a document of cultural history, largely sociological in its methods and achievements. In an important article, David Singer made use of the novel to confirm a historian's thesis on the process of Jewish secularization. Cushing Strout has suggested the value ofDavid Levinsky as a historically dense account of identity under the pressure of "cultural strain" and recommended it to sociologists as a valuable source on this subject.

Other readers have highlighted the novel as a genre piece, a fine example of, variously, realism, "ghetto realism," or naturalism. When mentioned in some academic context other than a course in Yiddish or a survey of American Jewish literature, Cahan is most likely to appear as an epigone of his sometime patron William Dean Howells and a lesser light among the realists. So far as I know, the only mainstream American literary journal that has published more than a single item on Cahan is American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, to whose lot he falls willy-nilly. Even so sympathetic a reader as Irving Howe, although according David Levinsky a fair measure of praise, has brought the novel up short by labelling it, finally, "a minor masterpiece of genre realism." This emphasis on the novel's realism, while not inappropriate, has too often tended to draw attention to the novel as a specimen of the genre while obscuring its more distinctive merits.

Finally, David Levinsky's themes have been applauded, in a way that Cahan's assimilationist hero would have envied, as "real Yankee," that is, characteristically American. Although the distinctive life of the Jewish Lower East Side began to wane in the Twenties with the fixing of immigration quotas, it left a legacy which includes patterns of experience that do seem typcially American. The lost home, the cost of success: these alone locate the immigrant adventure in the thick of or imaginative preoccupations. In his excellent introduction to the recent reprint of David Levinsky John Higham has suggested that the novel's theme of success derives from American literature, from Howells, Norris, and Dreiser. Isaac Rosenfeld has called David Levinsky "an American novel par excellence … and exemplary treatment of one of the dominant myths of American capitalism, that the millionaire finds nothing but emptiness at the top of the heap."

It is this emptiness, the all too familiar canker at the heart of die American dream, that The Rise of David Levinsky is about. But it is about more than that. The pluralism of Cahan's experience, his outsider's perspective coupled with his intimate participation in an important historical occasion, expands the novel so that it is more than the chronicle of a place in time (the ghetto, turn-of-the-century America); it is, I would argue, a novel richly descriptive of that situation of history and feeling we call modernity. And I believe that we may gain a more accurate appreciation of Cahan's achievement in David Levinsky by coming to see it as a novel absorbed with the issue of what it means to be modern.

The modernity of Cahan's writing in David Levinsky, as in virtually all his fiction, begins in his customary historical subject, which is an episode in that epochal process that is often called "modernization": the transition of the east European Jews from the traditional world of shtetl and ghetto to die new world of open society, city life, and industrial labor. Cahan contributes as few other American writers have to our understanding of that constellation of decisive historical turnings—secularization, urbanization, proletarization—which has enacted the transformation of traditional into moderen society, and which finds its classic treatments in European social thought and literature. In a briefer, more abruptly violent arc, Cahan's Jews travel the same historical distance as the English of Cobbett and Carlyle. The violence of this journey lies not only in its ability to alter the tangible life of a people, providing new opportunities and new manners, but in its power to reshape the intimate life of feeling and belief. We can see the full reach of this transformative process, as it typically asserts itself in Cahan's fiction, in Yekl, the 1896 novella which brought Cahan to the attention of Howells.

Cahan begins his story with the palpable trappings of the new life—the sweat shop and dancing academy, the half mastered idioms and proudly displayed slang of newly acquired English, excited talk about boxing and baseball—the circumstances among which the old country's "Yekl" becomes America's "Jake." Jake is enthusiastic for everything in his experience that strikes him as American and modern, and Cahan develops and deepens his story by showing, through Jake's growing disgust with his too old-fashioned, "dowdy little greenhorn wife" and their eventual divorce, how a man can come to decide against the past and try to kick free of it. The story concludes with Jake half-reluctantly on his way to take a new, more Americanized wife. At the close of Yekl, Cahan succeeds impressively in suggesting what is truly unprecedented in Jake's feelings: not only regret, but a confused sense of new possibility and freedom which Jake doesn't know how to act on but which he feels he mustn't lose, a new uncertainty which colors all his perceptions.

The subject of Yekl and the essential subject of all Cahan's fiction is the impact of historical change on culture, that region of experience where private and collective meaning merge to set the limits on what possibilities we can imagine for ourselves in such things as marriage, livelihood, the fundamental matters of a life. And the power of Cahan's stories derives in large part from our assumption that this base of unexamined, everyday belief is immune to history and change. Culture, as we unreflectingly participate in it, is the natural, timeless, and true. Intruded upon by history, it is none of these things. The effect of historical change on those significances which are cultural can accurately be called radical, because change reminds culture of what it has forgotten, that it too is history, not "the way things are" but merely "the way things are now." What felt secure now seems impermanent. The sense of unspecifiable possibility which troubles Jake at the close of Yekl is due not only to the specific changes in his life but to the fact that change itself, the possibility of possibilities, has entered permanently into his life.

The modernity of Cahan's fiction lies in his depiction of this radical process whereby new experiences are compounded to alter the boundaries of a life, changing the fundamental feeling of experience itself. His writing is of more than documentary value because it expresses this process, as few documents can, as it is enacted in consciousness. Cahan's stories are less interested in directly representing the large, collective dimension of historical events than they are in intuiting history as an event for consciousness.

