SOURCE: "A Convert to America: Sex, Self, and Ideology in Abraham Cahan," in The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 64-91.

[In the following essay, Girgus examines Cahan's portrayal of the perversion of the American ideal in The Rise of David Levinsky.]

The world of European Jewry that sent forth waves of mass immigration to America has been described and dramatized in many tales and stories. This is the world of Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is a world of the ghetto and the schlemiel and of emancipation movements that had to look to the New World for examples of how to treat Jews with freedom and equality. With all its mystery, vitality, and richness, it is also a world of terror and ambiguity, of the loveless Jew, and of the wasted pariah who existed on the margins of society Who better tells the story than the baptized Heine in "The Rabbi of Bacherach"? In this story Heine summarizes the history of the oppression of Jews in Europe: the Great Persecutions during the Crusades, the catastrophes at the time of the Great Plague, the rage of the rabble, the Flagellants, the blood libels, and the wafer desecration charges. Thus he weaves history into the story with a detailed account of a Passover service that devotedly renders the beauty of Jewish religious practice, customs, and belief. Throughout the story runs an ambivalence toward the culture of Germany and Europe. This ambivalence is seen in the image of "old, kindhearted Father Rhine" who "cannot bear to see his children weep." For the culture of the Rhine is also terrifying as it stands ready at any moment to change its mood and devastate its Jews. The unfinished novella by Heine trails off almost as though history must fill the silence and complete the story with our knowledge of the fate of European Jewry in our century. Heine's tale implies a catastrophe that only modern history could create.

To some Jewish historians, however, the disabilities of medieval and preemancipation Jewry were exaggerated by reform-oriented scholars and writers. Such reformers, it is argued, saw the preemancipation era in Europe in completely negative terms because they desired the Jews to modernize and sacrifice their ethnic and national identity for an exclusively religious affiliation that would allow them to be total citizens of the modern nation state. Thus, Salo W. Baron wrote in 1925, "Ardent advocates of liberalism and democracy, visioning a reformed society guided by beneficent rationalism, believing religiously that the world in general and the Jews particularly could be improved by an extension of rights, it is easy to see how they found it useful to take as black a view as possible of the pre-Revolutionary treatment of the Jews." In a sense, according to Baron, such reformers were apologizing for Jewish "peculiarities" by seeing them as scars of oppression that should be healed through emancipation so that Jews could become like everyone else. In so doing, Baron felt, reformers also were ready to cast aside significant aspects of modern Diaspora Jewish character and culture. Baron's interest in correcting this historical view of the ghetto was based in part upon his uncertainty about the quality and the depth of emancipation for Jews in Europe. As it turned out, Jews who staked their security and identity upon their full emancipation in Europe built their futures upon quicksand. In Baron's later estimation, they mistook the visible signs of emancipation for solid and deep-based support from within European culture. The roots into Europe that seemingly nurtured their freedom were extirpated in modern times. Following the Holocaust and the war, Baron wrote that a major test for the reality of emancipation for Jews is the viability and endurance of the social and cultural structures upon which that emancipation is based. "On my part, I have long come to the conclusion," he writes, "that one cannot hope to understand the development of legal and political emancipation without a careful review of the basic social forces which brought them about. That is why one must deal at the same time with the impact of both the economic and cultural emancipation which had preceded the legal emancipation by several generations." In America Baron felt emancipation was built upon custom, belief, and opinion. His analysis of "long-range socioeconomic and cultural factors" as opposed to dramatic historic events indicated a long tradition of emancipation for Jews in America that provides a contrast with the more superficial emancipation movements in European countries.

Emancipation in America in the context of continuing efforts to develop political, economic, and cultural democracy proved irresistible to many Jews, including, as I have already noted, many radical socialists who often were critical of American culture and politics while adhering to the principles of the American idea. The accommodation of these socialists to America anticipates the later movement of intellectuals who became what Alfred Kazin terms with apparent sarcasm "converts to America." These intellectuals, he says, grew inclined to view "America as an ideology." This shift toward America can be seen symbolically on the cover of Irving Howe's collection of radical and socialistic pieces drawn from the journal Dissent. The title of the book, Twenty-Five Years of Dissent: An American Tradition, demonstrates how even the opponents of so-called dominant political beliefs and values still see themselves as modern Jeremiahs working within an American tradition that makes them part of the American Way in its broadest and most meaningful sense. One of the first and most important examples of this phenomenon can be found in the life and career of Abraham Cahan. As a writer, intellectual, and activist, Cahan represents something of a paradigm for the Jewish man of ideas and letters whose original opposition to American culture evolves into a more complicated prophetic position of advocacy for the ideals of the American Way and of criticism for the failure to live up to them. In many ways, Cahan provides a model for the Jewish intellectual who begins as an alien to America but turns into a convert while even being a critic. The great depth and breadth to Cahan's understanding of the American experience can be found in his novel The Rise of David Levinsky. A classic study of immigration and success, the novel dramatizes the meaning to a generation and a culture of the myth of America as the new promised land. It shows the shift from European experiences and ways of thought to the adoption of the American way of life. The novel further dramatizes the psychological, sexual, sociological, and intellectual roots within both American and Jewish culture of the corruption of the American idea. Thus, Cahan uses the persona of David Levinsky in order to take the traditional stance of a modern-day Jeremiah attacking those who have lost their faith or cheat in their proper observance of the ideals of the American idea. As such the novel is more than an important literary work and cultural document. It forms part of the traditional ritual of renewal of the American Way.

Abraham Cahan was a man of many conflicts and aspects. As Louis Harap says, "at the core his personality was a set of contradictions." Indeed, he was born into a world of cultural contradictions on July 6, 1860, in the town of Podberezy, situated about twenty miles from Vilna, the city Napoleon called the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." This was also Cahan's Jerusalem under siege by new ideas, institutions, and philosophies that reflected the enormous social and economic forces changing modern Jewish life. As the grandson of a famous rabbi, Cahan was expected to maintain that tradition. However, by the time he arrived in Philadelphia in early June of 1882, socialism had for several years become a new religion to him. His flight to America as a revolutionary was made to avoid arrest by czarist police. In his later years, Cahan recalled the confidence with which he and his friends in Europe emphasized socialism over Judaism, even in the wake of the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. He writes, "Even though the pogrom brought dread into the heart of every Jew, I must admit that the members of my group were not disturbed by it. We regarded ourselves as human beings, not as Jews. There was only one remedy for the world's ills and that was socialism." In spite of such youthful bravado, Cahan never actually lost his concern as a Jew over matters relating to Jewish welfare, although there remained a lingering tension between his religious roots and his belief in a universal socialism. Thus Ronald Sanders notes that in his fiction "Cahan seems to have been unable to find the proper control of his own ambivalences about Jewishness." Almost immediately upon his arrival in America this conflict between religion and politics was compounded by another conflict of loyalties between the revolutionary cause in Russia and political realities in America. In his first speech to Jews and Socialists that made him by his own account "the hero of the day," Cahan said: "'We have come to seek a home in a land that is relatively free,' I began. 'But we must not forget the great struggle for freedom that continues in our old homeland. While we are concerned with our own problems, our comrades, our heroes, our martyrs are carrying on the struggle, languishing in Russian prisons, suffering at hard labor in Siberia. There is little we can do from this distance,' I continued. 'We can raise money to aid the sacred cause. And we must keep the memory of that struggle fresh in our minds'." Throughout his life, attitudes and policies toward Russia were to consume a considerable amount of Cahan's attention.

