SOURCE: "Cahan's Rise of David Levinsky: Archetype of American Jewish Fiction," in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer, 1973, pp. 278-87.

[In the following essay, Vogel contends that The Rise of David Levinsky became the archetype for later fiction in the same genre.]

Some years ago, in a reconsideration of Abraham Cahan's 1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, Isaac Rosenfeld declared, "Levinsky [is] the essential Jewish type of the Dispersion." The truth of this assertion is underlined, it seems to me, by the rehearsal of some essential elements of theme, characterization, and method in later American Jewish fiction. My purpose here is to explore the ways in which The Rise of David Levinsky is archetypal—archetypal, not in the sense of racial memory, but in the sense of community experience during the three generations since the flood of East European Jewish immigration in the 1880's. Nor do I mean that Cahan's hero is the ideal Jewish type of the Dispersion. Rather, he is the prototype whose features of personality and career, whether for ill or for good, are reborn in later protagonists of this genre.

The origin of the type is in the closed, theocratic world of the shtetl in Russia. In his sustained reminiscence, which makes up the entire novel, David recalls his early Gorky-an circumstances in Antomir, a shtetl somewhere in the Russian Pale. His father, it should be noted for later discussion, is dead; his mother, who scrimps in order to send David to heder, the religious school, dies in an altercation with anti-Semites, and it is of her only that the orphan dreams. Shifting for himself, David joins the round of his fellow-students in going from house to house for meals. Thus he grows into adolescence, a time which marks his discovery of girls and the concomitant neglect of Talmud study. In time, David joins the migration to America. He arrives poor and ignorant, garbed and hirsute in the manner of the greenhorn Talmudic student. The remainder of Levinsky's tale is about his peddling, his drift from Orthodox Judaism, his sexual debauchery, his acquisition of two million dollars, his loneliness, his futile attempts to marry and, finally, his total dissatisfaction with his life. He is still diffident in the presence of women, fearful in the presence of waiters, and indecisive in the presence of his workers. Though Cahan has not made David Levinsky into a shlemiel, he portrays him as a nebbich with a veneer.

Thus, Abraham Cahan formulated the first two archetypal characteristics of American-Jewish literature: the theme of the consequences of the collision of old world Orthodoxy with new world materialistic emancipation, and the anti-hero as the central character of this drama.

I think we can better appreciate Cahan's achievement in The Rise of David Levinsky by noticing that this protagonist of 1917 is, himself, the end-product of two earlier major efforts by Cahan to depict the new Jewish immigrant to America. Before publishing that novel, Cahan wrote, in English, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and "The Imported Bridegroom" (1898). Yekl anticipates the later works negatively: that is to say, it is important in hindsight to see how different Cahan's emphasis is in this novella. The chief figure is Yekl, or Jake in English, whom we meet on the Lower East Side three years after his arrival in America. He had landed in Boston, sojourned there for a time, and now is living in the New York ghetto. He has emigrated alone, leaving aged parents, a young wife, and an infant son back home in Russia. Jake has long since given up his quaint religious upbringing: he is a modern American sweatshop worker, and a devil with the dance hall girls, for he had kept his married state a secret.

In time, he brings over his wife and son. But Giti proves to be old fashioned, dowdy, and unexciting—unfit to be the consort of the new "Yenkee," as Jake sees himself. (Henry Roth, almost 40 years later, will exploit a similar situation.) Certainly, Gitl is not like the sharp, vulgarly Americanized girls with whom Jake has been making his mark. So, with some intermittent misgivings, Jake slides apart from her, and they are finally divorced, he about to marry the sharpest of the dance hall beauties, Gitl about to be courted by a scholarly, gentle, less Americanized sewing-machine operator. At the end, Jake is disquieted; he fears that he has been cheated, somehow, of the sense of freedom, superiority, and ebullience that his Americanized conduct should have given him.

This feeling of dissatisfaction, rising at the moment of seeming triumph, will become a Cahan hallmark. But here, in this early story, it is significant to note that Jake's disillusionment has nothing to do with the classic attempt at upward mobility nor with the loss of religious tradition, for Cahan does not deal with either theme here. The loss of tradition is only passingly dealt with in the story. There is no pain upon its loss; no substitute, like materialistic striving, in place of the Judaism that is rejected; no feeling of emancipation is suggested. We get the feeling that Jake's restlessness is inborn and that the ghetto served, not as the cause, but as the catalyst of his marital drift, divorce, and discontent. Cahan does not offer his tale as typical or universal among East Side Jews. Certainly, Jake is no hero of the Americanizing process. As Howells noted in his review, this is but a realistic story, perhaps reminding him of the tone and manner of Stephen Crane's Maggie (1893).

