The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  In America, by using guile, evoking pity, and trading up, he soon becomes a peddler. When another peddler warns him that his beard makes him look like a greenhorn, he commits the “heinous sin” of shaving. He makes passes at various landladies and falls into a period of dissolution that he calls “unrestrained misconduct,” in which he is “intoxicated by the novelty of yielding to Satan.” He goes through months of “debauchery and self-disgust.” The “underworld women I met, the humdrum filth of their life, and their matter-of-fact, business-like attitude toward it never ceased to shock and repel me. I never left a creature of this kind without abominating her and myself, yet I would soon, sometimes during the very same evening, call on her again or on some other woman of her class.”

  Like Cahan, Levinsky enrolls in a public night school and undergoes the tortures of learning English grammar. He reads Dickens while living in the basement of a dance hall, but loses his lodgings for ogling the dancers. Destitute, hungry, and without a decent place to live, he fortuitously encounters a crony he’d met on the ship to America, who encourages him to become a sewing machine operator in the cloak-making trade. At first life in the sweatshop is hard, but it begins to change him. “By little and little I got used to my work and even to enjoy its processes,” he says. While he works, he is able to think and dream. “No one seemed to be honorable who did not earn his bread by the sweat of his brow as I did,” he says. “Had I then chanced to hear a Socialist speech I might have become an ardent follower of Karl Marx and my life might have been directed along lines other than those which brought me to financial power.”

  Levinsky continues on his path to self-improvement. “The Ghetto rang with a clamor for knowledge,” he observes, and “to save up some money and prepare for college seemed to be the most natural thing for me to do.” He improves his skills at his sewing machine, and “it did not take me long to realize that the number of cloaks or jackets which one turned out in a given length of time was largely a matter of method and system.” His new methods and systems eventually earn him a salary of ten dollars a week. During slow seasons, he develops a passion for the Yiddish theater. When work picks up again, he is dazzled by his ability to put one hundred dollars in the bank; his dream of attending college inches that much closer to reality. Then Levinsky expresses ambivalence about America, a feeling that will recur throughout his life.

  I knew that many of the professional men on the East Side, and, indeed, everywhere else in the United States, were people of doubtful intellectual equipment, while I was ambitious to be a cultured man “in the European way.” There was an odd confusion of ideas in my mind. On the one hand, I had a notion that to “become an American” was the only tangible form of becoming a man of culture (for did not I regard the most refined and learned European as a “greenhorn”?); on the other hand, the impression was deep in me that American education was a cheap machine-made product.

  Just as he is about to start a better-paying factory job comes a “calamity”: the cloak makers’ union goes out on strike. Levinsky reluctantly joins the union. But his shopmates reproach him for his lack of interest in union activities, and he asks them what more they want of him. They reply, “Do you think it right that millions of people should toil and live in misery so that a number of idlers might roll in luxury?”

  A pragmatist with his eye on only one goal—obtaining a college degree and improving his station in life—Levinsky curtly replies, “I haven’t made the world, nor can I mend it.” The strike is settled, and Levinsky is delighted that his bigger paycheck means that his dreams of attending college are that much closer to being realized. Working furiously during “the season,” studying furiously for his exams during slack times, he takes only the briefest time off to attend Felix Adler’s ethical culture lectures: “I valued them for their English rather than for anything else, but their spirit, reinforced by the effect of organ music and the general atmosphere of the place, would send my soul soaring.”

  Then a seemingly trivial incident changes the course of Levinsky’s life. While working on some silk coats for a new employer, he inadvertently spills milk on them, for which his employer humiliates him. Levinsky vows revenge and decides to start his own clothes manufacturing company, partnering with his employer’s talented designer. His dreams of college recede into the background, and his new venture comes to life. “I visioned myself a rich man, of course, but that was merely a detail. What really hypnotized me was the venture of the thing. It was a great, daring game of life.”

  After a few false starts, some bad breaks, and then a bit of luck, Levinsky’s business begins to succeed. But in the process he finds himself changing into a different sort of person:

  The inadequacy of my working capital often forced me to have recourse to subterfuges that could not exactly be called honorable. One day, when we had some bills to meet two days before I could expect to obtain the cash, I made out and signed checks, but enclosed each of them in the wrong envelope—this supposed act of inadvertence gaining me the needed two days of grace. On another occasion I sent out a number of checks without my signature, which presumably I had forgotten to affix.

