SOURCE: "The Lonely New Americans of Abraham Cahan," in American Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, Part 1, Summer, 1968, pp. 196-210.

William Dean Howells, impressed with a short story which his wife had pointed out to him, called on its author in the bustling ghetto district of New York's Lower East Side. Abraham Cahan was not home, but Howells left his card, and not long afterward his call was returned. The result of this interview in 1895 was Cahan's first novel, Yekl; A Tale of the New York Ghetto, which was published the following year, and which drew from Howells a very favorable review. In 1898 Cahan brought out his second book, The Imported Bridegroom and Other Tales of the New York Ghetto, a collection of five stories which Howells also greeted warmly. "No American fiction of the year," Howells wrote, "merits recognition more than this Russian's stories of Yiddish life"; and elsewhere he pointed out with confidence: "I cannot help thinking that in [Abraham Cahan] we have a writer of foreign birth who will do honour to American letters." Howells was right. When The Rise of David Levinsky was published in 1917 Cahan established himself firmly as an important American author, for since that time David Levinsky has become a minor classic in our national literature.

Yekl, a small and not particularly well-written book, nevertheless marks a noteworthy stage in Cahan's literary development. This is true not only because Yekl happened to be the author's first novel to appear in America, but more significantly because it provided the immigrant Russian Jew with the experience of writing in a language other than his native one; many of the stylistic errors which the author committed in Yekl are no longer apparent in his later work—not even in the short stories written immediately afterward. Furthermore, Yekl anticipates the two central elements of Cahan's later fiction: the realistic portrayal of ruthless sweatshop labor and the spiritual hunger of the estranged immigrant Jew in America.

These two primary ideas lead to the dual purpose of this essay: first, to explore the element of the "Americanized," secularized Jew in Cahan's ghetto fiction by tracing it throughout his novels and tales; and secondly, to prove thereby that it was neither America nor the sweat-shop that defeated Cahan's soul-racked immigrants but an essential weakness, or flaw, in the characters themselves. Those who traded their faith for the gospel of materialism suffered the pangs of loneliness regardless of their wealth, prestige or position; those, however, who clung to their heritage, despite poverty and hard work, avoided the constant sting of isolation, disillusion and despair. Abraham Cahan was, indeed, more than simply a Jewish author writing a "Jewish" novel about a ghetto. In his fiction he accomplished what he advocated elsewhere by focusing on "human nature" as he perceived it operating among individuals, rather than by more broadly scanning social conditions and deducing from those what any specific Jewish ghetto-dweller's problems and reactions might be. Primarily concerned with delving into the plight of the alienated Jew, Cahan nevertheless was able to depict, with a selective eye for detail, the sordid state of existence suffered by the garment workers and peddlers of New York's teeming Lower East Side—an area where the author himself struggled to bring modernity into the lives of his immigrant neighbors through the medium of an oft-foundering Yiddish daily, The Jewish Daily Forward, of which he was editor for more than half a century.

Sweatshop clothing manufacturing was the most prominent and lucrative industry of the ghetto at the turn of the century, and it was only natural that the fiery young Socialist should devote particular attention to that trade in order to realistically depict the Lower East Side. Cahan, like Howells and James, whose work had inspired him, continually stressed the need to present real life in literature:

Would that the public could gain a deeper insight into these [sweatshop] struggles than is afforded by [scornful] newspaper reports! Hidden under an uncouth surface would be found a great deal of what constitutes the true poetry of modern life,—tragedy more heart-rending, examples of a heroism more touching, more noble, and more thrilling, than anything that the richest imagination of the romanticist can invent. While to the outside observer the struggles may appear a fruitless repetition of meaningless conflicts, they are, like the great labor movement of which they are a part, ever marching onward, ever advancing.

Cahan censured the gross sentimentalism that pervaded the novels and periodicals of the day, manifest particularly in the affected writing of multitudinous popular authoresses. Most American novels "smell of rouge and powder," Cahan sarcastically wrote; "they are a lot of stunts and phrasemongery." American businessmen, he continued, are

the shrewdest men on earth, with a deep, keen understanding of human nature as it is.… [But they] delight in plays and novels whose authors apparently have not the slightest idea of human nature. They give you cant and cheap sentimentality, burlesque and the most ridiculous plots. This is not fiction: it is mere fake!… Is it not a time for sincerity here? Will it not be well for this Nation if strong, new, American writers arise who will give us life—real life, with its comedy and its tragedy mingled—give us what in my Russian day we called the thrill of truth?