Two years later, in "The Imported Bridegroom," which Cahan wrote as the lead story for a collection of his already published magazine stories, we begin to see a greater universalization of the ghetto experience. Reb Asriel Stroon, a widower, who had played loose with halakhic laws in order to amass his real estate fortune, now fanatically returns to religion. In fact, he goes back to his shtetl in Russia to find a bridegroom for his daughter, Flora. On her part, Flora is horrified, for she dreams of marrying a Jewish doctor, clean-shaven, American, modern, educated. Reb Asriel, in his hometown, discovers that you can't really go home again, but stays long enough to buy at auction a brilliant, shy Talmudic genius. He imports him for Flora.

At first, to Asriel's frustration, the wishfully emancipated Flora and the bewildered Shaya do not hit it off. Then Flora begins to teach him English. From that point on, the way to hell is opened. Shaya learns to read Socialist theory, which leads to the neglect of his Talmud studies, then to the abandonment of religious scruples and, finally, to outright atheism. He and Flora marry civilly only, and Flora dutifully accompanies her bridegroom to a free-thinking soirée, where Swedes, Englishmen, Russians, and Scots read and discuss the texts of Utopian theory. At the end, Cahan pictures Shaya listening raptly to the new revelation, and Flora, unable to compete in this deeply intellectual discussion, feeling cheated and excluded from "Shaya's entire future."

Again disappointment at the moment of triumph. But now Cahan's attention has shifted. First of all, the chief character is the father. Significantly, the mother in this story is dead. The father dominates his daughter, who feels smothered by the weight of this dominance, desires to get out from under, and does. Of course, it will be recognized that the same story is told over and over again later in American-Jewish fiction, but with the sexes reversed.

It is no accident, I think, that Cahan does it this way in "The Imported Bridegroom." After all, immersed as he was in contemporary fiction, he had Henry James and W. D. Howells to point the way to him about how mothers dominated daughters in genteel American society. How a transplanted Jewish mother might have dealt with Flora might have made an interesting story, but Cahan did not write it. His interest here is the father, and presently I shall suggest why.

Secondly, the major theme of this novella is how an innocent refugee from the shtetl loses his Jewishness because of his exposure to America—a more pointed theme than the one in Yekl. To fill the vacuum created by the loss, Cahan offers one of the two religions prevalent at the turn of the century—Socialism. (The other, economic mobility, will be David Levinsky's.) But the handling of the theme is strange for Cahan. He himself was an old yeshivah bohur who became devoted to free-thinking socialism, and the last scene of "The Imported Bride-groom," says Ronald Sanders, in The Downtown Jews, was drawn from an incident in his own life. But Cahan does not make Shaya the new immigrant intellectual hero, passionately embracing the dogma of progress. Indeed, he makes Shaya a source of disappointment and pain to his benefactor and his beloved. Cahan forces our sympathy upon Asriel and Flora, the woebegone greenhorns who simply are not with it. And the way Cahan describes the brilliant Shaya's participation in the avant-garde group restrains our admiration for his intellectual courage. "The Imported Bridegroom" is a story in which the rejection of tradition is depicted as an unretrieved loss and a betrayal, rather than as a triumph over provinciality; and there is nothing—neither new doctrine nor economic ascendancy—to take its place.

When Cahan turned his attention entirely to the Shaya-figure, whom he renamed David Levinsky—he has his hero try the other religion that was touted at the turn of the century: financial success. However, the acquisition of money and position as the compensation for the loss of Jewishness, fails the test. And, in depicting the failure, Cahan concomitantly perceives that the East European heritage offers a glimmering of hope in the midst of despair. In the final paragraphs of his confessional, Levinsky says:

When I think of these things, when I am in this sort of mood, I pity myself for a victim of circumstances. At the height of my business success I feel that if I had my life to live over again I should never think of a business career.

I don't seem to be able to get accustomed to my luxurious life. I am always more or less conscious of my good clothes, of the high quality of my office furniture, of the power I wield over the men in my pay. As I have said in another connection, I still have a lurking fear of restaurant waiters.

I can never forget the days of my misery. I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over the Talmud volume at the Preacher's Synagogue [in Antomir] seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak-manufacturer.