  Time passes, and Levinsky is now a wealthy man, but then another crisis looms:

  My business was making headway when the Cloak and Suit Makers’ Union sprang into life again.… It seemed as if this time it had come to stay. My budding little establishment was too small, in fact, to be in immediate danger. It was one of a scattered number of insignificant places which the union found it difficult to control. Still, cheap labor being my chief excuse for being, the organization caused me no end of worry.

  Eventually Levinsky’s worst fears are realized. All the cloak manufacturers form a coalition and lock out their union men. A bitter struggle ensues, with Levinsky now in the thick of it:

  I made a pretense of joining in the lockout, my men clandestinely continuing to work for me. More than that, my working force was trebled, for, besides filling my own orders, I did some of the work of a well-known firm which found it much more difficult to procure non-union labor than I did. What was a great calamity to the trade in general seemed to be a source of overwhelming prosperity to me. But the golden windfall did not last long. The agitation and the picketing activities of the union, aided by the Arbeiter Zeitung, a Yiddish socialist weekly, were spreading a spell of enthusiasm (or fear) to which my men gradually succumbed. My best operator, a young fellow who exercised much influence over his shop mates and who had hitherto been genuinely devoted to me, became an ardent convert to union principles and led all my operatives out of the shop. I organized a shop elsewhere, but it was soon discovered.

  Somebody must have reported to the editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung that at one time I had been a member of the union myself, for that weekly published a scurrilous paragraph, branding me as a traitor.

  I read the paragraph with mixed rage and pain, and yet the sight of my name in print flattered my vanity, and when the heat of my fury subsided I became conscious of a sneaking feeling of gratitude to the socialist editor for printing the attack on me. For, behold! the same organ assailed the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Rothschilds, and by calling me “a fleecer of labor” it placed me in their class. I felt in good company. I felt, too, that while there were people by whom “fleecers” were cursed, there were many others who held them in high esteem and that even those who cursed them had a secret envy for them, hoping some day to be fleecers of labor like them.

  Here is an amazing situation. Through Levinsky, Cahan is reasoning from the perspective of a union member who has become a capitalist, and whose ruminations are ignited by an attack on him in a newspaper for which Cahan used to write editorials attacking people much like Levinsky. And as Cahan was writing those lines, he was either doubled over in pain from an ulcer or recovering from its removal. His doctors believed the ulcer had been brought to an acute stage by the stress of a strike during which Yiddish-speaking garment workers had formed a mob outside the Forward Buildin
g and stoned Cahan’s office. As the story unfolds, the reader can’t help but feel a certain amount of sympathy for Levinsky, despite all his cynicism. At one point, as Levinsky sits in an elegant dining car speeding through the night, he imagines he is “partaking of a repast in an enchanted palace” and wonders, “Can it be that I am I?”

  While Levinsky’s quest for romance grows ever more frustrating, he emerges triumphant as a businessman. Toward the end of the novel, he delivers something of a paean to American capitalism. As he walks along the great Fifth Avenue shopping thoroughfare in a reverie, he refers to himself as

  a Russian Jew as head of one of the largest industries in the United States.… As a master of that industry he had made good, for in his hands it had increased a hundredfold, garments that had formerly reached only the few having been placed within the reach of the masses. Foreigners ourselves, and mostly unable to speak English, we had Americanized the system of providing clothes for the American woman of moderate or humble means. The ingenuity and unyielding tenacity of our managers, foremen, and operatives had introduced a thousand and one devices for making by machine garments that used to be considered only as the product of handwork.… We had done away with prohibitive prices and greatly improved the popular taste. Indeed, the Russian Jew had made the average American girl a “tailor-made” girl.

  When I learned the trade a cloak made of the cheapest satinette cost eighteen dollars. To-day nobody would wear it. One can now buy a whole suit made of all-wool material and silk-lined for fifteen dollars.… 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.