Cahan's "thrill of truth," however, had to include not only the accurate depiction of sweatshop struggles but also the immigrant Russian Jew's estrangement in the New World. Alienated from his homeland by increasing waves of anti-Semitism, with no money to live and work outside the ghetto, the immigrant Jew, like Cahan himself, either quickly became secularized and attempted to escape from his East Side tenement, or he turned inward to the faith of his fathers. About these more pious individuals, mostly of the older generation, Cahan wrote: "Their religion is to many of them the only thing which makes life worth living. In the fervor of prayer or the abandon of religious study they forget the grinding poverty of their homes." Their diverse Hebrew festivities "pervade the atmosphere of the Ghetto with a beauty and a charm without which the life of its older residents would often be one of unrelieved misery."

Yet in Cahan's fiction it is ironically not the pious Jew who suffers the pangs of longing and loneliness, but the secularized individual, the Jew who sloughed off his Judaism as though it were an old coat and thus left himself bare to face the world alone—as "an American feller, a Yankee." The Orthodox people of the ghetto celebrated and suffered together; each had his place in the common faith, and each drew his strength from this commonality. Hence they stood upon an adamant yet spiritual foundation of faith paradoxically strengthened by years of suffering and persecution. It is this solidity and tradition mat Cahan's secularized Jew lacks, often unwittingly longs for, and needs. It is he who cannot satisfy the agony of loneliness, the "twinges" of his "stretching heart."

Yekl, egotistical and unsympathetic, was the first of Cahan's woebegone victims of alienation. After emigrating to America from Russia, Yekl changes his name to Jake and takes a job in a sweatshop; he rapidly becomes secularized and detached from his homeland and family. By the end of his third year in the New World, everything and everyone in Russia seem nothing more to Jake than parts of "a charming tale, which he [is] neither willing to banish from his memory nor able to reconcile with the actualities of his American present." But the reconciliation has to be attempted. When his penniless wife, Giti, comes to America with their child, Jake sees immediately that he no longer has anything in common with the typically disheveled, uneducated and unsophisticated immigrant who has just stepped off the boat. "For a moment the sight of her … precipitated a wave of thrilling memories on Jake and made him feel in his old environment. Presently, however, the illusion took wing and here he was, Jake the Yankee, with this bonnetless, wigged, dowdyish little greenhorn by his side." Compatibility with her is impossible, and Jake—proud, arrogant and secularized—continues to sink further and further into a well of despair until he begins to wish for her death. Finally he turns for divorce money to a pretentious and passionate Jewess, who drags from him a promise to wed her in exchange for the necessary funds. He learns too late that it is a bad bargain.

Though Giti tries gamely to become a "Yankee," her first efforts are vain; but the experience she undergoes during the lengthy process of alienation from her husband nevertheless has its effects on her. Jake offers her "cash"—a new Americanism in his vocabulary—for a divorce, and she is forced to accept it as a settlement. Yet at the divorce proceedings she is not the same immigrant Giti who met her husband at the wharf. "The rustic, 'green-hornlike,' expression was completely gone from her face and manner, and … there was noticeable about her a suggestion of that peculiar air of self-confidence with which a few months life in America is sure to stamp the looks and bearing of every immigrant." Giti, too, though she does not turn aside from Judaism, is quickly Americanized.

The novel concludes less unhappily for Giti, who is given an almost immediate opportunity for a successful second marriage, than for Jake, who despondently looks forward to the end of his short-lived freedom. Anticipating David Levinsky, Jake sees no possibility of bringing together the charming dream of the past with the painful and banal activities of the present.

This hunger for reconciliation causes his most intense suffering, although he is seldom aware that his yearning is the real basis for his unhappiness. When the news comes to him of his father's death, however, Jake remembers—and forgets too soon:

Suddenly he felt himself a child, the only and pampered son of a doting mother. He was overcome with a heart wringing consciousness of being an orphan, and his soul was filled with a keen sense of desolation and self-pity. And thereupon everything around him—the rows of gigantic tenement houses, the hum and buzz of the scurrying pedestrians, the jingling horse cars—all suddenly grew alien and incomprehensible to Jake. Ah, if he could return to his old days.