"I cannot escape from my old self." In one sentence, Cahan announces a major theme of future American Jewish fiction: the attempt to escape Jewishness and the continual (though not invariable) realization that there is no escape. It is the attempt to escape Jewish identity and the consequent realization that the search for inner identity demands some sort of return. Cahan contains this theme in the story that has since become typical: the East European Jew confronting the freedoms of an emancipated America. He describes the competing attractions of piety, or at least of a Jewish ethos, on one side, and economic materialism and social belonging on the other, together with the almost inevitable drift from Judaism toward a vestigial Jewishness. Later writers, like Jerome Weidman and Philip Roth, will carry the story even further, to the point where their protagonists simply ignore their Jewish origins or embrace outright assimilation. Sanford Marovitz has called this theme the central one:

The spiritual hunger of the immigrant Jew in America.… Those who traded their faith for the gospel of materialism suffered the pangs of loneliness regardless of their wealth, prestige, or position.…

In post-Cahan American Jewish fiction, the story of competing codes of thought and conduct is told over and over again. Never mind that Augie March, Marjorie Morningstar, Alexander Portnoy, Eli Peck, Moses Elkanah Herzog, Stern, and a host of others were not born in the shtetl. The shtetl ethos has filtered into their consciousness, as it never left Levinsky's, and forces them to evaluate, and in many cases to decry, their slipping into the slough of despond of American social and philosophical emancipation. What Cahan did right at the beginning was to anticipate the tendency of American Jewish fiction—for all its claims of universality—to be inspirited with parochial introspection. And this parochialism often results in some kind of re-integration with the old time-value system: rarely halakhic (although it does occur in Blankfort's The Strong Hand, [1951], or Potok's three novels, [1967, 1969, 1972]); sometimes merely habitual (as in Wouk's novel, [1955]); perhaps psychological (like Eli Peck's moment of epiphany in Roth's story, "Eli, the Fanatic," [1957]); at best, spiritual (as in Bellow's Herzog, [1964]).

Cahan emphasizes this theme by reprising a motif from "The Imported Bridegroom"—the transference of the traditional faith in learning from religious to secular matters:

My old religion had gradually fallen to pieces [recollects David Levinsky], and if its place was taken by something else, if there was something that appealed to the better man in me, to what was purest in my thought, and most sacred in my emotions, that something was the red, church-like structure on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street [the City College of New York].

It was the synagogue of my new life. Nor is this merely a figure of speech: the building really appealed to me as a temple, as a House of Sanctity, as we call the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. At least that was the term I would fondly apply to it, years later, in my retrospective broodings upon the first few years of my life in America.

Though he never could drag himself away from making money to enroll, Levinsky did find the time to read Herbert Spencer.

Well, the genre-children of David Levinsky did go to college. Nonetheless, the new American Haskalah, when taken in place of, not as complementary to, the heritage of the Temple in Jerusalem, landed them in the same alienated corner in which Cahan placed Levinsky.

Through the theme of alienation, Cahan introduced into American Jewish literature the anti-hero as protagonist. Let us understand the nature of David's anti-heroism. No doubt, in a sense, Cahan saw the "yeshivah to penthouse" progression as but a variation of America's heroic myth of "rags to riches" or "log cabin to White House." No doubt he took pride in the kind of person that Levinsky represents—the greenhorn who meets the challenges of a totally new way of life and overcomes them in terms of the host society. In this sense, the old role of hero, as representative of his community in a confrontation with the Other and in the ultimate rush to victory, can still be discerned in David Levinsky.

But Cahan perceived that the nascent Jewish hero in America would find no satisfaction in his heroism. Much of the novel is given over to portraying the erosion of self-confidence and of any sense of accomplishment in success or sacrifice. Cahan's intent is not to delineate a romantic hero, who scores a victory over the odds of life; nor a realistic hero, who accommodates himself to defeat with dignity; nor a tragic hero, whose catastrophe is his victory. Whatever heroism lies in the character of David Levinsky lies in the recognition that his strengths and persistence have led him only to spiritual dissatisfaction and misery, and that all along he has avoided making the truly hard decisions. In the welter of these anti-heroic emotions, however, David Levinsky retains an important trait of the ancient heroes: he still represents his community, then and since.

In his portrayal of the anti-hero, Cahan considers two forms of spiritual weakness: the arguments of determinism and of self-pity. His rejection of the first presages the rejection of it by later writers in his genre. As for the second, however, Cahan's theme of self-pity can now be seen as an early symptom of a syndrome in American-Jewish literature that will be climaxed by the hatred of the Jewish self and of the Jewish mother.

Desperate, in his alienation, for a modicum of self-esteem, David Levinsky cries out, "I pity myself for a victim of circumstances." Quite candidly, the plea that he is a victim of circumstances sounds convincing to our generation, disposed as we are to find existential or Freudian or sociological justification to replace the old idea of guilt. Indeed, even Mr. Marovitz is persuaded, going so far as to compare David with Clyde Griffiths, the predestinated hero of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), and to assert that David's future was predetermined in the old country before he ever started on his way to America. It seems to me, however, that Cahan's whole point in this novel is thus turned around.