Yekl ends inconclusively, with Jake's own uncertainty and a more general uncertainty about the questions his experience poses: Can a man walk unencumbered, as Jake hopes, from the past into the future? Is it possible to simply decide against the past and for the future? Or are the consequences of such a choice so ramified and unpredictable that inevitably one chooses blindly, and choice is no choice at all? To claim that Cahan's attention to these questions, which are the same questions posed by David Levinsky, provides a vision of the modern, is to assert something about Cahan's understanding of the exigencies of experience in time. And it is Cahan's imagination of history, as die individual experiences it, which, I should like to argue, makes David Levinsky a novel of modernity.

To be sure, the idea of modernity seems to introduce more problems tiian it solves. Like its famously difficult kin, romantic, modern eludes definition. Its range of reference—which can include any manner of event in time, along with any kind of art and matters of subject, style, and form—is immense, and its boundaries are unclear and flexible. In addition, it presents the special problems of those terms whose reference is temporal. Our attempts to apply the word "modern" to a text or an occasion are liable to end up meaning it in that weak sense whereby it serves as merely a marker for the contemporaneous; and if, as the joke on the historians' cliche goes, every age is an age of transition, it's equally true that it's always modern times. But, on the other hand, if we try to define the modern as something more than the fashion of the day, by specifying certain traits of spirit or style as definitively modern 'for all time,' we quickly find that such definitions are helpless against shifts in taste and opinion. The modernism of one age is notoriously the classicism of the next.

Those accounts of the modern which try to evade the temporality of the concept inevitably fall victim to it. A more adequate understanding of the modern must, instead, account for its temporality by recognizing that modernity as such is a mode of historicity, an attitude toward experience in time. The modern comes after. It begins in an awareness of change and develops into a sense of discontinuity. The past seems to have receded faster than before and left the present stranded, cut off from tradition, radically free but also uncomforted by any faith in history. In literature, those texts are modern which, through subject, style, or form, raise the issue of change, discontinuity, novation. Modernity can be claimed, then, for any text of any period that raises in this way the issue of modernity. This is not to say that the texts we generally recognize as modern need to be redefined and reclassified on these terms—this essay will continue to use modernism in its common acceptation, which clusters together certain familiar texts, authors, and issues of nineteenth and twentieth century literature—but only to suggest that what our modernist texts most fundamentally share may be an attitude toward history. So many of modernism's characteristic griefs, its feeling of loss and homelessness, as well as its brighter moments of radical liberation and invention, seem implicated in its loss of faith in teleology and its sense of discontinuity.

A useful account of the modern in its relation to history and, at the same time, an excellent standpoint from which to consider the modernity of David Levinsky, is Paul de Man's essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity," which I'd like to consider briefly before turning more directly to Cahan's novel. De Man has fittingly chosen to center his discussion on that paradigmatic modern, Nietzsche. And equally appropriate is his emphasis on Nietzsche's 1874 essay "The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life," which stands, if any single text can, at that point which is both culmination and crisis of the nineteenth century historicist tradition. The special authority of Nietzsche's text derives from his own participation, through his philological training and scholarship, in this tradition, which he here turns so violently against.

Nietzsche's essay begins in his recognition that his age has seen the triumph of history as the sole category for the understanding of man, and he seconds historicism's anti-metaphysical tendency to reduce man to his history and history to man. However, Nietzsche attacks what he calls the "historical sickness" of the age: this is the excessive admiration for the past which amounts, he feels, to a weak-willed escape from the present. All historical thought which is merely comtemplative, which does not explicitly serve the present, enfeebles it, inhibiting action, spontanaiety and change. Nietzsche calls instead for a "critical" historical consciousness willing to "judge and condemn the past" in order to free the present generation from its encumbering weight.

As de Man points out, history and modernity relate to each other as antonyms in Nietzsche's essay. History oppresses modernity's desire for originality and change, and modernity must, in order to come into being, assert itself against the historical past. In this opposition de Man recognizes the "radical impulse that stands behind all genuine modernity." "Modernity," de Man writes, "exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point of origin that marks a new departure. This combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with an action that is also a new origin reaches the full power of the idea of modernity."

However, as de Man also recognizes, Nietzsche is too subtle a thinker to really believe in a present entirely cleansed of any past. Only in desire or abstraction are past and present, history and modernity, fully separable from each other. The image of the chain, firmly linking past, present, and future, and the image of the growing tree, affirming the continuity of identity through time, run throughout Nietzsche's essay. Not only is the past linked to the present, it is, moreover, constitutive of the present. Given this fact, the destruction of the past that is the precondition of modernity is bound to be, as Nietzsche admits, "a dangerous process, dangerous for life itself. Men and eras that serve life in this manner, by judging and destroying the past, are always dangerous and endangered. For we are inevitably the result of earlier generations.… It is not possible to loosen ourselves from this chain." The destruction of the past is dangerous because the past inheres in the present and in ourselves.

It should be clear that Nietzsche is not writing about history considered only as the collective or national past, but equally about the individual's attitude to his experience in time, his relationship to his own past, the power of his memory and his desire to forget. Nietzsche's essay isn't so much a philosophy of history as it is a phenomenological and psychological account of history and modernity as elements in individual consciousness. And it is Nietzsche's ability to bring these issues to a focus in individual consciousness which makes his essay useful to our understanding of Cahan's unhappy hero.

