, meaning, and values.

David's mother is adoring and protective; as in many subsequent American Jewish novels including the strikingly opposite Call It Sleep and Portnoy's Complaint, the mother/son relationship is central. Here the relationship is unashamedly tender. David's mother is also his spiritual and emotional guide. Although completely illiterate, she is passionately devout; she prays with "absolute earnestness and fervor, often with tears of ecstasy coming to her eyes." She feels communal ties to her neighbors, gives alms regularly despite her poverty, acts as a defender of religious morals, and has an acute sense of justice. In spite of her extreme poverty and overwhelming work, the impossibly cramped and horrible living conditions, Levinsky's mother feels moments of transcendent joy: "The sight of me learning the Word of God so diligently was a source of indescribable joy to my mother. She struggled to suppress her feeling, but from time to time a sigh would escape her as though the rush of happiness was too much for her heart." And Mrs. Levinsky is no rare exception: "there were hundreds of other poor families in our town who would starve themselves to keep their sons studying the Word of God." In such a community where the aim of being a good, learned Jew was a clear and unequivocal goal, poverty was bearable and self-sacrifice, nobilizing.

In addition to his mother, in his youth David temporarily possesses a satisfactory "spiritual" father in Reb Sender. "A dreamer with a noble imagination, with a soul full of beauty," Reb Sender is one of the "quick-witted, nimble-minded scholars in town," full of gentleness and religious fervor. For Sender life is ordered and meaningful; he knows that "only good deeds and holy learning have tangible worth."

And within this paradoxically "secure" world, Levinsky as a young boy experiences the deepest happiness he is ever to know in his life: he feels a "veritable delirium of religious infatuation" and an occasional "fit of happiness." But the security and authority are transitory; in a section (or book) called "Enter Satan," Levinsky describes his dual temptations: sexual desire and envy. Levinsky's growing adolescent sexuality has no sanctioned outlet; orthodox Judaism allows no expression of sexuality outside of marriage, considers even looking upon a strange woman a sin, and has no concept of romantic love. The envy Levinsky feels for a pampered, glib Talmudic student is even more immediately destructive: Levinsky begins to use his studies as a way to out-shine the other boy and thus perverts his entire religious orientation.

When his mother is murdered, Levinsky's whole structure of authority crumbles. Deprived of his mother's meager financial support, he is acutely hungry. But this hunger is more than physical. The rent in the fabric of his belief widens, and his "communions with God" become rare. Where before Levinsky saw the "Divine Presence shining down" on him, now the face of his martyred mother looms. Levinsky is now a "famished orphan … all alone in the world," for he has neither mother, nor father, nor God as heavenly Father.

His spiritually orphaned condition is underscored by the fact that the same friend Naphtali introduces him to both sex and agnosticism. In both cases, his reaction is a sense of loss. When Levinsky first sees a Jewish wedding, he is "in a trance"—he sees the ceremony as "a poem," as "something inexpressably beautiful and sacred." When Naphtali tells him about the relation between sex and marriage, the beauty of the wedding Levinsky had witnessed and of weddings in general seems to be "irretrievably desecrated." Later when Naphtali calls reading Talmud "all bosh," Levinsky has "nothing clear or definite to put forth."

Thus by the time Levinsky leaves for America at age twenty he is truly orphaned—without God, without biological or spiritual parents, and in fact without a true home as well, because local pogroms force the Jews of Eastern Europe to realize that their "birthplace was not their home." The enclosed, self-sustaining Antomir is itself passing even before Levinsky departs for America. As David Singer has noted, the forces of secularism which overwhelm Levinsky upon his arrival in America were, to a lesser extent, at work in Europe too. The Minsker family who virtually arrange for Levinsky's passage to this country are themselves symbols of the breakup of the cohesive, orthodox ghetto and mark the entrance of Jews into modern, secular society. Which is to say that the self-contained shtetl with its poverty and piety was disintegrating before the seemingly benign forces of modernity as well as the clearly malevolent forces of physical destruction.

In this last meaning of orphanhood, homelessness, Levinsky is truly the archetypal immigrant. His yearning parallels the yearning of the immigrant everyman. The hunger at the heart of the immigrant experience is well-captured in the memoirs of a self-educated worker quoted in Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers:

While I was growing up in Russia, I developed a tremendous hunger for learning … since I had also gone a little to Russian school, I began to swallow—I mean really swallow—Russian books. How can I describe to you, you who live with a mountain of books, the hunger that I and my friends felt?… I went to lectures. God, those lectures of ours! The socialists, by the dozens, the anarchists, the schools, everybody.… And I thought to myself, maybe next time I can swallow it all!