In America there also developed a split between Cahan's work in Yiddish and his writings in English. Indeed, Cahan the Yiddish journalist and socialist leader at times seems to be a different person from the Cahan who wrote both fiction and journalism in English. From his first days in America, Cahan became a force within the Jewish community. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, he wrote for the Yiddish journals, Di Neie Tseit, the Arbeiter Tseitung, the Yiddish weekly of the Socialist Labor party, and Di Tsukunft. In 1897, however, in helping to form the Jewish Daily Forward, Cahan took the most important step in his journalistic career. After heated dealings with other editors and managers that caused him on various occasions to leave the paper, Cahan finally returned in 1903 as editor with unqualified authority. Editing the Forward became his major work. "Cahan's greatest achievement," writes Leon Stein, "was the Jewish Daily Forward," while Jules Chametzky says that "Cahan's life-work was the great Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward." The newspaper was a leading force in the Yiddish community in shaping political attitudes, supporting socialism and social welfare measures, and establishing and maintaining the garment unions. It also participated in the daily life and activities of the Jewish community through its editorial features such as the Bintel Brief (a "Bundle of Letters" section that created a dialogue with the people of the ghetto about the most intimate and personal of problems) and its political and social commentary. In this paper Cahan exercised a direct influence on the daily customs, habits, and attitudes of Jews in the community.

However, his progress as a writer in English seems no less remarkable than his success as a Yiddish writer. He moved quickly from using Appleton's English Grammar to teaching himself English to writing sketches and pieces in English for various papers and journals. His most important experience on an English language newspaper occurred from 1897 to 1901 when he worked on the Commercial Advertiser. Lincoln Steffens was the editor, and the staff consisted of talented writers such as Hutchins Hapgood. On the newspaper he learned the basics of modern journalism that helped him so much in his later work as the editor of the Forward. Around this time he also began to write fiction in English, publishing his first story, "A Providential Match" in 1895 and his first novel, Yekl: A Tale of the Ghetto, in 1896. The latter provided the basis for the contemporary movie Hester Street. Cahan was encouraged to pursue his work in fiction by William Dean Howells, who was interested in Cahan both as a young realistic writer and as an expert on the Jewish Lower East Side. For his part, Cahan, according to Ronald Sanders, "still considered Howells to be the greatest living American author, but he had never met him, nor did he ever dream that he would." Cahan also ranked Howells with Henry James as a leader in the "avant-garde." Howells had first heard of Cahan's work as editor of the Arbeiter Tseitung and paid a surprise visit to Cahan's office. Not finding him there, Howells also missed Cahan at a neighborhood café called Sussman and Goldstein's that Jewish intellectuals frequented. He followed this excursion with an invitation to Cahan to visit him at home on East 17th Street and Second Avenue. "Cahan's visit here," writes Sanders, "provided him with his first glimpse of the upper-class life of an established American writer." Howells tried to help Cahan in important ways, including finding a publisher for the English version of Yekl. He then favorably reviewed the book along with Stephen Crane's George's Mother on the front page of the literary section of the New York World of July 26, 1896.

As a socialist critic of both European and American literature who had his own literary ambitions, Cahan developed a theory of realism that attempts to establish a connection between his work as a writer of fiction and his experiences as a journalist and active socialist. This theory of literary criticism and social values was presented first as a lecture before a cultural group of the Socialist Labor party. It was printed later on March 15, 1889, in the Workmen's Advocate as an article entitled "Realism." The article reflects Cahan's devoted readings of Howells as well as his admiration for Tolstoy. In this piece Cahan advocates a literature of realism on the grounds that the accurate portrayal of social conditions inevitably would lead to social change and revolution. Writing retrospectively in his autobiography, Cahan admitted the naiveté of some of his ideas about art as expressed in "Realism." He also described his confusion between art and propaganda. "In the portion of the article dealing with the social question," he writes, "much of the language is straight propaganda and creates an impression that undermines my own integrity. Now, it is easy for me to separate the passages that were written from the heart, with conviction, from those which were written as propaganda, from a sense of duty. We used propaganda for an honest purpose, and there are still socialists who feel that this should be done. Almost all that I wrote at that time suffered from this fault."

Cahan's literary production in English constitutes a measure of his success in overcoming his initial tendency to confuse propaganda with art. After writing Yekl, his stories such as "The Imported Bridegroom," "A Providential Match," "Circumstances," "A Sweat Shop Romance," "A Ghetto Wedding," and "Tzinchadzi of the Catskills" appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Short Stories, Century, and Scribner's. Thus, by 1913 when McClure's Magazine asked him to write an article about the economic success of American Jews, he already was an important figure both in the Jewish community and in New York literary and intellectual circles. Just three years before the request from McClure's, the celebration of his fiftieth birthday filled Carnegie Hall. The work he produced for McClure's was a four-part series entitled "The Autobiography of an American Jew." Described sensationalistically on the cover as "The Confessions of a Jew," the articles were written in the form of fiction but really were more on the order of a modern "documentary." The series provided the basis for his novel The Rise of David Levinsky.

Cahan's willingness to see himself as a writer rather than as a propagandist for socialism follows his critical reexamination upon reaching America of the political ideology that inspired his early years of intellectual development. Almost immediately the experience of America and the American ideology tended to challenge the rigid socialism that Cahan like others brought from Russia. Thus, Cahan states that "for the first four or five years of my life in America I had no answers—only perplexities." Among the greatest perplexities was his immediate impression that America was a new kind of political and cultural enterprise. He writes, "The anarchists and even the socialists argued that there was no more freedom in America than in Russia. But that was just talk, I concluded. After all, in America there was no Czar, there were no gendarmes, no political spies. You could speak and write what you wanted! The President was elected, the governor was elected, even the congressmen who made the laws were elected." At the same time he also could perceive that "some things were strange, ridiculous, wild, sometimes even disgusting." The imbroglio of conflicting beliefs and perceptions that Cahan faced led him to feel that "what I considered to be my convictions were in truth a mishmash of ideas." Out of this percolation of new ideas and impressions emerged a fresh analysis from Cahan of European political philosophers and thinkers such as Proudhon, Johann Most, William Frey, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Herbert Spencer.