If modernity's murder of the past is parricide, de Man writes, making explicit the psychological current in Nietzsche's essay, it is also suicide, since the son who turns his hand against his father also strikes at whatever of his father there is in himself. Equally paradoxical is modernity's leap forward toward some absolute origin, since the new can only originate a new history, becoming itself the past from which it had hoped to escape. This turbulent but unbreakable relationship between history and modernity is endlessly ironic: its individual ironies born at those moments when the implacable opposition of history and modernity suddenly shifts to reveal the mutual constitution of each by the other, and then again when this new vision of interpellency, continuity, and renewal shifts once more, revealing opposition. De Man captures this irony and also says something marvellously suggestive about this day's modernism—its familiar subject, failure, and its own habitually ironic tone—when he observes that "the modernity of a literary period [may lie in] the manner in which it discovers the impossibility of being modern." We can overhear the modern in the act of uttering its own impossibility when Stephen Dedalus, in that quintessentially modern novel made from cliches and twice-told tales, proclaims: "History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." This is no more than the sleeper's dream talk, not loud enough to awaken him, borne back into the dream.

In David Levinsky, Cahan has imagined a man tempted by the essential modern possibility, which is at the same time the eternal American promise: the fresh start. Levinsky's life in America is dominated by his strenuous efforts to remake himself in some ideal image which combines the immunity of an aristocrat with the power of a magnate. Although he denominates this fantasy self "American," it really stands as a general wish for invulnerability, a desire to escape whatever is conditioning and constraining in experience. Levinsky wishes to escape, most of all, from the past, that portion of experience which insists that identity is not only something to be willed, originated, but something to which one must also submit. Levinsky's denial of his past, his Jewish identity, and his European experience, amounts finally to a disabling self betrayal, an unmaking of the self. Levinsky finds that the past can indeed be destroyed, but it is this destruction which then becomes his inaugurating act: ironically, Levinsky finds his future determined, not only by the past, but by his vehement denial of it. This irony, whereby his denial of his past becomes his past, dogs Levinsky at every turn: we see it clearly in the way his immigrant awkwardness and his self consciousness are compounded by his frantic efforts to appear a real American, supremely at ease in the world. Cruelly, it is Levinsky's exaggerated conformity which, more than anything else, marks him as ineradicably an outsider. A fellow immigrant acknowledges this, in his taunt, "You're awfullv grammatical, Levinsky."

The trajectory of Levinsky's American experience describes, then, that double movement of radical aspiration and necessary failure, which in de Man's account is the process whereby the modern discovers its own impossibility. As it takes place in David Levinsky this process is at once: concrete, in its treatment of Levinsky's unhappy life history; representative, in the relevance that Levinsky's experience has to the collective history of Jewish immigration (compare the structure of Levinsky's experience in time, his self-making as unmaking, to the structure of this statement by Irving Howe: "The dispersion of the immigrant Jews began the very day they started shaping themselves into a community."); and paradigmatic, in its description of what we might call the phenomenology of being modern and, also, in its depiction of the final effect of this experience on Levinsky's identity, his self-estrangement, a condition of spirit which we recognize as modern in an exemplary way. It is with an eye to each of these aspects of the novel that we can turn now to pursue a reacquaintance with David Levinsky.

The first sixth of the novel is comprised of David Levinsky's reminiscent account of his childhood and adolescence in the provincial Russian city of Antomir. From the death of his father when he is three, David, an only child, is raised by his devoted and strong-minded mother. Her single ambition is that her son become a Talmudic scholar. David undertakes the life of a young Talmudist, spending his days in the synagogue and, as a charity scholar, at religious schools. Ghetto life, impoverished though it is, makes sense to David, the unexamined sense of tradition seen through a child's eyes. Piety, learning, and loyalty to faith and family, are the transcendent values of the community.

Although Cahan does not idealize this traditional life, it clearly manifests the unity of experience which Levinsky's American experience so damagingly lacks. The same values, or at least the imperatives to them, are reiterated at each level of experience: individual, familial, communal, and in the religious institutions of the community. The unity of this culture is preserved by its resistance to change, its orientation toward mythical rather than historical time. The unworldliness of a people in daily contact, through its holy texts, with a mythical past and aspiring to a millenial future is captured in Reb Sender's words to David: "What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter. Only the other world has substance and reality." Weighed against the other world and eternity, this world and its history are as nothing.

The surrounding Russian state also contributes, in its exclusion and confinement of Jews, to the integrity of the Jewish community and its insulation from history. But at the time of David's young manhood this is changing. A program of russification is in effect. Jewish students are being admitted to Russian schools and being taught, by Gentiles, Russian language and culture. Although David attends no such school this wedge of modernity penetrates the community and touches him. His friend Napthali, a devoted Talmudist, develops a passion for Russian literature and becomes apostate. After the death of David's mother at the hands of a Gentile mob it is a modernized Jewish family, the Minskers, which takes him in. Matilda Minsker, the daughter, is the typical barishnaya, the new Jewish woman who speaks Russian, plays the piano, and keeps company with the young gymnasists. It is Matilda who gives David his fare to America; but just as important, it is she who introduces David to new standards of love and sex which depend upon the canons of neither the Talmud nor the community nor the family. Even before David arrives in America he is caught between the wheels of contrasting ways of life.

From the moment of Levinsky's departure for America his experience is shaped by the persistence of the past, which he is eager to leave behind, in the present. Although by this point an unbeliever, Levinsky is unable to keep from reading psalms and benedictions for his ship's safety. Similarly, on his arrival Levinsky lags oddly behind himself, unable to catch up with and assimilate his new experiences. Of his landing, he writes stiffly, "I am at a loss to convey the peculiar state of mind the experience created in me." As Jules Chametzky has pointed out, Levinsky's account of his first American impressions suffers from a dull, over-literary quality which fails to capture them in their immediacy or take their measure in retrospection. Levinsky offers a static, pictorializing description—"The magnificent verdure of Staten Island, the tender blue of sea and sky, the dignified bustle of passing craft"—which replaces perception with cliche, demonstrating Levinsky's failure to fully grasp his own experience.