Jake's pride and his hard American shell do not leave him suffering for very long in a state of nostalgia. Nevertheless, this "heart wringing consciousness of being an orphan," this "keen sense of desolation," is the real root of Jake's emotional instability.

Abraham Cahan's short fiction reveals a notable consistency. As in Yekl, desolation and spiritual hunger are central in nearly all of the short stories; the one exception is "Rabbi Eliezer's Christmas," Cahan's only thoroughly humorous tale, though even here one finds a note of resentment aimed at the dehumanizing effect of America's industrialized culture. "I make every letter with my own hands," Eliezer, an aging craftsman complains in despair to a businessman, "and my words are full of life." "'Bother your hands and your words!' said the merchant. 'This isn't Russia,' says he [sic]. 'It's America, the land of machines and of "hurry up,"' says he." How obvious it is: where mechanical efficiency is dominant there is no room for an artisan's pride in his craft. And it is this "hurryup" America, "the land of machines," that is to become central in The Rise of David Levinsky.

Other than "Rabbi Eliezer's Christmas," all of Cahan's short stories are imbued with pathos, and nearly all of his fiction ends on a pessimistic, or even tragic, chord. Although in "A Ghetto Wedding" the conclusion is something brighter than unhappy, its optimism is but a tint of color amid varying shades of gray. Nathan and Goldie want to marry, but in order to provide themselves with a "respectable wedding," they attempt to save their scant earnings and therefore postpone the ceremony for years on end. Finally, still poor, they spend their few gleaned dollars on an immense wedding reception and banquet, anticipating a bountiful return of extravagant presents. But the wedding is held at an unfortunate time; no one has much money, few people send gifts, and, ashamed to arrive empty-handed, fewer still come to the celebration. Nathan and Goldie married are poorer than they were before. After the festivities the forlorn newlyweds walk through the darkness to their tenement. "When they found themselves alone in the deserted street, they were so overcome by a sense of loneliness, of a kind of portentous, haunting emptiness, that they could not speak, so on they trudged in dismal silence." Before they arrive home a group of Gentile rowdies shout and throw vegetables at them, and Goldie clings to her protective husband in the darkness. "The very notion of a relentless void abruptly turned to a beatific sense of their own seclusion, of there being only themselves in the universe, to live and to delight in each other." Here, then, Nathan and Goldie can be taken to represent historic Judaism, with their devotion to each other, their sense of exile and seclusion, and their persecution by the Gentile world that surrounds them. Isolated, perhaps, but not alone, they prevail together.

The title story of his collection, "The Imported Bride-groom," clearly anticipates the major themes of Cahan's later fiction. The traditional past of the European ghetto is brought into touch with the Americanized, younger-generation present of the Lower East Side through the medium of Asriel, the "boor," a retired man of relative wealth and leisure who yearns nostalgically for his religion and the "old country." He travels to Pravly, the Russian city of his birth, and flashes his wealth in the synagogue; by offering an immense dowry, he literally purchases Shaya, a brilliant young Talmudist whom he brings back to America as the providential groom for his daughter, Flora. The secular American girl refuses to wed the old-fashioned, unsophisticated, ultra-pious Talmudic scholar. Soon, however, Shaya's earlocks and beard disappear, and the youth commences to study the "Gentile" books of learning with which Flora provides him; the two youngsters fall in love, and Shaya turns aside completely from his religion. "Bedeviled America" has made him "an appikoros," an atheist, Asriel moans. "America has done it all."

But it is Asriel who is really at fault and not America. Shaya has changed as Asriel himself had been transformed thirty-five years earlier. Moreover, Flora, whom he has raised with little or no concern for religion, is the direct cause of Shaya's abrupt westernization; she indoctrinates her brilliant fiancé so rapidly into secularity that he is soon far beyond her in the "Gentile" knowledge of mathematics and natural philosophy to which she has introduced him. The story ends as Flora sits in a garret, ignored and despondent, vaguely hearing the animated discussion of a group of Bohemian intellectuals, among whom is her new husband. "A nightmare of desolation and jealousy choked her, … jealousy of the whole excited crowd, and of Shaya's entire future, from which she seemed excluded." Here again is the dominant note of loneliness and estrangement, of despair and anguish that can be recognized in all of Cahan's American fiction.