Cahan's sense of the importance of America to the future of the Jews helped him ultimately to moderate his socialism and to give priority to the American ideology over other systems of belief. Thus, upon seeing America as a real refuge for the world's Jews, he reversed his early inclination to prefer socialism over Judaism. By converting to Americanism, Jews could survive as a people and as free individuals. As early as 1890, he understood that "we have no Jewish question in America. The only question we recognize is the question of how to prevent the emergence of 'Jewish questions' here." In addition, Cahan saw that America offered the average Jew a way of life that seemed inconceivable in Europe. "The life of the Jewish sweatshop worker was hard," he writes. "Still the average Jewish immigrant felt that in comparison with what he had suffered in the old country, America was paradise. The worker ate better and was better clothed than in the old country." The benefits of this life, according to Cahan, were apparent even in the physiques of the younger generation. He writes, "The immigrant family began to understand the difference between the old and new lands when it looked upon its children, who grew tall and strong and were better built than their parents. It was not uncommon to see a sixteen-year-old boy towering over his father." To Cahan, however, it was freedom in America that was of the greatest importance to the American Jew. "And what value there was in political freedom!," writes Cahan. "Here, one was a human being. My friend Alter, who always worked hard but barely made a living and considered himself to be a failure, once said to me with a resigned smile, 'Never mind. In the old country I kept my head bowed and my back bent. Here I keep my head high and my back is straight'." Cahan was especially impressed by the fact that Jews could participate so freely in the political process in contrast to Russia where "Jews were denied even the small rights granted to their gentile neighbors. But here in America all enjoyed the same rights, whether Jew or gentile. And for us the right to vote should have been even more precious than for our Christian fellow Americans."

In assuming this commitment to the American ideology, Cahan in effect was accepting the inevitable. He recognized that the mass movement of Jews from the oppression of Europe to the freedom and opportunity of America dramatized an inexorable shift in the direction and meaning of modern Jewish history There is a touching moment in his autobiography when Cahan discovers that he is part of forces larger than himself. During his escape from Russia, he realizes that on roads all over Eastern Europe other Jews also are on the move toward America. This happens to him as he boards a train at the Kiev station and sees how many other Jews are also traveling. "On that Saturday night there began the broad stream of Jewish migration that was to continue for almost two generations," he writes. "It was to make America the major center of Jewish population. The course of Jewish history would be changed by it." He notes that "soon every emigrating Jew moving westward realized he was involved in something more than a personal expedition. Every Jew, even the most ignorant emigrant, came to feel that he was part of a historic event in the life of the Jewish people. Ordinary, common Jews became as idealistic and enthusiastic as the intellectuals. Even Jewish workers and small tradesmen who had managed fairly well sold their belongings and joined the exodus from Russia and the move westward to start a new Jewish life in America. They did so with religious fervor and often with inspiring self-sacrifice."

Cahan realized that the socialism in which he believed so strongly would not be as acceptable to many of his fellow immigrants. He saw that even before arriving in America many Jews forgot their radicalism as their expectations about America grew. Thus, while still in the European phase of his journey to America, Cahan remembers that he was "bitterly disappointed at not finding more socialists. In fact, in the seething tumult of Brody [the first city on the Austro-Galician side of the Russian border] even some who had considered themselves socialists in their hometowns began to have doubts about the political meaning of their journey to America."

However, even while criticizing the abandonment of radical doctrine, Cahan himself fell victim to the excitement of going to America. He felt the enthusiasm for achieving a new life and identity in accordance with the myth of America. In spite of his radicalism, Cahan, like so many others, saw himself as a new man in the new American garden. Cahan writes, "America! To go to America! To re-establish the Garden of Eden in that distant land. My spirit soared. All my other plans dissolved. I was for America!" It is this mythic sense of America as a new land that dominates Cahan's novel The Rise of David Levinsky. The idea of America as a unique culture offering a new way of life constitutes the book's central concern; it is not a discussion of political principles and ideologies disguised as a novel.

The story of America in The Rise of David Levinsky can be compared with that in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald writes, "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." Years before Fitzgerald, Cahan describes the same kind of experience for Levinsky. Cahan's language is far more literal than Fitzgerald's. Indeed, his language at times approaches sociology. Nevertheless, like Fitzgerald, Cahan attempts to relate fact to symbol as they merge in the psychology of one individual who comes to represent a people, a generation, and a culture in one moment in history. Both Fitzgerald and Cahan dramatize the myth of America through their portrayals of men who are propelled by their "vision" of what America could mean to them. And like Fitzgerald, Cahan shows how the concept of America translates itself into perceptions of the landscape. This projection of the self onto the landscape in turn reflects back onto the self with a force that inspires a belief in self-transformation.

Accordingly, to Levinsky America is a place of awe and wonder. "The United States lured me not merely as a land of milk and honey," he says, "but also, and perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, of marvelous transformations. To leave my native place and to seek my fortune in that distant, weird world seemed to be just the kind of sensational adventure my heart was hankering for." Based on his own first view as an immigrant of New York, Cahan describes David Levinsky's vision of the city "as something not of this earth" until he glimpses a cat. The reality of the cat brings America back to earth—somewhat. "For a moment," Levinsky says, "the little animal made America real to me." The wonder of America creates a physical and psychological reaction in Levinsky. Levinsky, Cahan notes, "was in a trance or in something closely resembling one" upon actually seeing "the hostile glamour of America." His feelings of "ecstasy" and "transport" contribute to his "sense of helplessness and awe." Such emotions result in the immigrant's belief in his own rebirth. "The immigrant's arrival in his new home," writes Cahan, "is like a second birth to him. Imagine a new-born babe in possession of a fully developed intellect. Would it ever forget its entry into the world? Neither does the immigrant ever forget its entry into a country which is, to him, a new world in the profoundest sense of the term and in which he expects to pass the rest of his life." For Levinsky, the transformation is so complete that he thinks of it as a metamorphosis. "Sometimes," he says, "when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle." A similar change seems to occur for the Jewish people as a whole as they participate in "the great New Exodus" to America.

Although the novel focuses on graphic and momentous transformations, it also dramatizes the significance of the idea of regeneration through a woman who denies herself the opportunity to achieve a new life because of fear and inexperience. In some ways, the meaning of the chance for a new life becomes most palpable in this woman who seems compelled to suffer the constraints of the life she has but wants to change. The misery and self-sacrifice of Dora Margolis emphasize the importance of giving people the opportunity to create their own futures. In love with David but unable to escape from her marriage, she feels "'buried alive'" and decides that her only alternative is to live vicariously through her daughter "'I want to know everything about her. Everything. I wish I could get right into her. I wish I could be a child like her.'" Mostly she wishes that life would give her the opportunity for a second chance. "'Oh,'" she asks Levinsky, "'why can't a person be born over again?'". The intensity of her lament greatens by contrast the dimensions of Levinsky's own rebirth in America.