In a famous sentence, Marx has written that history is the formation of the five senses down to the present. But the possibility remains that the senses will not keep pace with history, that perception may not be adequate to the moment. Levinsky's summary metaphor for the spectacle of the new world, "It unfolded itself like a divine revelation"—shows that he still sees with old world eyes.

Cahan's writing here seems entirely right, true to the difficulty of any attempt to grasp powerful, unprecedented experience and true, no doubt, to the real disorientations of the immigrant's arrival. However, Levinsky's failure at this moment to comprehend his experience exemplifies a defining element in his character, his persistent distance from himself, from his true feelings and ambitions. This passage prefigures the alienation that characterizes his entire life, the hyperconsciousness which inhibits some truer self-understanding, his perverse success in pursuit of his own unhappiness. In addition, this passage, showing as it does how the past inheres in and shapes the present—something Levinsky vigorously denies until his unhappiness forces him to admit it—suggests that Levinsky participates in that typical self-estrangement of the modern will to self-origination, whereby "in separating itself from the past, it has at the same time severed itself from the present."

Levinsky marks the self-originating quality of his enterprises by referring to his arrival as a "second birth," and to himself as "a new born babe." From the first, he does all he can to abet the transformation from "greenhorn," a word that rings cruelly and contemptuously in his ears, to "real Yankee." He goes about memorizing Americanisms ("Good looks aren't everything. Beauty is skin deep, and handsome is as handsome does;"), trying to eradicate his "Talmudic gestures," and dressing in the bowler-hatted American style of the day. He attends night school with "religious devotion," straining to emulate the th of his teacher's born-in-America diction. Despite his aversion to their sound, he masters the difficult satisfaction, think, and because but learns from Bender (a pun here), his teacher, that the real American bywords are "Dil-i-gence, perr-severance, tenacity!"

Levinsky's frantic self-acculturation amounts to a whole-sale assault on the integrity of his European experience and identity. Even the organism is open to the prospect of americanization: "That I was not born in America was something like a physical defect that asserted itself in many disagreeable ways—a physical defect which, alas! no surgeon in the world was capable of removing." In shaving his beard and his earlocks, Levinsky removes as much as he can.

Only when David Levinsky can look at himself and finally say "I scarcely recognized myself," does he feel truly American. But with the new man comes a new life. Levinsky has kept some tally of his experience; he knows that the glory of his new clothes has been paid for with his brutalization as a peddler: "Nor was I unaware of certain unlovable traits that were unavoidably developing in my own self under these influences. And while human nature was thus growing smaller, the human world was growing larger, more complex, more heartless, and more interesting." As the world expands in interest, in possibility—for money, for sexual adventure, for personal aggrandizement—something valuable is diminished. The bargain of modern life counters the promise of religion, the things of the flesh or those of the spirit. In choosing the former, Levinsky denies the Old World and the values which are still deeply his own, and so denies a part of himself.

Even before leaving Russia, Levinsky had thought of himself as no longer a believer. However, in America certain elements of his orthodox faith persist, transformed. The sixth chapter of the novel is entitled "My Temple." Levinsky's new temple is the house of man, CCNY. The College's buildings and students become objects of religious veneration: "I would pause and gaze at its red, ivy-clad walls, mysterious high windows, humble spires; I would stand watching the students on the campus and around the great doors, and go my way, with a heart full of reverence, envy and hope, with a heart full of quiet ecstasy." The word rings with cabalistic significance: "College! The sound was forever buzzing in my ear. The seven letters were forever floating before my eyes. They were a magic group, a magic whisper." Although Cahan intends some irony at the expense of Cahan's displaced piety for profane knowledge, this is Levinsky's one chance to be true, in some form, to his mother's hope that he become a man of learning, and to be true to himself, to "the better man in me, to what was purest in my thoughts and most sacred in my emotions." But in point of these aspirations, Levinsky is destined to become a Jude, and what is worse, a Jewish Babbitt. Destined, is the wrong word, though. Although Levinsky blames his fall (recorded in "The Destruction of My Temple") on a single fatal accident, the point at which he abandons his plan of working just long enough to earn his tuition is characterized by decision as well as destiny.

While working at the stitching machine of his employer, Jeff Mannheimer, a German Jew (and so a rival), of American birth (and so envied), Levinsky accidentally spills a bottle of milk on some coats. Mannheimer flies at him, chastises him, and embarrasses him in front of his shopmates. Burning with humiliation and desire for revenge, he decides to steal the designer who has made Mannheimer* s fortune and enter the "great, daring game of life" (business) on his own. In later years, Levinsky is to blame his disappointments as well as his riches on the fall of a bottle of milk.

Here is one of the trademarks of naturalism, the tiny event whose raison d'être is cosmic but whose repercussions are all too human—the click of the safe door in Sister Carrie, for example. However, those readers who have imagined that Cahan is writing as a naturalist here have overlooked his rather broad joke on Levinsky, crying over spilt milk. It is only Levinsky's cowardly desire to deny responsibility for his own actions which leads him to blame Fate. Cahan is far too attuned to the contingencies of character, circumstance, and history, and far too interested in his character's psychology to take very seriously the determinisi explanations and facile pessimism of naturalism. It is not Cahan, but Levinsky who chooses an oversimplified and inadequate explanation of his own behavior. In this incident, Levinsky acts with his typical perversity, first deciding against his own best hopes for himself and then rationalizing and mystifying his own action. In this way, Levinsky proceeds to make a life which, despite his success, seems not so much lived as inflicted upon him and an identity which meets itself as a stranger.