The leading figures in nearly all of his stories are carried around and around a continual cycle of intense desire and foredoomed disappointment. The freedom of America paradoxically gives them nothing to be free for. They yearn for something to which they can bind themselves, something to replace the protective religious shawl which they have left behind. When Judaism and piety no longer provide Cahan's figures with the means by which to live, with the single guiding light of their behavior and existence, then their stretching hearts begin to twinge.

Nor can anything satisfy the pangs of spiritual hunger suffered by most of these people except maintaining the faith of tradition. Shaya, to be sure, has no time for yearning and suffering; his transformation from a pious Jew to a fervent Socialist is almost immediate; his change is not effected through the need of a substitute stabilizing force to compensate for spiritual loss, but more simply through a new and broader awareness. Shaya is a brilliant young man in a closed society; transplanted into a completely new and considerably more open environment, he reacts to it much as any vigorous and intelligent youth probably would: he rebels against the confining old-fashioned traditions which have held him unwittingly in check and opens himself wide to the secular world around him. Unlike Cahan himself, who was driven from his motherland for his socialistic views, Shaya is not converted, or westernized, until shortly after he sets foot in America. Because he is secularized without being tormented by his loss of faith, Shaya can be compared with few other figures in Cahan's American fiction, nearly all of whom suffer constant "twinges" of pain and remorse as the barrier between themselves and their heritage becomes almost impregnable.

Aaron Zalkin, for example, suffers intensely in "The Daughter of Reb Avrom Leib" until he manages to leap back over the barrier into restored faith and a happy life; he has been separated from his religion for more than fifteen years "when a great feeling of loneliness [takes] hold of him." He begins to attend a small synagogue, where he meets his "predestined one," and the story ends with his imminent marriage. Usually in Cahan's stories, however, there is no return to the faith.

More typical of his fiction was "A Providential Match," Cahan's first published American tale, the one which had elicited Howells' initial encouragement; it was later included in The Imported Bridegroom. In this story Rouvke Arbel comes to America and is soon earning a moderate income; but he is a single man, does not attend synagogue, and "his heart was stretching and stretching" for someone to love. At last, after several lonely years, the shadchen (marriage-broker) arranges a match for him; but Rouvke loses his bethrothed to a scholar during her passage to the United States. Embittered, he is again left in desolation.

"So this is America and I am a Jewess no longer," are Michalina's first words in "The Apostate of Chego-Chegg." She is a meshumedeste, a convert, scorned by Gentiles for her Jewishness, and by Jews for her conversion. She longs to return to her Hebraic faith, but she is also devoted to her Catholic husband. In the same tale, Nehemiah the Rabbi cuts off his traditional earlocks and beard and becomes an atheist. "Religion is all humbug. There are no Jews and Gentiles," he tells Michalina. "This is America. All are noblemen here, and all are brothers—children of one mother—nature. But he fails to convince her. Michalina still yearns to return to Europe and to Judaism, but she loves her husband too much to leave him. So she must live under a curse and with the hunger of unsatisfied spiritual desire always within her.

In "Dumitru and Sigrid," a well-educated Roumanian officer meets a beautiful Swedish girl. Both are immigrants, and they converse haltingly in English through their bilingual dictionaries. After they separate, Dumitru finds a pleasant job in New York, but still "his desolation grew and grew upon him.… Could it be that he was doomed to life-long exile?… He felt lonely, gnawingly lonely." When he meets Sigrid again, she is already a domesticated wife and mother, no longer the embodiment of the dream which she had become in his imagination; hence even the pleasure of illusive hope abruptly disinte-grates, and another immigrant is lost through alienation in America.

"A Sweat-Shop Romance" displays a conflict of personalities among workers in a tenement garment factory; Heyman loses his sweetheart to David because he has not the courage to assert himself. He is thus left stunned and in wretched loneliness. In "Circumstances," Boris and Tanya are a well-educated immigrant couple whose home life steadily deteriorates because of the low wages in the ghetto. Finally their relationship breaks completely; Tanya takes a job, and Boris breaks out in tears over his lost wife and bleak future. Both stories are included in The Imported Bridegroom; and, again, in both of them the emphasis is on desolation and despair in the New World.