Unfortunately, Levinsky's transformation in the New World garden seems more diabolical than miraculous. He becomes The Great Levinsky, a grotesque perversion of the American dream whose enormous economic success leaves him feeling homeless. Like Gatsby, he is without any real sense of identity or place as he comes to embody the corruption of the myth that brought him to America in the first place. As Levinsky the immigrant is transformed into The Great Levinsky the giant of the cloak and suit trade, we see the myth of regeneration and new life transmogrified into the "gospel of success." Levinsky represents a Jewish version of the rags-to-riches myth in America in which success and power are values in and of themselves. Thus, Levinsky notes how people who congratulate him on his achievements "were inspired by genuine admiration for my enterprise and energy." He goes on to say, "All of them had genuine admiration for my success. Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splendors. Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full of her glory, and he who found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes of man." The deification of success for Levinsky into what William James called "the bitch goddess" indicates his ready adaptability to a world in which there are no greater ideals than power over others. Students of American culture such as John Cawelti and Moses Rischin have pointed out how the myth of success reaches far back into our history. Originally, success in the form of wealth and power often were considered symbolic of righteousness and strong character. In this novel, however, success becomes its own justification and establishes a new ideology that counters the more traditional democratic values of the ideology of the American Way. As a member of this new ideology, Levinsky finds himself with the rest of American culture on the brink of an abyss from which no higher values and beliefs can be seen. In the novel Tevkin the old poet summarizes this situation by condemning America as a cage of the spirit. Levinsky, who admires the poet, is shocked by "'the idea of America being likened to a prison.'" The poet, however, tells him that Russia is a "'freer country, too—for the spirit, at least'." Levinsky's own values seem to prove the poet's point. For Levinsky develops a world view based on his business experience in the garment industry and his reading of Darwin and Spencer. His philosophy goes back to a comment made by a friend who compares the world to "'a big barn-yard full of chickens'" in which all the chickens are "'scratching one another, and scrambling over one another'" in their greed for shares of "'little heaps of grain'" scattered in the yard. Levinsky identifies himself with the fittest and develops a concomitant contempt for workers and the poor. He says, "A working-man, and every one else who was poor, was an object of contempt to me—a misfit, a weakr ling, a failure, one of the ruck." His experience in business teaches him that life is a jungle. "My business life had fostered the conviction in me that, outside of the family, the human world was as brutally selfish as the jungle, and that it was worm eaten with hypocrisy into the bargain." With faith only in success and power, Levinsky espouses a philosophy of nihilism that starkly contrasts with the idealism and wonder of his original idea of America. "I had no creed," he says. "I knew of no ideals. The only thing I believed in was the cold, drab theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest."

The ideology of success changes the emphasis in the idea of being American from a question of inner values, ideals, and strengths to a matter of images. However, because appearances are inherently ephemeral and contingent upon others' perceptions, it condemns one to continual frustration. Thus, success, as Levinsky perceives it, is simply a part of never-ending failure. In the novel, the road becomes an important metaphor for this aspect of American life. It dramatizes how American mobility and change inspire both alienation and adventure. As noted earlier in this study, on the road Levinsky learns how to disguise his shame and uncertainty about being Jewish through his adoption of the style and manners of the dominant culture. Thus, he sees the road as a "great school of business and life" that brings out and develops "the 'real American' quality" in him as opposed to New York, which he comes to see as "not an American city at all." He becomes self-conscious about his mannerisms, "trying to make them as 'American' as possible," and attempts to overcome his "Talmudic gesticulations, a habit that worried me like a physical defect." Instead of simply seeing himself as different from others, he feels deformed because such Jewish gestures were "so distressingly un-American." He says, "I struggled hard against it. I had made efforts to speak with my hands in my pockets; I had devised other means for keeping them from participating in my speech. All of no avail. I still gesticulate a great deal, though much less than I used to." Thus, attempts to literally shackle himself and to stifle the Jewish self within him fail, leaving him feeling always out of place and inferior. Guilt over such reactions compounds the complexity of his feelings. Literally a man divided against himself, he laughs publicly over another Jew's jokes about Jews. "I laughed with the others," he says, "but I felt like a cripple who is forced to make fun of his own deformity. It seemed to me as though Loeb, who was a Jew, was holding up our whole race to the ridicule of Gentiles."

However, the contrast between the appearance of being American and the inner reality of the values below the surface startles Levinsky when he realizes that one of the most American-looking travelers is in fact a butcher, a gentile who undoubtedly deals in unkosher meat, which is an abomination to orthodox Jews. Levinsky says, "He fascinated me. His cultured English and ways conflicted in my mind with the character of his business. I could not help thinking of raw beef, bones, and congested blood. I said to myself, 'It takes a country like America to produce butchers who look and speak like noblemen.' The United States was still full of surprises for me. I was still discovering America." Thus, the road teaches him about the brutality of shaping and turning people into a single definition of what it takes to be an American. On the road with strangers Levinsky comes to feel at war with himself and devoid of any reality or sense of self beyond what others see in him. "'Can it be that I am I?'" he asks himself. In the end he is alone and miserable. "After dinner, when we were in the smoking-room again, it seemed to me that the three Gentiles were tired of me. Had I talked too much? Had I made a nuisance of myself? I was wretched."

Levinsky's response to such insecurity is to fight even harder for success. One of the novel's frequently heralded achievements is Cahan's method of relating the psychology of the individual immigrant, as seen through Levinsky's drive to success, to the rise of the Jews as a group in the clothing and other industries. In the novel, the Jews take the lead in the national anxiety to shed one identity and assume a new one by putting on a new fashion of clothes. Through the Jewish experience in this industry, the novel documents the growing national obsession with looking a particular way labeled "American" at a time when there was a growing uncertainty over what such an identity entailed. This was, after all, the eve of the twenties when, as Robert Sklar notes, "careful self-schooling in the mass technological norms of dress, habits, manner and language" could enable the individual, especially a minority member, to establish a new identity, even if that identity made the person like everyone else. "You could change your name, ignore your religion, leave your background a thousand miles behind," writes Sklar. "But you could never afford to neglect your appearance. In the twenties Americans began their grand obsession with cosmetics. The absence of body odor mattered more than the lack of a family tree. Ironically, the Jews, as Moses Rischin indicates, achieved dominance in the clothing and such other industries related to taste and style as communications, films, and media because they were so systematically excluded from participating significantly in more basic American industries. Such dominance in these industries helped create a myth of Jewish power. However, there is another irony in the prominence of Jews in relatively marginal enterprises that depend so much upon public taste and fashion. Rather than setting or establishing tastes, styles, and trends, the leaders in these kinds of industries often resemble slaves to the publics they serve. This can be especially true for minority or ethnic leaders whose own self-image and ambition compel them to anticipate the desires and standards of the dominant culture. Moreover, progress in such areas often can undermine individual power because success requires participation in mass markets that tend to redefine the whole concept of taste and fashion to mean only the average, the mediocre, and the marketable. Cahan's novel dramatizes these kinds of weaknesses that lurk beneath the cover of success in America.