As Cahan makes plentifully clear, Levinsky's fate is not determined by a single slip, but multiply determined by his own character. Even in his Antomir childhood, Levinsky's emotional life has been characterized by proud self-pity, envy, and vengefulness. In one of his juvenile daydreams David plans the comeuppance of a cruel school master:

In my helplessness I would seek comfort in dreams of becoming a great man some day, rich and mighty, and avenging myself on him. Behold! Shmerl the Pincher is running after me, cringingly begging my pardon, and I, omnipotent and formidable, say to him: "Do you remember how you pinched the life out of me for nothing? Away with you, you cruel beast!"

With its exaggeration and magical transformations, this rings true as child's fantasy; yet, the fantasy comes true.

David's mother is his avenging angel and, sure enough, discovering her son black and blue, she lights out after the villianous Shmerl. Even with his mother's death, David's pity is reserved for himself, his mother again expected to play the role of intercessor:

I would shut my eyes and vision my mother looking at me from her grave, her heart contracted with anguish and pity for her famished orphan.… It would give me satisfaction to denounce the whole town to her. "Ah, I have got you!" I seemed to say to the people of Antomir. "The ghost of my mother and the whole Other World see you in all your heartlessness. You can't wriggle out of it." This was my refuge. I reveled in it.

Perpetuated into adulthood, these feelings constitute a deep vein of childishness in Levinsky's character. Levinsky is dominated by those reactive emotions which express a desire to annul the slights and wounds of the past, to reach back and punish one's first enemies. However, Levinsky's resentful animus against the past binds him to it, brings it into the present and, with cruel irony, determines his future. As Levinsky admits, of the Mannheimer episode, "I was bound to make good, 'just for spite.'" Of course, Levinsky's unhappy success spites no one but himself. His inability to place himself in some adequate relation to the past, neither denying it nor wholly submitting to it, contributes to his failure of adult-hood. In his complaint, at the end of his autobiography—"I pity myself for a victim of circumstances"—it is hard not to hear the whine of a disappointed child.

Levinsky's passivity before his own childishness and pettiness, his failure to win through to the best in himself, rather than circumstance, destroys his temple. The special pathos of his life is that as David Levinsky watches with regret he becomes exactly what he hoped not to be—a man of business, not letters, a parvenu boor.

Once in the world of business all questions of ideals and ethics are subjugated to the ethos of Success. For the businessman with an intellectual bent the age supplies a practical philosophy, Social Darwinism. The factory is "one of the battlefields in our struggle for existence." A Rivington Street sage offers a counterpart to Dreiser's lobster and squid: "The world is not a wedding-feast, Levinsky. It is a big barn-yard full of chickens and they are scratching one another, and scrambling over one another. Why? Because there are little heaps of grain in the yard and each chicken wants to get as much of it as possible." Levinsky reads Spencer and Darwin and chooses his theories according to his needs. "It was as though all the wonders of learning, acumen, ingenuity, and assiduity displayed in these works had been intended to establish my title as one of the victors of Existence." One of Nature's elect, Levinsky is not above employing scabs, stealing designs, and spying on the unions. His fortune is raised on a foundation of cheap labor.

Levinsky's education in the American ethos is an education in cynicism and deceit, and the discrepancy between American ideal and American reality contributes some leavening ironies to the novel. In his "greenhornhood," exposed for the first time to the machinations of ward politics, Levinsky "formed a conception of political parties as of a kind of competing business companies whose specialty was to make millions by ruling some big city, levying tribute on fallen women, thieves and liquor dealers, doing favors to friends and meting out punishment to foes." In his American maturity, Levinsky himself adopts this too-shrewd Yankee apothegm: "If you have his confidence, you have him by the throat." He conforms to the type of the two-faced businessman, the "cheerful competitor" who is as much back-stabber as back-slapper. He learns to smoke "the cigar of peace and goodwill" with a rival salesman, all the while gauging their shared duplicity: "He seemed to like me. But then he hated me, too. As for me, I reciprocated both feelings."

Levinsky's final initiation into Babbittry occurs, appropriately, in the dining-car of a west-bound train. After contributing his share of shop talk and dirty stories in conversation with some Gentile salesmen, he joins them for dinner. He steers the conversation to politics and receives their attention and, it seems, their acceptance. But even in his joy Levinsky must struggle to restrain his European gesticulations. He is all the while "aware that it was 'aristocratic American' food, that I was in the company of well-dressed American Gentiles, eating and conversing with them, a nobleman among noblemen." With this, the epiphany of his acculturation, Levinsky is taken to the cold steel heart of a new, faintly inhuman world: "I throbbed with love for America … The electric lights, the soft red glint of the mahogany walls, the whiteness of the table linen, the silent efficiency of the colored waiters, coupled with the fact that all was speeding onward through the night, made me feel as though I were partaking of a repast in an enchanted palace."

If Levinsky could disappear into this wonderland all would, I suppose, be well. But he is still David of Antomir, the Talmud student, his mother's son. The self-consciousness which he cannot banish is the warning "You do not belong." Flushed with his companions' acceptance of Mr. Levinsky the American businessman, he asks himself, "Can it be that I am I?". Walking away from the table he wonders, "Had I talked too much? Had I made a nuisance of myself?"