"Tzinchadzi of the Catskills" is not as successful artistically as the other tales, but through Tzinchadzi, an alienated Russian nobleman, Cahan expresses his own understanding of the elemental paradox in the Jewish psyche—and ironically Tzinchadzi is one of Cahan's few non-Jewish protagonists. The Russian has explained how he lost his sweet-heart, Zelaya, through his vanity, and how he had yearned both for his homeland and for the girl herself before he became prosperous and apathetic:

"I have money and I have friends, but … I am [not] happy.… I yearn neither for my country nor for Zelaya, nor for anything.… A man's heart cannot be happy unless it has somebody or something to yearn for.… [In the Catskills] my heart ached, but its pain was pleasure, whereas now—alas! The pain is gone, and with it my happiness. I have nothing, nothing!… I do enjoy life; only I am yearning for—what shall I call it?… I can't tell you what I feel.… Maybe if I could I shouldn't feel it, and there would be nothing to tell, so that the telling of it would be a lie."

The feeling cannot be explained, but it is nevertheless present in many of Cahan's characters, most particularly in David Levinsky, the multimillionaire.

The Rise of David Levinsky is Cahan's chef-d'oeuvre. Although autobiographical elements are pervasive in the novel, Levinsky and his creator are thoroughly different individuals, for the two men diverged in thought with their arrivals in America. However, there are inherent Judaic characteristics in each of them which can be extirpated neither by time nor by experience. If Levinsky is not the spokesman for Cahan's social and political views, he serves nevertheless as a persona through which the author can express the innate Jewish feeling common to the secularized people in his fiction—the craving for relief from spiritual vacuity.

David Levinsky flees from the poverty and persecution in his homeland to America, where within a few decades he becomes a multimillionaire. Levinsky's real story, however, lies in his character: how it is affected by his circumstances, by his ambition and by his success. It is a tale of industrial America, true, but even more, it is the psychological portrait of Levinsky himself.

In 1865 David Levinsky was born in Antomir, Russia, and raised by his mother in poverty; his father died before he was three. His early schooling was sporadic because of insufficient funds, but he learned to study the Talmud and was on his way to becoming an adept and devoted Talmudic scholar. During a wave of antiSemitism his mother was beaten to death by a mob of Gentiles, and Levinsky was suddenly an orphan. His loneliness and poverty rendered him apathetic:

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.… My communions with God were quite rare now. Nor did He take as much interest in my studies as He used to.… I said prayers for [my mother] three times a day with great devotion, with a deep yearning. But this piety was powerless to restore me to my former feeling for the Talmud.

As Ranga observes in Aldous Huxley's final novel, Island: "Without bread … there is no mind, no spirit, no inner light, no Father in Heaven. There is only hunger, … despair, … apathy, … death." The young Levinsky's reaction to sustained physical hunger is a natural one.

It is not America, then, that turns Levinsky from Judaism, but the adverse circumstances of his situation in Russia. His secularization, or, as John Higham has suggested, his "Americanization," begins to lead him toward spiritual insecurity even before he commences his actual journey to the New World. In his excellent analysis of the novel, Isaac Rosenfeld has explained that Levinsky's "character was formed by hunger"; he lacked a father, and he therefore fastened himself spiritually to Reb Sender, a pious old Talmudist in young David's synagogue; he lacked normal sexual relationships because of his narrow religious training, and as a result the only women he desired were those beyond his reach; he lacked material comfort, and thus when the opportunity to acquire wealth arose, he reacted almost violently to it and became insatiable in his demands. Hence, like Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser's An American Tragedy, David Levinsky's future was predetermined in the "old country," before he ever set out on his journey to the Promised Land.

Once in the New World, Levinsky quickly throws off the mantle of tradition. It is his "second birth," and he intends to lose his status of "greenhomship" as soon as possible. Homesick and alone, he buys a peddler's stand and goes into business; and although he continues to study the Talmud during the evenings, he does so not as much for the sake of piety as to mollify his twinges of nostalgia:

But many of the other peddlers made fun of my piety and it could not last long. Moreover, I was in contact with life now, and the daily surprises it had in store for me dealt my former ideas of the world blow after blow. I saw the cunning and meanness of some of my customers, of the trades-people, … and of the peddlers.… 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 as a whole was growing larger, more complex, more heartless, and more interesting.

In order to justify his own loss of piety, Levinsky criticizes the adamantine traditionalism of the Jewish faith. It must "learn the art of trimming its sails to suit new winds," he says; "it is absolutely inflexible":

If you are a Jew of the type to which I belonged when I came to New York and you attempt to bend your religion to the spirit of your new surroundings, it breaks. It falls to pieces. The very clothes I wore and the very food I ate had a fatal effect on my religious habits.