Levinsky becomes a perfect model of impotence masking itself as power as we get beneath the surface of his claims concerning his business success. The contrast between visible success and inner weakness grows apparent as we see that his reputed influence over fashion really reflects a demeaning readiness to trade his own sense of self for a system that imposes one standard of beauty and style upon the new market of women buyers. At one point in the novel Levinsky in a reportial voice boasts of "the advent of the Russian Jew as the head of one of the largest industries in the United States," which can, because of the Jew's leadership, provide "clothes for the American woman of moderate or humble means." Proud of this visible success he maintains that "the average American woman is the best-dressed average woman in the world, and the Russian Jew has had a good deal to do with making her one." "Indeed," says Levinsky, "the Russian Jew had made the average American girl a 'tailor-made' girl." However, the diminution of individuality implied by such appeals to the "average" have their impact upon Levinsky himself. While Levinsky does exert power over women by averaging their tastes and influencing them to tailor their buying habits and expectations, he also must place his own mind in a kind of straitjacket that will enable him to exert such leadership. To become a success, he totally accepts an external—in a sense, a foreign—set of values and standards.

With all his supposed influence over taste and standards. Levinsky finds only one ideal for beauty and charm—the Anglo-Saxon—in a way that clearly demonstrates his deep sense of ethnic inferiority. Thus, of his models he writes, "These models were all American girls of Anglo-Saxon origin, since a young woman of other stock is not likely to be built on American lines—with the exception of Scandinavian and Irish girls, who have the American figure." Of course, the idea of women as "stock" built according to certain "lines" fuses racist and sexist ways of thinking with the steady movement of American culture toward a uniformity of style and taste that fits the needs of a mass-market industry and economy. The conformity sought by Levinsky extends to more than looks. His models have to be the "right" examples of accepted and standard American behavior and thought. Thus, Levinsky, who is only too ready to sell himself for success in the system, learns how to expect others as well to sacrifice their ways of thought and patterns of behavior in order to satisfy a model created for them. Levinsky says, "But the figure alone was not enough, I thought. In selecting my model-girls, I preferred a good-looking face and good manners, and, if possible, good grammar. Experience had taught me that refinement in a model was helpful in making a sale, even in the case of the least refined of customers. Indeed, often it is even more effectual than a tempting complexion." Besides an obvious disdain for his own people and other non-Anglo-Saxons, the language of this paragraph shows Levinsky's strong animosity toward women. The man who clothes women and brags about taking care of them in fact talks about them as though they were merchandise and hates them.

Levinsky's hatred of women signals a deep sexual neurosis. Cahan connects this psychic phenomenon in Levinsky to the attitude toward clothing in both Jews and other Americans. For Cahan, the obsession with style and the need to dress up the self and the body dramatize a problematic attitude toward sexuality. The neurosis vitiates the opportunity within both cultures to achieve autonomy and individually. Moreover, each culture in its own way nurtures the psychic causes for the individual's ambivalence toward women. Accordingly, Cahan couples this basic psychic discontent toward women with institutions and behavioral patterns in both cultures that tend to turn Levinsky into a psychic and social outcast. Aspects of Levinsky's life as both a Jew and an American, some of which already have been described, interiorize a sense of inferiority and inadequacy in him that strengthens the immutability of his alienation. Thus, both cultures contribute to Levinsky's misery and unhappiness. Both share responsibility for the corruption of his character and for his unrealized regeneration. This attempt to demonstrate partial responsibility within Jewish culture itself for Levinsky's suffering and moral failure is contrary to most interpretations of the novel. While Irving Howe notes that Cahan was concerned about Jewish "alrightniks," or parvenus, other critics tend to place the burden of the blame for Levinsky's problems and unhappiness upon materialistic America. These critics believe that American values encouraged Levinsky to abandon more spiritual Talmudic and intellectual pursuits. Thus, John Higham says, "But David Levinsky's 'rise' is simultaneously a fall, and the reader participates in both.… In any case, the American experience, so stimulating and manifold in its possibilities, coarsened Levinsky's character in the very process of liberating it. Since he could not forget what he had betrayed, the path of commercial achievement ended in spiritual loss and emptiness." In an indispensable study of Cahan and his fiction, Jules Chametzky writes, "Rich in the things of this world, he [Levinsky] finds at last that he has purchased them at the expense of his inner spirit. At the end Levinsky yearns for more spiritually satisfying fare than business and the success ethic. He envies those of his brethren who have distinguished themselves in science, music, art, and he says that if he had it to do all over again, he would not think of a business career. At the heart of whatever is self-serving rationalization in that statement, we must discern a legitimate and despairing hope for an elusive center that would stabilize and legitimate his American life."

Aspects of the novel certainly support Chametzky's interpretation. For example, in the last paragraph Levinsky says, "I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher's Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak-manufacturer." This paragraph repeats an important theme of yearning for the past that appears throughout Cahan's writings. It also suggests, as Chametzky notes, a longing for the kind of center Levinsky thinks once existed in his life. However, this interpretation also exaggerates the significance and solidity of Levinsky's earlier identity and implies too great a discontinuity between the old David of Europe and The Great Levinsky of America. In fact they are, as Isaac Rosenfeld and David Engel suggest, very much the same person. Both have the same roots in a diminished and miserable sense of self, a self that derives from Levinsky's cultural origins as a poor Jew in Russia, which in turn involve his ambivalent psychosexual relationship to his mother.