The way in which Levinsky courts acceptance is slavish and unsavory. Through his life he broods on some unknown inner world and finds only the half-solace of position and prestige. But even though his emotional defeats are clumsy and the saddened tenderness with which he regards himself is often repellent, his unhappiness speaks of genuine pain and truly regretted loss. He writes, "My wretched boyhood appeals to me as a sick child does to its mother." David Levinsky's appeal, to the Gentile "noblemen," to those whose respect he tries to buy, is for love. His real affliction is lovelessness. He makes no true friend, has no family, and is welcome in no home. He arrived in America homesick and lovesick (over the loss of Matilda Minsker) and this, in a sense, is his condition throughout his American life. Leslie Fiedler has recognized this, calling David Levinsky's theme "the failure of love." He says of Levinsky, "some deep impotence dogs him … he is somehow sexually or affectively incapacitated." Isaac Rosenfeld suggests the same when he writes, of Levinsky's women, "He goes among them mainly to find a substitute for his mother."

In his childhood, as an adored son, David learned that the place for love was in the home. The orthodox law of the community supports this: "To be 'in love' with a girl who was an utter stranger to you was something which only Gentiles or 'modern' Jews might indulge in." Even through the changes of David's adolescence, sexuality remains associated only with the family and marriage: "the word 'girl' had acquired a novel sound for me, one full of disquieting charm. The same was true of such words as 'sister,' 'niece,' or 'bride,' but not of 'woman'." This pushes David toward a not unusual adolescent meditation, but one which seems crucial in terms of his later life:

Kissing meant being fond of one. I enjoyed kissing my mother, for instance. Now I certainly was not fond of Esther [a neighbor, his own age]. I was sure that I hated her. Why, then, was I impelled to kiss her? How could I hate and be fond of her at once? I went on reasoning it out, Talmud fashion, till I arrived at the conclusion that there were two kinds of kisses: the kiss of affection and the kiss of Satan.

Levinsky's failure to integrate the sexual and the affective, the failure that Freud called "the most prevalent form of degradation in erotic life," makes a shambles of his love life. He visits prostitutes but, even though he feels he is being unreasonable, despises both himself and them. He pursues women he abhors and women he cannot have: older women when he is young, young women when he is old, a Socialist when he is rich, married women, and, at the last, a Gentile. The family is the one ideal that he has clung to through his life. And his inability to find love and a home is the final measure of his spiritual failure and sterility. When Levinsky reaches his fortieth year, despairing—"without knowing who I worked for"—he looks, desperately now, to find a meaning for his life in love. He writes:

The vague portrait of a woman in the abstract seemed never to be absent from my mind. Coupled with that portrait was a similarly vague image of a window and a table set for dinner. That, somehow, was my symbol of a home. Home and women were one, a complex charm joining them into an inseparable force.

This picture of nurturance and security suggests that Levinsky's longed-for home is not really a hope for the future but a recollection. When he plans a honeymoon that never happens he imagines a trip to Antomir and thinks to name his daughter after his mother. Despite his changes in worldly circumstance, Levinsky's past, his motherland, remains hugely important to his inner life.

However, when Levinsky, sick of his barren life, tries to return in feeling and imagination to the past, he bathes it in a falsifying nostalgia. He writes, "My heart was still in Antomir, in the good old Antomir of synagogues and Talmud scholars and old fashioned marriages, not," he adds, "of college students, revolutionaries, and Matildas." Levinsky idealizes and simplifies, redrawing the past to suit his present needs. But he can't even be true to this idealization; he contributes to the Sons of Antomir Benefit Society only to secure a supply of non-union labor, compounding his sentimentality with hypocrisy.

During the last third of the novel nearly every figure from Levinsky's early days reappears, but each reunion, instead of restoring the past, deprives Levinsky of the satisfactions of memory and mocks his nostalgia. Shmerl the Pincher reappears, a ragged and puny Lower East Side peddler, hardly a fitting object for the spite which has helped goad Levinsky to success. Levinsky reencounters his night school teacher, his first partner, and his first business rival, but instead of establishing some more feeling relationship with these men who had been so important to him, Levinsky can only think to hire them, humiliating them and widening the distance he had hoped to close. When Matilda Minsker, a socialist now, arrives in New York, it is inevitable that Levinsky should visit her dressed in his most opulent fur coat and win her disdain as a bourgeois exploiter of labor.

The reunion Levinsky arranges with Gitelson, a "ship brother" who shared the crossing twenty-five years earlier, is marred by the awkwardness of the two men, one a success and one a failure. Levinsky looks at Gitelson, giddy on a single glass of champagne, and thinks that the Waldorf is no place for such a man; but he also admits to himself his own discomfort: "At the bottom of my heart I cow before waiters to this day.… They make me feel as if my expensive clothes and ways ill become me." Both men are marked by a new gracelessness, and their attempt to commemorate the past seems instead to prove its annihilation.

Levinsky finds that the past, having been denied, cannot be willed back into existence, anymore than faith once lost can be reclaimed. What remains of his past is blighted by sentiment or simply false or trivial. He savors matzo balls with "the genuine Antomir taste;" a way of life has become a fragment of ethnicity, and ethnicity is reduced to a gustatory phenomenon—a matter of what you eat, not who you are.

Estranged from his past, as choice and circumstance have made him, Levinsky is estranged from himself. With the loss of Levinsky's real feelings there comes in place of them a crowd of ersatz emotions. In this passage Levinsky woos a shopgirl to whom he has already proposed; they are both aware that he is attracted only by her savings, which he hopes will start him on a career:

Poor Gussie! She was not a pretty girl, and she did not interest me in the least. Yet at this moment I was drawn to her. The brooding, plaintive tones which resounded around us had a bewitching effect on me. [They are on an East River dock.] It filled me with love. Gussie was a woman to me now. My hand sought hers. It was a proffer of endearment, for my soul was praying for communion with her.