Levinsky's self-vindication is almost convincing, but it must be regarded in the light of his past; for it was in Antomir that he lost his faith, not in America. Moreover, the first girl whom he loves is a westernized divorcée in Russia. By the time he arrives in the United States, Levinsky's psychological state is one in which he is trying to talk himself into being pious. He attempts to delude himself, and when he realizes that this condition is an impossible one to maintain for long, his pride leads him to excuse his action on the basis of a flaw in the religion itself—its inflexibility. Ironically, it is exactly this fundamental stability of the religion that has been its salvation.

During his rise from a street peddler to a ladies' garment manufacturer worth more than two million dollars, Levinsky steadily loses his soul to his desire for material gain. He becomes "Americanized," yes, but he becomes dehumanized as well. Levinsky is neither avaricious nor cruel. But he is an exploiter. He is shrewd and cold. He lives and operates his business solely according to the principles of Social Darwinism—"the survival of the fittest." Once he becomes aware of Spencer's writings, he reads them through several times:

I sat up nights reading these books. Apart from the peculiar intellectual intoxication they gave me, they flattered my vanity as one of the "fittest." It was as though all the wonders of learning, acumen, ingenuity, and assiduity displayed in these works had been intended, among other purposes, to establish my title as one of the victors of existence.

A working-man and everyone else who was poor, was an object of contempt to me—a misfit, a weakling, a failure, one of the ruck.

A contemptible, contemptuous—and yet pathetic—individual, it is no wonder that he can coldly regard Lucy, the daughter of a married woman with whom he falls in love, as "an interesting study."

At times David Levinsky appears to be nothing but a machine, requiring and exploiting all of humanity to keep himself well oiled and completely in tune. His capacity for spiritual fulfillment and affection seems to have contracted and disappeared, and therefore the industrialist should be considered a deviation from Cahan's prototypal secularized Jew. But he is not essentially different, after all. Levinsky yearns for a wife and family, but it is an ideal woman whom he craves and not a real one. She is a shadowy figure whose picture has been compounded in his mind partially from his imagination and partially from the women in his past: his mother, who doted on him; Red Esther, who introduced him to the charms of femininity; Matilda, his first love; Bertha, the prostitute, who was "at heart … better than some of the most respectable people I had met"; and Dora, a friend's wife, whom he "loves" with "a blend of animal selfishness and spiritual sublimity." Of course, the matchmakers find him "a hard man to suit."

It is clear, then, that David Levinsky is not simply another face of S. Behrman or Flem Snopes, the economic "monsters" of Norris and Faulkner, for he is a much more elaborate and broadly conceived figure than they. John Higham recognizes him as "not a universal man or a wholly representative figure. He was partly an individual, partly a specific type." To be sure, Levinsky is an extremely complex man—the embodied dichotomy of mind and soul in conflict.

Cahan clearly reveals this duality in Levinsky's character through the extensive use of self-contradiction. The two conflicting elements inside of him are constantly at war with each other; he is the employer who sympathizes with the strikers, and the presence of his name in a derogatory newspaper editorial "flattered [his] vanity." His attitude toward the Socialists is remarkably inconsistent; it varies radically according to circumstantial change. When he begins to work steadily for the first time, Levinsky admits: "Had I then chanced to hear a Socialist speech I might have become an ardent follower of Karl Marx." Later, after he has become a wealthy manufacturer, he says that the "Jewish Socialist leaders … seemed to me to be the most repulsive hypocrites of all. I loathed them." And still later, during a major strike in his own factory, he recalls: "For all my theorizing about 'the survival of the fittest' and the 'dying off of the weaklings,' I could not help feeling that, in an abstract way, the Socialists were not altogether wrong. The case was different, however, when I considered it … concrete[ly]."

Irrational as it may seem, Levinsky truly suffers from this continual conflict within himself. It has become a part of his nature; both elements react against each other, thus keeping themselves insatiable and rendering the conflict itself irreconcilable. Shortly before his betrothal, Levinsky clearly but unwittingly gives voice to this contrariety in a single brief paragraph:

I had no creed. 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. This could not satisfy a heart that was hungry for enthusiasm and affection, so dreams of family life became my religion. Self-sacrificing devotion to one's family was the only kind of altruism and idealism I did not flout.