The very title of the novel shows its affinity to the story of the successful rags-to-riches paint manufacturer in Howells' Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), rather than to the story of the bewildered, unsuccessful youth from the Middle West. American literary history records the warm friendship of Howells and Cahan, and, as John Higham points out in his introduction to the Torchbook edition, the novel is written in the tradition of Howells as well as of Dreiser, but the earlier Dreiser of Sister Carrie (1900, 1911). Dreiser's point in that novel is that success and social acceptance lead but to inner dissatisfaction and misery, precisely the donnée of The Rise of David Levinsky. And Howells means to tell us, as Cahan does, that success in business is not the true rise for a man. He must re-evaluate himself in terms of a traditional ethos—Christian and Yankee in the one, Jewish in the other—which in the last paragraph of Cahan's novel is hinted at.

There is, then, in Cahan's work, as in its literary progeny, a retreat from the logical finality of naturalism. Immediately after Levinsky utters his claim of victimization, he says that, were he able to do it all over again, he would have done something else. So he did have a choice, didn't he? The power to choose is Moses Herzog's discovery in Bellow's novel, and, indeed, is the climax of it. When Herzog rises above the feeling of victimization, then he decides to begin a new life. In almost all of American-Jewish fiction, the power of the Other—whether object, circumstance, or person—wields tremendous influence, but rarely to the point of total enervation. There is, at the very least, a confessional and, therefore, a ray of hope.

More important man the theme of determinism in the confessional is the strain of self-pity that begins in The Rise of David Levinsky and permeates much of future American Jewish writing. Already in Cahan's novel, self-pity develops into a lack of self-confidence and positive self-dislike. In time, this feeling will be developed into a castigation and denigration of the Jewish ego—in short, into self-hatred, which so disturbed the readers of Commentary magazine when it published a few of Philip Roth's stories in this vein.

Out of the sturm und drang of this process, the anti-hero emerges as an "I" persona mat is solipsistic in its view of the world. I refer, not only to the predilection in American Jewish fiction toward the method of first-person narration but, also, to the way the psyche of the "I" persona has developed. The Rise of David Levinsky is in the first-person, but it is not a first-person narrative in the tradition of Conrad and James—the dispassionate development of moral perception and judgment in the narrator. Rather, Cahan's tone is in the line of Poe and Joyce—the passionate self-revelation of despair, stress, pain, and spiritual nakedness. Since then, with whatever variations of first-person method—Portnoy's Complaint (1969) is entirely so; Herzog weaves it in with agility; Markfield's Teitelbaum's Window (1970) in sections harks back to the epistolary variation—this psychological catharsis has become a feature of recent fiction in this genre.

It is the solipsistic "I," the extremity of anti-heroism, that has disfigured the Jewish mother in American Jewish literature and created a popular, if notorious, caricature. In Cahan's book, the pattern is quite innocently established: the father is dead and the mother becomes the center of the son's psyche. This situation, a generation later, becomes typical: the father is physically or symbolically dead; the mother survives to become her son's hang-up. But her role has been reevaluated since Cahan's time. Once she was praised for her influence upon her son's Ufe. Now the solipsistic "I," casting about for a villain mat has caused the hatred of self, accuses her of smothering her son's ego and freedom. She is the Freudian bogey of those who try to get out from under the accident or divine plan of their being born Jewish.

Because American-Jewish fiction since the second World War has become so popular and, along with it, the theme of the withdrawn papa, the yiddishe mama, and the choked son, this Oedipal-looking trinity has been thought of as uniquely Jewish. Lately, Professor Harold Fisch has argued that it is not Jewish at all, but is a by-product of the French Revolution's intellectual emancipation. In literature, Professor Fisch finds, the most blatant non-Jewish example of it is D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), four years before the appearance of The Rise of David Levinsky, in which Mrs. Morel is a Gentile yiddishe mama. But this, for American-Jewish literature, smacks too much of the sexual and not enough of the cultural—too much Freud, as it were, and not enough Jung.

For Abraham Cahan and his heirs, the father symbolizes tradition, like Reb Asriel in "The Imported Bridegroom." When, in the story, tradition has been lost, the father is sick, dead, or a non-entity, as in so many stories from David Levinsky right up to Friedman's A Mother's Kisses (1964) and Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. This plot dominates our fiction because it is the reflection of the American-Jewish experience—the rejection of Orthodoxy. This is the theme, amply supported, of Professor Allen Guttmann's recent study.