She withdrew her hand. "This should not be done in a hurry either," she explained, pensively.

"Gussie! I swear to you you're dear to me. Can't you believe me?"

The singing night was too much for her. She yielded to my arms. Urged on by the chill air, we clung together in a delirium of lovemaking. There were passionate embraces and kisses. I felt that her thin, dried up lips were not to my taste, but I went on kissing them with unfeigned fervor.

As I trudged along through the swarming streets on my way home the predominant feeling in my heart was one of physical distaste. Poor thing! I felt that marrying her was out of the question.

Besides the duplicity caused by sexual urgency, Levinsky's feelings are further confused by the attraction of Gussie's money and the persistence of his old-fashioned standards of sexual behavior. His attempt at cold-hearted, modern indulgence is subverted and muddled by the traditional beliefs which are still stubbornly his. Ultimately, Levinsky is left without any solid ground for his feelings, which are all, his warmth and his coolness alike, equally inauthentic. But the unsettling thing is that it's Levinsky himself who is telling this all to us. His lies are conscious ones and his inauthenticity is, exactly, a matter of his exaggerated consciousness. Levinsky's lying confessions, and much of his memoir could be considered just that, make him a character not out of Tolstoy or Chekhov, those fellow realists with whom Cahan is so often compared, but out of Dostoevsky. Lionel Trilling's description of Dostoevskian man rings true to a great deal of Levinsky's behavior: "stronger than his desire for respect is his appetite for demonstrative self-abasement; his ego, betraying its proper function, turns on itself … at once inviting shame and achieving shamelessness."

At one moment Levinsky repudiates the insincerities he finds all around him, "sham ecstasy, sham sympathy, sham smiles, sham laughter." But it is just these false-hoods which infest his life, and Cahan, with a skill that has been little noticed, uses the first-person narrative to emphasize this fact. Levinsky's "autobiobiography" is dotted with the tag-lines o f bogus emotion: "—,I said feelingly"; "—,I added mournfully";"—, I exclaimed, with a thrill of genuine pity "; "—,I cooed." He becomes expert in the gestures he hates, "the unsmiling smile."

When Dora, the one woman in his life whom Levinsky feels he genuinely loves, professes her love for him, he is "somewhat bored" by her earnestness and put off by her diction. Although Levinsky threatens suicide when she ends their affair, he is distracted by trifles from her grief; they are walking in Stuyvesant Park: "The revolting sight of the dog-faced fellow who was ogling Dora so fascinated me that it interfered with my listening to Dora." In his hero, "distracted from distraction by distraction," Cahan anticipates no less a modernist than Eliot.

The quality missing from Levinsky's feelings is what Erik Erikson has called "actualness," and what replaces it is a self-consciousness which not only signals the absence of real emotion but which prevents it. There is, of course, the self-consciousness ("I am always more or less conscious of my good clothes") of the poor Jewish boy who is anxious to be taken for something he's not. This is Levinsky in the dining car. Yet, beyond this, Levinsky comes to display a new and pernicious self-consciousness without immediate cause. In this passage, Levinsky is in the Catskills pursuing the much younger Anna Tevkin. There is a magnificent sunset which she comments on appreciatively. Levinsky writes:

I discovered a note of consciousness in her rapture, something like a patronizing approval of the sky by one who looked at it with a professional eye. Nevertheless, I felt that my soul was cringing before her.

An epigram occured to me, something about the discrepancy between the spiritual quality of the sunset and the after-supper satisfaction of the onlookers. I essayed to express it, but was so embarrassed that I made a muddle of my English. Miss Tevkin took no notice of the remark.

The sunset was transformed into a thousand lumps of pearl, here and there edged with flame. In some places the pearl thinned away, dissolving into the color of the sky, while the outline of the lump remained—a map of glowing tracery on a ground of the subtlest blue. Drifts of gold were gleaming, blazing, going out. A vast heap of silver caught fire. The outlined map disappeared, its place being taken by a raised one, with continents, islands, mountains, and seas of ravishing azure.

What was the power behind this sublime spectacle? Where did it come from? What did it all mean?

What Levinsky sees as Anna's "consciousness" is equally his own. Not only is he estranged from the girl, but from Creation, which he watches dissolving and reforming before him. Whereas formerly his "relations with God were of a personal and rather familiar character," he is now confronted by a Creator of unfathomable dimension. The many dislocations of Levinsky's life have been compounded until he is now out of sympathy with the universe, with some first principle of life.

At this moment Levinsky suffers what can only be called alienation, that compound condition of consciousness, identity, and the self in relation to others which, as melancholia was the typical ailment of the Elizabethans, is the classic affliction of our times. Apart from the notable confusions that surround the word, it can be agreed that, as Istvan Meszaros has noted, "'Alienation' is an eminently historical concept." Although there does not seem to be any reason why alienation, as a condition, could not be suffered in any age, as a concept it belongs distinctively to the post-nineteenth century world that has radically historized its understanding of man and experience. Alienation is a condition of historical man; it measures the discrepancies between the past and what has been lost of it, between the present and what can be hoped for it. And Levinsky here experiences one of those characteristic moments of modern consciousness—exemplary recognitions by Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf immediately come to mind—in which the death of the old, the fact of irreversible change, has been categorically realized. Gone so long, there is no longer any way home.