The unnamed worker's hunger is for learning—a phenomenon which frequently suggested the Jewish immigrant's transference of devotion from Talmud to secular sources. But to Levinsky America's meaning is not the possibility of enlightenment or worldly wisdom, rather the United States appeals to him as a land of "mystery, of fantastic experiences, and marvelous transformations." His eventual spiritual emptiness, loneliness, and purposelessness are suggested by the fact that he conceives of his journey in naive and shallow terms as a "sensational adventure." Levinsky sees his immigration as a picaresque journey toward new experiences, adventure, personal freedom, possibility. What he finds is that while this new experience is more exciting and complex than the narrow, closed world of Antomir, it is empty, valueless, and he remains in every sense an orphan.

That Cahan did not believe that the American experience was devoid of meaningful possibility is clear from his depiction of other characters in the novel who sustain themselves through religious faith, political activity, art, workers' associations, family and social ties. Moreover, Cahan's own rich, full life in America is in fact almost a paradigm of the American immigrant dream. Within a few years after his arrival in this country in 1882, Cahan was becoming known as a socialist, political speaker, writer, and editor in Yiddish, English and Russian. Cahan participated actively in union activities and wrote articles, stories, and novels praised by William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane. Cahan had a major impact on the entire American Jewish community as the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, the largest Yiddish newspaper in the world. Cahan's life in this country was marked by devotion to trade unionism and socialism, by identification with the Jewish masses, and by a Tolstoyan sense of literature as embodying the highest moral and artistic value.

Cahan himself experienced a complex relationship to his dual identity as Jew and American. It is generally accepted that through his influence as editor of the Forward, he was the most influential Americanizing force in the lives of the Eastern European immigrants. Enlightened, secular, and, particularly in his early years, politically radical, Cahan clearly did not argue for a return to Old World values and Talmudic devotion. His years of writing in Yiddish—a procedure adopted in order to serve the masses—forced upon Cahan "his own ineluctable Jewishness." Moreover, as Sanford E. Marovitz has observed, in much of Cahan's fiction the immigrants "who clung to their heritage, despite poverty and hard work, avoided the constant sting of isolation, disillusion and despair." In the same way that Cahan believed that literary realism and socialism "must ultimately work toward the same end," so he assumed that Judaism could be expressed without orthodoxy and that assimilation to American values and style was possible without loss of Jewishness. In short, Cahan avoided the dilemma of assimilation by a faith that commitments to Judaism and to American life were totally compatible.

In contrast to Cahan's complex involvements and commitments, Levinsky achieves only wealth and the specious "authority" of being the boss of his own business, which bring him no happiness, and in fact estrange him further from everyone around him. Having lost all bearings and ties, the orphan continually seeks to feed his insatiable, nameless hunger.

Satan first appeared in the dual forms of unsanctioned sexual appetite and envy—or in the more abstract sense of unsatisfactory relations with women and negative relations with his fellow men: Levinsky's later career recapitulates these same patterns. His sexual encounters with women remain unsatisfying, transitory. Outside the sanctity of Jewish marriage, women become "quarry." He never achieves any lasting or satisfying connection between sex, love, and marriage, as he compulsively visits prostitutes, tries to seduce his landladies, and falls in love with his friend's wife. Levinsky's three most significant love affairs reveal his main motive: to escape his orphaned state. With Dora, his friend's wife, the appeal is that of refuge, home. As a boarder in their house, Levinsky experiences a sense of belonging—and immediately falls in love: "my lonely soul had a sense of home and domestic comfort that all but overpowered me."

Indeed even Levinsky's conscious plan to seek a wife is announced in terms of an escape from orphanhood. Meyer Nodelman, the closest approximation to a friend Levinsky ever achieves, tells him, "'You are an orphan … you're still a child. You need a mother … get married and you will have a mother—for your children. It isn't the same kind, but you won't feel lonesome any longer'."

And in his two subsequent serious love affairs, the orphan Levinsky seems in search of a mother as wife—and a father as father-in-law. He decides that marrying into a well-to-do orthodox family would mean respectability and solidity and seems more attracted to his prospective father-in-law than to Fanny, his bride-to-be: "It was sweet to hear myself called 'as good as a son' by this man of Talmudic education who was at the same time a man of substance and of excellent family."

After breaking off this engagement, perhaps unconsciously realizing that he "can't go home again"—home being Old World orthodoxy—Levinsky then falls in love with Anna, the socialist daughter of a once-famous Hebrew poet with Zionist leanings. Once again, much of the woman's appeal is her father's spiritual claims.