However, before describing one basic source of his misery in his pathological relationship to his mother, I wish to discuss how his origins in Russia helped to make Levinsky a man of great loneliness and despair. Levinsky grew up in an atmosphere of poverty, misery, and worldly ignorance that cultivates the psychic insecurity and ambivalence of his relationship with his mother. Born in northwest Russia, David becomes the archetypal Jew: an alien among aliens, an outcast among a dispersed nation of pariahs. He yearns for the past because in sentimentally recalling the circumstances of his youth he can explain his current state of despair without accepting responsibility for it. "I love," he says, "to brood over my youth. The dearest days in one's life are those that seem very far and very near at once." The very next line, however, indicates that beneath this sentiment are feelings that associate his youth with a form of sickness. He says, "My wretched boyhood appeals to me as a sick child does to its mother." Throughout the novel, he describes this inner identity, this center of his existence, in images of sickness and desolation. His mother also saw his situation in pathetic terms, at least since his second year when his father died. From that moment his mother regarded him as an orphan. "Sometimes," he remembers, "when she seemed to be crushed by the miseries of her life, she would call me, 'My poor little orphan'." In fact, the absence of a father creates a vacuum in his life that helps to shape his view of the world. "I scarcely remembered my father, yet I missed him keenly," he says. "I was ever awake to the fact that other little boys had fathers and that I was a melancholy exception; that most married women had husbands, while my mother had to bear her burden unaided. In my dim childish way I knew that there was a great blank in our family nest, that it was a widow's nest; and the feeling of it seemed to color all my other feelings."

Thus, the key to Levinsky's character lies not in his solid sense of belonging and identity during his youth in Europe but in the exact opposite—a pervading sense of destitution and deprivation. Moreover, because of their poverty David and his mother are made to feel like the black sheep of the community. Unable to pay as much as others for his Hebrew education, his mother perennially fights to give him opportunities they cannot afford. At school the teachers vent their frustrations on David so that at one point he compares himself to a friend who is always abused at home. He says, "She was the outcast of the family just as I was the outcast of her father's school." The event that turns Levinsky into a permanent outcast with a deprived and inferior sense of self is the violent death of his mother at the hands of neighborhood bullies. This occurs when Levinsky is attacked and beaten by a group of gentiles who are amused at his Orthodox style of dressing in a "long-skirted coat" and his Orthodox appearance with his hair grown out into "side-locks" over his ears. Upon seeing her son bloodied and disheveled, the mother races out of the house to attack the bullies and is killed by them. Since he is in his late teens at this time, her overly protective reaction indicates his prolonged adolescence.

His mother's death reduces David to a condition of mendicancy and despair. The impact of her death and the horrible manner in which it occurred together with the resulting state of isolation, insecurity, and misery mark the climax of the processes that shaped his character from the beginning. Describing his situation after her death, he says, "Nothing really interested me except the fact that I had not enough to eat, that mother was no more, that I was all alone in the world." He notes how the "shock of the catastrophe" had altered his outlook and way of relating to people. "My incessant broodings," he says, "and the corroding sense of my great irreparable loss and of my desolation had made a nerveless, listless wreck of me, a mere shadow of my former self. I was incapable of sustained thinking." Throughout the rest of the novel, Levinsky continues to feel essentially the same way.

American conditions nurture the insecurity of Levinsky's youth. "'You are all alone in the world!,'" he says to himself in the midst of his rise to success in the clothing industry. He also describes himself as "a lonely man." A friend says to him, "'You feel more alone than any bachelor I ever knew. You're an orphan, poor thing. You have a fine business and plenty of money and all sorts of nice times, but you are an orphan, just the same. You're still a child. You need a mother'." By the end of the novel, he still says of himself, "I am lonely," and he adds that, even after having a good time, "I suffer a gnawing aftermath of loneliness and desolation." As a permanent pariah and outsider, Levinsky's relationships with people always awaken his feelings of inadequacy and misery. Thus, he feels sure that a condescending gentile merchant believes him to be "his inferior, all the same—a Jew, a social pariah. At the bottom of my heart I considered myself his superior, finding an amusing discrepancy between his professional face and the crudity of his intellectual interests; but he was a Gentile, and an American, and a much wealthier man than I, so I looked up to him." He fails to see the contradiction of "looking up" to a man whose condescension amuses him. Similar feelings occur even in his dealings with other Jews. A Jewish sculptor doing a head of Levinsky arouses a comparable sense of inadequacy in him. Levinsky says of the sculptor, "His demeanor toward me was all that could have been desired. We even cracked Yiddish jokes together and he hummed bits of synagogue music over his work, but I never left his studio without feeling cheap and wretched." The problem obviously resides more in Levinsky's head than in the sculptor's.

Given his background and the nature of his developing values, The Great Levinsky can only feel "cheap and wretched." His debilitated sense of self makes it impossible for Levinsky ever to consider himself worthy of love or able to love successfully. Although he has a long series of infatuations and affairs, he can neither establish a solid and permanent relationship nor find a real home for himself. As David Engel says in his brilliant study of the novel, Levinsky "is nowhere at home." Levinsky's "real affliction," writes Engel, "is lovelessness. He makes no true friend, has no family, and is welcome in no home." Thus, as a boarder during the early days of immigration, Levinsky pursues the married woman from whom he rents. After years of infatuations, he becomes engaged to a woman he does not love but who promises him a Jewish home. However, he falls in love with another woman so intellectually and emotionally removed from him that the lesson of this unhappy relationship can clearly be attributed to his penchant for hurting and punishing himself.

At the core of Levinsky's diminished sense of self is a pathological attitude toward women that goes back to his relationship to his mother. In what has been a neglected aspect of this novel, Cahan shows how family and culture prime Levinsky for an ambivalence toward women and sexuality that receives added reenforcement in his life in America. In her provocative discussion of the role of mothers in shaping attitudes toward life and sexuality, Dorothy Dinnerstein uses Freud and Norman O. Brown to provide an important model for gaining insight into the formation of Levinsky's character. She argues that the mother as the "first parent" receives the first love of the child but also the burden of the first hatred for being the apparent cause of life's initial pain of separation. The mother, therefore, also introduces the first intimation of death. Dinnerstein writes, "As Brown, following Freud, maintains, the adult's grief at mortality is preceded and preformed by the infant's grief at its lost sense of oneness with the first parent: The later knowledge that we will die resonates with the pain of our earliest discovery of helplessness, vulnerability, isolation; with the terrified sorrow of the first, and worst, separation." The logical extension of this fear of death and separation is the denial of the vulnerability of the flesh that in turn requires a denial of the flesh itself. The mother as the first parent operates at the center of these drives. "Freud has pointed out," Dinnerstein argues, "how the child tries to console itself for the first great loss by mastery, by the exercise of competence and will: Torn from what he calls the 'oceanic feeling' that it enjoyed at the outset, from the passive infinite power that lay in unity with the all-providing mother, it explores the active, the finite but steadily growing, powers of its newly isolated self." In order to gain a sense of "control" over the ineluctable forces of separation, the child and then the adult renounce "the fundamental, primitive joy of the body." Dinnerstein maintains that this revolt against the flesh to achieve through denial control over death also amounts to a revolt against women because the entire process occurs "under all-female auspices." "The relation," she writes, "between our sexual arrangements and our unresolved carnal ambivalence begins with this fact: when the child first discovers the mystical joys and the humiliating constraints of carnality, it makes this discovery in contact with a woman. The mix of feelings toward the body that forms at this early stage, under female auspices, merges with our later-acquired knowledge of the body's transience and the flavor of this early mix remains the most vivid ingredient of that unassimilable eventual knowledge." This ambivalence turns woman into a magical goddess with both a life-giving power and a shame-ridden carnal body that invites death. "Woman, by and large," writes Dinnerstein, "meekly carries this burden of shame and sacredness, relying on man to represent matter-of-fact spiritual self-respect, clean, world-conquering humanity."