There is, however, a sporadic, but definite, parallel line of stories in which tradition is seen as strong and viable, and in these the mother is cast in a distinctly lesser role. Thus, in "The Imported Bridegroom" and in Chaim Potok's first two novels, where tradition plays a central role, the mothers are absent and the fathers dominate. Even Philip Roth, perhaps instinctively, pays obeisance to the power of tradition as embodied in the father. Eli Peck, the fanatic, bursting out from under the smothering weight of his super-sophisticated, assimilated wife and of his own guilt feelings, dons the smelly garb of the young hasid. But the gesture is not yet a complete assuagement. He must run to confront his new-born son, brought before him in the hospital nursery; and, promising himself mat his son will one day wear these gabardines, he cries out, "I'm the father!" Though Eli is mad, we are left with the feeling that he has reached a spiritual insight not vouchsafed his assimilated neighbors. He has fallen into what Melville called "the madness of vital truth."

Indeed, cued once more by Cahan, we may be on the verge of witnessing the restoration of the mother to a more healthy place in the triangle of the Jewish family. Henry Roth's Call It Sleep may be read as such a story. Though first published in 1941, it was reprinted just a few years ago to popular and critical acclaim. In Herzog, Bellow has Moses' mother remain in his memory as the paragon to which he hopes his daughter will aspire; and she is part of that poignant memory that includes his ineffectual but wonderful bootlegger father, his compassionate mother, and the bootlegger's sons saying ancient Hebrew prayers. And Chaim Potok, after two novels in which the mothers of his heroes are either literally or figuratively dead, resurrects the true yiddishe mama in Rivkeh Lev in My Name is Asher Lev (1972), a story about a God-endowed artist growing up in a Brooklyn hasidic community. It is significant, I think, that Asher's father is continually traveling, but leaves behind him the power of his personality and his traditional role which his wife must interpret for this son during his absences. This is precisely the role that fate and tradition devolved upon the mother of David Levinsky, to whom David's memory returns time and again later in life, a factor in his spiritually fructive dissatisfaction. Rivkeh Lev's presence in her son's psyche is what frees his artistic soul from the misunderstanding of his community, and yet prevents his drift into non-Orthodoxy.

These novels exemplify one of my emphases in this essay. Cahan insists that neither the theme of escape from Jewishness nor the self-hating nature of the American-Jewish anti-hero sentences him to a spiritual demise. Many critics of American literature have pointed to the theme of the self's spiritual death and rebirth. I suggest that, in the last chapter, David Levinsky's summation of his life implies such an awakening. But do not mistake me. The evidence in our fiction since Cahan does not reflect a religious revival and Cahan writes no portrayal of such. The competition between the shtetl ethos and the attractions of a materialistic haskalah society still goes on. Nostalgia for a lost, if seamy, Jewish paradise is not rebirth. And yet it was mainly emotion, not doctrine, that distracted our American Jewish heroes from their grandfathers' path. It may yet be the factor that will bring them to the threshold of spiritual peace. David Levinsky, of course, has no guarantee, but his suffering does lead to possibility.

Professor Guttmann thinks otherwise. He argues that American-Jewish fiction is the record of a generation of Jews that refuses to go on being Jews or to transmit Jewishness. Certainly, there is much sociological evidence to support his reading of the literature. Yet his study shows also that assimilation leads but to a crisis of identity. There is no epiphany or fulfillment depicted in stories that describe the adoption of a non-Jewish way of life. Consequently, even at the moment when he thinks he has successfully escaped, the straggler is still beckoned back, just as Cahan perceived more than half-a-century ago. I submit that there are too many marranos among our assimilated anti-heroes to permit total acceptance of Guttmann's bleak conclusion. Such are the heroes of some of the best old and new writers, like Lewisohn, Bellow, Philip Roth, Malamud, Wallant. All of them are heirs of Abraham Cahan.

Apparently then, in theme and vision, in method and thought, Abe Cahan blazed a trail for later American-Jewish fiction. Certainly, this trail has been broadened and strengthened so that stories of American Jews reflect, not only the experience of the East European immigrant community for three generations, but the general condition of mankind. This is an attempt by our authors to declassify this fiction as ethnic, and to incorporate it as characteristic of American literature in its totality. I refer the reader to an interview with Saul Bellow, in May 1971, in the New York Times Book Review for the expression of this sentiment. But the attempt is doomed to failure. Cahan's story—of one who tried to get out from under his Jewishness and learned that he could not—is archetypal of a specific genre of fiction, expressing a specific communal experience in America.