Levinsky's dream of a satisfactory family life cannot come true. The women he can have, he does not want; the few women whom he loves "to insanity" will not, cannot, have him. Anna Tevkin, who, because of an incident in his childhood, comes nearest to approaching his ideal woman, refuses to consider him a candidate for marriage. Shocked with his proposal, she turns him down and weds a high-school teacher. His dreams become his religion, but this kind of rootless faith cannot require anything of him. It is a whimsical, bloodless, unreal religion of the fancy, and therefore does nothing to fill the spiritual hiatus within him. His heart is stretching, but his hardened exterior confines it, and nothing is there for it to grasp.

Levinsky's paradox rests upon the circumstances of his past; despite his increasing material wealth, they continue to operate against him. He has won his struggle for survival, but in the process of doing so he has relinquished his kinship with humanity and has thus become, in a variation of the American success story, a "sad millionaire." "When I take a look at my inner identity," Levinsky meditates, "it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance." Isaac Rosenfeld considers these lines the key to the novel, for they reveal Levinsky's fundamental Jewishness, his "uniquely Jewish character." They express the hunger that can be neither stifled nor satisfied. Again, Levinsky's statements are simply reiterations of Tzinchadzi's lamentations of apathy, and they also recall the despondency of Rouvke Arbel, Flora and divers other figures in Cahan's earlier fiction.

Moreover, the traditional Jewish emphasis on education strengthens the paradox. Levinsky's business acumen develops rapidly in America as a direct result of his intense study of Talmudic law and commentary. These studies sharpened his wit and memory, and because in his early years they were a mark of religious piety, they satisfied his spiritual and intellectual requirements simultaneously. During his process of secularization in America, Levinsky's wit and piety are transmogrified into shrewdness and longing. It is at this point that the two sides of the psychic conflict entrench themselves firmly in his nature, and with the passage of time each of the opposing elements strengthens proportionately.

Ronald Sanders has suggested that the most significant problem in the novel is an obstrusive flaw in American society. The spiritual life is lost, he says, from "a society that was in some ways built too fast." Certainly this is an important factor in Levinsky's unhappy situation, but it is not the decisive one. The freedom of America allows room for the pious Jew and the materialistic atheist. The question is one of self-discipline and desire. Levinsky's poverty as a youth induced him to sacrifice his religious devotion for the sake of wealth. Such was his wish; such was his achievement. But the choice was Levinsky's, and America's only "fault" was leaving him at liberty to make it. Inevitably reminding one of Yekl's enigma, Levinsky concludes: "I cannot escape from my old self" and this is his tragic limitation—his inability to release himself from his fundamental Jewishness.

Although few people in Cahan's fiction amass great stores of wealth, most of them suffer from the same ironic duality that destroys all possibility of Levinsky's ever attaining spiritual fulfillment. The difference between their condition and his, however, is that Levinsky's financial success has all but atrophied his soul, whereas most of the lesser characters retain their elemental sense of kinship with humanity. Perhaps they have been forced to the fringes of society, perhaps into years of loneliness; but this alienation is usually unsought and unwanted; they consistently attempt to escape it. Levinsky, however, holds himself aloof from nearly all of society—he thinks of himself as one of the chosen "fittest."

But the failure of so many of Cahan's heroes is definitely not the failure of America. To assert that one's country is at fault on the basis of its allowing too much freedom of worship is absurd. If the immigrants and citizens of a nation wish to adore an economic god rather than a heavenly one, it is hardly advisable that government policy regulate these desires—unless, of course, too many innocent victims are sacrificed by exploitation to their voracious deus auri. Even then, however, it is the economic laws and principles that are at fault and certainly not religious liberty.

In Yekl, many of the short stories, and particularly in The Rise of David Levinsky, Cahan explored both of these elemental social factors—economics and religion—and the difficulties that derive from them—exploitation and secularization. Like Norris and Dreiser, Cahan realistically depicted a portion of industrial America; though his descriptions at times become sordid, they are never anything but convincing. But Cahan has given the Lower East Side of New York City a pervasive aura of warmth and charm that does not glow from the cold, amoral and indifferent visage of Dreiser's Chicago. For Abraham Cahan, religion tempers circumstance—simply because a strong sense of faith is a circumstance in itself. If religion is not the decisive factor in the lives of Cahan's immigrants, it is always one of the most influential, for few of his people are able to alienate themselves from it completely.

Hence a generation of lonely new Americans.