Dinnerstein's analysis of Freud and Brown describes very well the psychology of Levinsky's attitude toward women and sexuality. Without the influence of a strong father, caught in a culture of poverty and alienation, characterized almost from birth as an orphan, Levinsky develops an abnormal dependence upon his mother. The heightened intensity of the relationship demonstrates contradictory feelings of both love and hate. In Levinsky's case, the initial feeling of death associated with the first separation from the mother merges psychologically with the physical death first of the father and then of the mother. In spite of the separation in time of these events, the second death confirms the domination of death and isolation in his childhood. Moreover, the manner of the mother's death on the son's behalf and the guilt it engenders further intensify their love-hate relationship. She died for him. Therefore, she not only acts as the vehicle for his knowledge of separation and death but she also helps to make him feel responsible for her death. Thus, he shares death with her. So while Levinsky throughout the novel indicates his love and grief for his mother, he also demonstrates a calculating ability to exploit her in a manner that implies deep-seated hostility toward her. In a scene suggesting true grief immediately after her death Levinsky says, "I had been in an excited, hazy state of mind, more conscious of being the central figure of a great sensation than of my loss. As I went to bed on the synagogue bench, however, instead of in my old bunk at what had been my home, the fact that my mother was dead and would never be alive again smote me with crushing violence. It was as though I had just discovered it. I shall never forget that terrible night. At the end of the first thirty days of mourning I visited mother's grave. 'Mamma! Mamma!' I shrieked, throwing myself upon the mound in a wild paroxysm of grief."

Later in his life, however, the authentic quality of his grief seems to change. The artificiality of his emotions—what Engel characterizes as his penchant for "bogus emotion"—dramatizes Levinsky's ambivalence toward his mother as he lights a memorial candle for her. He remembers that "as I gazed at that huge candle commemorating the day when my mother gave her life for me, I felt as though its light was part of her spirit. The gentle flutter of its flame seemed to be speaking in the sacred whisper of a graveyard. 'Mother dear! Mother dear!' my heart was saying." This, of course is the language of sentimental popular music and the stage. It is filled with stock images and emotions. Such language and thought patterns enable Levinsky to avoid confronting his complex and contradictory feelings toward his mother. However, his actions in other parts of the book also demonstrate his confused emotions. Levinsky exploits the drama of his mother's death to gain the attention and favor of his first benefactor in America. The man offers to take Levinsky to a restaurant for a meal. Levinsky says, "On our way there I told him of my mother's violent death, vaguely hoping that it would add to his interest in me. It did—even more than I had expected. To my pleasant surprise, he proved to be familiar with the incident. It appeared that because our section lay far outside the region of pogroms, or anti-Jewish riots, the killing of my mother by a Gentile mob had attracted considerable attention. I was thrilled to find myself in the lime-light of world-wide publicity. I almost felt like a hero." Calling him "'My poor orphan boy!,'" the man asks for additional details about the incident. Levinsky says, "I made it as appallingly vivid as I knew how. He was so absorbed and moved that he repeatedly made me stop in the middle of the sidewalk so as to look me in the face as he listened." Transparent exploitation of his mother's death, however, does not always work for Levinsky. To his great dismay, he learns that not everyone knows of her or cares. There was only a murmur of curiosity and sympathy" among worshipers in a synagogue when he identifies himself and tells the story of his mother. The congregation is interested in other things and Levinsky must operate on his own.

Levinsky's contradictory feelings toward his mother dramatize the pattern of ambivalence that Dinnerstein delineates. Moreover, the drive that Dinnerstein describes which denies the flesh as a response to the mother and to death finds significant reenforcement in the Orthodox religion and culture of Levinsky's background. In fact, the theme of God, sex, and women dominates an early chapter of the novel. As a Talmudic student prior to his mother's death in Antomir, Levinsky receives instruction in the absolute opposition of sex and religion. He says, "In the relations between men and women it is largely a case of forbidden fruit and the mystery of distance. The great barrier that religion, law, and convention have placed between the sexes adds to the joys and poetry of love, but it is responsible also for much of the suffering, degradation, and crime that spring from it." Levinsky adds that in his case "this barrier was of special magnitude." Levinsky is taught about women in a way that guarantees his perpetual distrust of them. "In the eye of the spiritual law that governed my life women were intended for two purposes only: for the continuation of the human species and to serve as an instrument in the hands of Satan for tempting the stronger sex to sin." This attack on women as instruments of sin and the embodiment of evil ultimately constitutes an attack on masculine flesh as well. When Levinsky's teacher, Reb Sender, catches him eyeing an attractive woman, he tells him about Satan and refers him to a lesson in the Talmud of Rabbi Mathia. The rabbi "'had nails and fire brought him and gouged out his own eyes'" because of Satan's effort to tempt him with the image of a naked woman. The vision of the rabbi "gouging out his eyes supplanted the nude figure" that had been in Levinsky's mind. An ideology that places women in an inferior status and a religious orthodoxy that preaches self-mutilation to suppress sexuality intensify Levinsky's ambivalence toward sex and women. Both ideological and religious restrictions tend to intensify his confusion and curiosity concerning sex and the flesh. "But at present," he says, "all this merely deepened the bewitching of the forbidden sex in my young blood. And Satan, wide awake and sharp-eyed as ever, was not slow to perceive the change that had come over me and made the most of it."

A girl from Levinsky's youth serves as a symbol throughout the novel of his uncertainty about sexuality, women, and the body. Her family is one of four that crowd into the basement in which the Levinskys live. Her name of Red Esther refers not only to the color of her hair but also suggests his fear of sexuality and the female body. Throughout his life, female sexuality arouses in him the feelings and associations he had toward Red Esther. This is true of his relationship with Matilda Shiphrah, the daughter of a woman who adopts him for a brief time following the death of his mother. Matilda's situation as a divorcée and her name fascinate him. "Her Gentile name had a world of charm for my ear," he says. These factors give her a quality of forbidden experience that tantalizes him. Her flirtations and teasings remind him of Red Esther and conjure up an aura of Eve. "A thought of little Red Esther of my childhood days flashed through my brain, of the way she would force me to 'sin' and then gloat over my 'fall,'" he says.