Significantly, all three women and their families represent viable alternatives to Levinsky's selfish, soulless, endless money-getting. Dora represents sacrifice for one's family: she stays with her boorish husband so that her daughter will have a freer, more meaningful life. Fanny and her family represent traditional religion and Old World authority. Anna and her family stand for artistic endeavor, Zionism, socialism—the whole intellectual Lower East Side.

That Levinsky fails to marry is particularly poignant because he comes to think that the family is the only possible source of value. As Levinsky becomes more enamored of Spencer and social Darwinism, he learns to look at a working man or poor man as an object of contempt: "a misfit, a weakling, a failure." He believes that outside the family "die human world was as brutally selfish as the jungle"—a conclusion which justifies his own exploitative treatment of others.

It is telling that education, the only value Levinsky holds with any assurance when he arrives in America, is forsaken for his business career. During his early years as a garment worker, Levinsky feels the satisfaction of physical work: "I was in an uplifted state of mind. No one seemed to be honorable who did not earn his bread in the sweat of his brow as I did." Moreover, in those early days he regards his work as a "stepping stone to a life of intellectual interests." City College becomes the nexus of values, the "synagogue of my new life." Paradoxically, Levinsky loses his dream of an intellectual life not during his physically taxing life as a worker, but when he becomes a businessman. And, ironically, he gives up his dream in a moment of business failure, not success. His first efforts as an independent cloak manufacturer having apparently failed, Levinsky finds that instead of thinking about a college career, he now cannot "resist the temptation" of dreaming of recouping enough money to go on manufacturing. The reason for this decision is the same one that brought Levinsky to America—adventure. He is taken by the "venture of the thing" and the "great, daring game of life." And once again his journey has no real destination, the apparent means become ends; the same hungry orphan gobbles experiences, relentlessly makes more and more money.

Despite his financial success, the sadness of Levinsky's later life is underscored in several ways. Tellingly, the penultimate chapter, about Levinsky's courtship of Anna Tevkin, is entitled "At Her Father's House." In addition to suggesting that Levinsky is searching for a father as well as for a wife, the title signifies Levinsky's separation from God: he no longer has a place in his Father's house. Unable to answer the real question—what are you living for?—he broods over his inability to fulfill the lesser substitute: "Who are you living for?". In the last pages of the novel, Levinsky bemoans the fact that he pursued business instead of art, science, or music. Even these last words reveal his old pattern: he envies those who achieve in intellectual fields. He has no sense of the value of these endeavors in themselves, outside of personal aggrandizement. Rather, envy and success-worshiping mark his spiritual emptiness.

In total Levinsky fails both of Reb Sender's injunctions: "'Be a good Jew and a good man'." Later American Jewish novels like The Assistant explore what it means to be a good Jew and what, if anything, must be added to the general requirements of a good man. In Levinsky the character's lack of any values obviates the subsequently haunting problem. The fact that at the end of the novel Levinsky is unmarried, childless—without descendente—serves three related symbolic functions: 1) Levinsky is thus deprived of the traditional, limited Jewish immortality: a child to say Kaddish over his grave 2) the sense that there is literally no future for Levinsky is stressed and 3) Levinsky remains defined by his primary role as orphan.

Ironically, at me time that Cahan published The Rise of David Levinsky in 1917, the novel was realistic but probably not representative. The novel rings with "the thrill of truth" Cahan and the American realists desired, but it was not the story of the usual or general American Jewish immigrant. For Levinsky, unlike the majority of immigrants including Cahan himself, did not genuinely participate in the experience of Yiddishkeit, which Howe called a "way of life, a shared experience, which goes beyond opinion or ideology." While the orphan Levinsky sheds Yiddish as well as all visible signs of his Jewishness and men tries to fill the bottomless hole of spiritual vacuity, most American Jewish immigrants shared die Yiddishkeit which thrived precariously in the early years of this century as it rested on me unresolved tensions of faith and skepticism, of me alien world (representing both high culture and revolutionary movements) and the native tradition. Unlike the countless unknown "little" Jews, Levinsky finds no real authority or home in any of these possibilities—high culture, revolutionary movements, or native traditions.

Levinsky is, ironically, more the spiritual prototype of the immigrants' descendents. David Levinsky is peculiarly prescient in its prediction of the malaise of the post-immigrant generations: the loss of values that accompanied the normalization and embourgeoisement in suburban America. In this connection the metaphor of orphan is particularly apt in that the raison d'être, the hope, and justification of the difficult immigrant life was often the children—both literal offspring and, in a general sense, the next generation.

But in the largest sense, Cahan's novel explores more than the world of the modern American Jew; David Levinsky probes the condition of modern man in a world where God is dead, where homes are transitory or absent, where authority is specious or at best dubious. Levinsky was an orphan before his time; he is, alas, a more modern man.