It's difficult to think of Levinsky standing embarrassed before the sunset as a World Historical figure, but I don't think it would be a mistake to think of this as a World Historical moment; Levinsky stands at a crux of history—the end of the old dispensation and the beginning of purely secular life. I use these grandiose phrases premeditatedly, since it is Hegel, the "historian" of such crises, who is particularly apposite here. At this moment Levinsky experiences alienation in one of Hegel's primary senses: he feels man and his world to be external to Spirit. Spirit appears to Levinsky precisely as what Hegel calls, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, "picture thinking," thinking that registers only objectivity and estrangement, the same sort of perception that characterized Levinsky's stilted description of his landing. Furthermore, Levinsky's behavior throughout his life identifies him as what Hegel calls a "hero of flattery," whose peculiar heroism (in Hegel's special sense of that word) it is to face society in a posture which combines fawning complicity and secret antagonism. The hero of flattery is the discrepant middle term, the man who is no longer loyal to the old "noble" life of obedience and servitude (David's life in Antomir) but who has not found it possible to become the man suitable for the new "base" life of bold opposition and autonomy. In this connection, it may be of more than passing interest that Levinsky calls die gods of his new life, the gentile travelling salesmen, "noblemen."

There is no need to suggest that Cahan's novel is directly indebted to Hegel. Although Cahan assuredly came into contact with Hegel in some form, at least through Marx, any certainty on this point will have to await Moses Rischin's forthcoming biography of Cahan. In any case, the abstruse, systematic quality of Hegel's thought seems foreign to Cahan the realist. What should be stressed, however, is David Levinsky's kinship with a tradition, a particular analysis of modernity which does owe a debt to Hegel. This is the tradition of secularized Jewish writers who, building on a rich German canon, raised a virtual ontology of estrangement on the historical fact of their own marginality. This tradition includes not only Marx, but Georg Simmel, the German sociologist who, himself forced by anti-semitism to work on the peripheries of his profession, established a sociology of the marginal in essays on "The Stranger" and "Secrecy in Social Life."

Here we can turn to Georg Lukacs, a late member of this tradition. Compare the famous opening passage of The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs' paean to the lost "integrated civilisations" and lament for our fall into philosophy, with Levinsky's disintegrated consciousness at sunset:

Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for the fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning—in sense—and complete for the senses; rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closed circumference round itself. "Philosophy is really homesickness," says Novalis: "it is the urge to be at home everywhere."

In his Preface to The Theory of the Novel, added nearly fifty years after writing this remarkable passage, which dreams of healing discrepancies like those which fracture Levinsky's experience, Lukacs confessed that in his youthful work he "was not looking for a new literary form but, quite explicitly, for a 'new world.'" Although none of Lukacs' various national and intellectual immigrations took him to David Levinsky's new world, Levinsky's experiences can, I think, augment our sense of Lukacs' thought in its historical situation. Lukacs and Levinsky share a common "structure of feeling" in which American experience and European thought meet, and seeing what is shared between them allows us to recognize David Levinsky as a novel that has a place in one of the main traditions of modern imagination.

However, the differences between Lukacs' essay and Cahan's novel are equally instructive. Lukacs wrote at the start of World War I, which seemed to him the final catastrophe of bourgeois civilization. At this moment, Lukacs turned to the vision of a lost ideal, the "integrated civilisation" of Greece and its epic, the form adequate to totality. What is weakest in Lukacs' essay is his nostalgia and, his "hunger for wholeness," which Peter Gay has described as a wish common to Lukacs' intellectual kin in the anxious society of late Wilhelmian Germany. As Lukacs very nearly admits in the 1962 Preface, the elements of idealism in his essay, especially his neo-Kantian attempt to discover the super-historical essences of genres, amount to a desire to escape from "concrete socio-historical realities."

Like Lukacs, Cahan wrote in response to a historical crisis, the entry of east European Jewry into modern, bourgeois society. However, the lyrcial, elegiac mood in which Lukacs contemplates the lost past, what Nietzsche would call Lukacs' commitment to "monumental" history, is absent from Cahan's novel. The only nostalgia in Cahan's novel is Levinsky's, and Cahan is unsparing in his mockery of it. Such nostalgia is dishonest, Cahan seems to say, when it denies the hard fact that for Levinsky's generation there is simply no viable world to which one can return. On the other hand, Cahan offers no easy faith in progress. Cahan does nothing to suggest that any law of history compels the future to compensate Levinsky for the loss of his past or the emptiness of his present. In David Levinsky the facile optimism which would view Levinsky as a member of a "transitional generation"—that first generation whose sacrifices are to be redeemed by the advances of the next—is refuted by the fact that Levinsky is most damaged in his ability to feel, to love, to marry and father a successor.

Cahan's imagination of the immigrant experience accommodates its ironies: the way in which a boldly conceived new life can be molded by the past it has denied, and the way in which the past, when frantically clutched at, can recede out of reach. For Cahan, unlike Lukacs, past and present are not so easily separable from one another nor so confidently judged. In his own tough mindedness about "concrete sociohistorical realities," the skepticism which allows him to include, without either despairing or offering any easy solace, all the discrepancies of Levinsky's experience, Cahan achieves a negativity which, especially in comparison with Lukacs' uncritical longing for a mythical past, seems characteristically modern.

The issues raised by David Levinsky expand beyond the rich historical particularity in which the novel is rooted and beyond the literary labels—naturalism, regionalism, sociological realism—that have too often confined it. The question David Levinsky builds to is a canonical American question. Levinsky finally asks himself "Am I happy?" But with his answer, "No," America fails on its own terms. With this completed catastrophe, the loss of the old and the failure of the new, come the perenially open questions, not only of the immigrant experience, but of "homeless" modernity.