All of the sexual images and contradictions that operate in Levinsky's mind come together in the American land-lady who serves as his surrogate mother. As though to drive home the point of Levinsky's lingering sexual obsession with his mother, Cahan awkwardly names this woman Mrs. Levinsky. Levinsky takes his room and board with her and notes, "The curious thing about her was that her name was Mrs. Levinsky, though we were not related in the remotest degree." Of course, a relationship does exist but on a deep psychological level mat indicates how well Dinnerstein's theory explains Levinsky's condition. The relationship with the landlady dramatizes his neurosis as a pattern of contradictory attitudes that dehumanizes women by turning them into either whores or goddesses. Subconscious drives propel him toward this woman while hidden needs to overcome the flesh and sensuality cause him to hate her. He manifests a self destructive cycle with her that typifies his relationships with all women. Thus, while observing Mrs. Levinsky one morning, he thinks: "'I don't like this woman at all,' I said to myself, looking at her. 'In fact, I abhor her. Why, then, am I so crazy to carry on with her?'" Levinsky follows this question about his compulsion with a statement that indicates a continuity of contradiction in his relationships that begins with his mother and carries forward to all future experiences with women. "It was the same question that I had once asked myself concerning my contradictory feelings for Red Esther, but my knowledge of life had grown considerably since then." The irony, of course, of this increased knowledge is that it simply adds more female names to the same pattern of love and hate, a pattern he is never able to break and which keeps him so unhappy. Thus, while dealing with Mrs. Levinsky, he thinks of Matilda in a way that seems new to him. In reality, however, his thoughts of Matilda as having fallen from a pedestal only reflect the same pattern of his relationships with other women who as goddesses must fall because they cannot escape their flesh. Accordingly, in the midst of his flirtations with the innocent Mrs. Levinsky he thinks, "I saw Matilda from a new angle. It was as if she had suddenly slipped off her pedestal. Instead of lamenting my fallen idol, however, I gloated over her fall. And, instead of growing cold to her I felt that she was nearer to me than ever, nearer and dearer." Levinsky gloats because her imagined fall helps to justify his own sexuality. At one point Matilda had called him a "'devil with side-locks'," but Levinsky never learns to confront and cope with that devil within himself and the flesh of the women he wants to both possess and idolize.

Levinsky's neurosis becomes a social pathology when he moves into the clothing industry. The Great Levinsky's personal problem achieves institutionalization in this business. His rise documents the growing dominance of a special social phenomenon of outward success based on self-deprecation, mass conformity, and the values of prejudice. Levinsky's story indicates that such success sustains the denigration of women, the debasement of the body, and the dehumanization of the spirit. Cahan's social criticism and his lines of attack anticipate by several decades the arguments and theories of many later social theorists. There is a direct link, for example, between his understanding of the social significance of the clothing industry and Marshall McLuhan's analysis much later of modern advertising. For McLuhan, the world of advertising constitutes another layer of signs and symbols that reenforce the messages of the world of fashion as rendered by Cahan. McLuhan's interpretation of advertising demonstrates the continued relevance and significance of Cahan's portrait of modern American character. McLuhan believes that advertising turns women into "mannequins" of "competitive display" as opposed to real persons of "spontaneous sensuality." He argues that advertisements demonstrate that men are threatened by the power women exercise in order to move between the contradictory images of whore and goddess. Such power heightens masculine hostility and suspicion and arouses feelings of violent detachment. This situation, according to McLuhan, creates "the view of the human body as a sort of lovemachine capable merely of specific thrills." Levinsky's sexual life with women, who do not even rate a name, exemplifies such mechanical sexuality. For McLuhan, these values further debilitate the qualities of inner character and strength that are necessary for democracy. Thus, he suggests, "we would do well to strengthen those inner resources, which we still undoubtedly exert, to resist the mechanism of mass delirium and collective irrationalism."

Precisely such "inner resources" are dissipated in Levinsky. In addition, the inner weakness that Cahan's novel describes goes beyond simply constituting an attack on business and commercialism. The character of David Levinsky, who feels himself to be of little worth in a world that defiles man's greatest dreams and ideals, finds duplication in other characters far removed from the garment industry. In other words, Levinsky's belief that he would be a happier man in a more established and prestigious intellectual, professional, or academic position seems to be another example of self-deception and rationalization. Levinsky's character and background, his sexual pathology, his place in both Jewish and American culture suggest that he would feel unhappy, insecure, and unworthy in any situation in contemporary American culture. Moreover, if we accept Isaac Rosenfeld's insight that The Rise of David Levinsky "consists of an extended commentary … somewhat in the manner of Talmud" from the opening paragraph of the novel, we can say that many Jewish writers since Cahan continue that Talmudic commentary.

Like Cahan himself, David Levinsky became a convert to the American Way. However, in his search for the "real" America, he turned to the artificial and superficial as substitutes for values of independence and inner strength. This amounted to a turn against himself and his potential. As the story of a Jewish immigrant's journey on the wrong road to the "real" America, The Rise of David Levinsky serves as Cahan's vehicle for an attack against those social, ideological, and psychological factors undermining the promise of America. Cahan viewed the corruption and perversion of the American idea from the vantage point of his own culture of Yiddish life and thought. To such Jews there seemed a possibility of losing two cultures at once. As their own world of Yiddish changed and moved more into the mainstream of American life, they also could imagine the America of their hopes losing its way in a world of reactionary and violent totalitarian "isms." At the same time, the belief in the importance of America to the future welfare and survival of the Jews added to the sense of Jewish investment in the idea of America. Rather than opposition to American politics and alienation from American life, Cahan's public career as a political leader and editor increasingly demonstrated a growing commitment to and participation in the American Way. Along with union leaders Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky, he was instrumental in putting Jews at the center of die liberal consensus of the New Deal in the mid-1930s. However, examples of such personal achievement and national consensus are generally missing from The Rise of David Levinsky. The novel intends, instead, to uncover the other side of the American dream, to expose the nightmare of conformity, materialism, and dehumanization that corrupts the idea of America. In effect, Cahan gives us this story of America to help revivify the moral imagination of all the people. Like the traditional jeremiad, the story functions as a warning and an attack. Moreover, this jeremiad achieves special immediacy and intensity because it is rendered through the perspective of a lost generation. Engel correctly articulates Levinsky's dual tragedy by claiming that "there is simply no viable world to which one can return" and that there can be "no easy faith in progress." The moral rhetoric of the story, however, mitigates such pessimism by insisting that "modernity" may complicate but does not automatically eliminate the moral vision of America. A myth of regeneration and a rhetoric of moral responsibility in Cahan's novel suggest the possibility of a future of choices that were unavailable to the oppressed cultures of the past.