  The storyline that Cahan created for The Rise of David Levinsky must have been surprising even for him: a Jew transcends capitalism by using it to improve social conditions, not via philanthropy, but by running a company that uses machines to profitably make inexpensive goods available to millions of people. Suddenly we glimpse a country in which capitalism and socialism seem allied in a way that once seemed unimaginable. Certainly Cahan seemed to grasp, at least unconsciously, the paradox of America as a place where immigrants, capitalists or not, could quickly rise to power and prominence. At some point Cahan must have realized that while he was a socialist and the Forward a complex profit-sharing association, he had risen to great heights by bringing to light the issues of the working poor and striving immigrants. In the process, he himself had become a captain of industry.

  Rival newspapers certainly noted it: one ran a cartoon of Cahan, the socialist, squeezing his writers under the caption “Free Press,” which was a pun in Yiddish as well. As the cultural historian and Yiddish professor Eddy Portnoy observes, “the cartoonists of the Yiddish humor press developed a caricature of a bloated alrightnik, or capitalist (ironically, Cahan’s own neologism), wearing the Forward Building as his top hat. This caricature varied in style, but remained a permanent fixture, appearing along with Cahan as representatives of the Forverts for nearly a quarter century in a variety of Yiddish periodicals.” The fiery socialist had become, in the eyes of many of his colleagues, a sort of Eustace Tilley, the top-hatted dandy who appeared on the cover of the first issue of The New Yorker in 1925.

  The Forward was hardly a sweatshop, but it made its presiding spirit a famous and powerful man. This no doubt explains the unmistakable narrative sympathy for Levinsky that appears as the novel draws to its conclusion. He falls hopelessly in love with the lively and progressive Anna Tevkin, who lives in a home full of life and culture, if not business success. Levinsky celebrates the Passover seder with her family. “She flooded my soul with ecstasy,” he relates. Of her father, he observes, “Tevkin’s religion was Judaism, Zionism. Mine was Anna.”

  After the seder meal, Levinsky takes Anna aside and says that while her brother asked the four questions, he would like to ask a fifth.

  “Something about Jewish nationalism?” she asks, in one of the great lines of the book.

  “About that and something else,” Levinsky replies, and proceeds to propose marriage.

  She rejects him, and his “crushing sense of final defeat” causes him “indescribable suffering.” He blames his fiasco, in part, on the difference in their ages; had he been ten years younger, Anna’s attitude might have been different. But he puts most of the blame squarely on her environment. “The atmosphere around her was against me,” he muses. “I hated the socialists with a novel venom.”

  Levinsky never does find love. Although he has amassed an enormous fortune, at fifty-seven he is an unhappy and lonely man. For all his worldly success, he would, were he able, trade places with “the Russian Jew, a former Talmud student like myself, who is the greatest physiologist in the New World, or with the Russian Jew who holds the foremost place among American songwriters and whose soulful compositions are sung in almost every English-speaking house in the world.” He engages a sculptor (“also one of our immigrants, an East Side boy who had met with sensational success in Paris and London”) to create a bust of himself. “But I never left his studio without feeling cheap and wretched.”

  In the end, Levinsky is unable to feel comfortable in his luxurious life. He is “always more or less conscious of my good clothes, of the high quality of my office furniture, of the power I wield over the men in my pay.” He confesses to a “lurking fear of restaurant waiters.” And in the final paragraph, Levinsky realizes that he cannot put his past behind him. “I can never forget the days of my misery. I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over 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.”

  The Rise of David Levinsky was quickly recognized as a classic of American realism. Not all the reviews were admiring; H. W. Boynton, writing in The Bookman, used the phrase “spiritual obscenity” to describe the character Cahan created, and an unnamed reviewer in The Nation opined that Levinsky was “that type of Jew who raises the gorge of all decent human beings.” But most of the notices were quite complimentary, including the glowing and insightful one that appeared on the front page of The New York Times Book Review on Sunday, September 16, 1917, alongside a review of a new novel by H. G. Wells:

  Among the many different kinds of immigrants who have come flocking in thousands to America, there were none to whom the change from the Old World to the New could be any greater than it was to the Russian Jew. From being one to whom practically every opportunity was denied, he became one to whom practically every opportunity was open. The rolls of the College of [the] City of New York tell us something of what certain members of the race did with one kind of opportunity, the history of the cloak and suit industry is record of their use of another. In this new novel is related, so vividly and so convincingly that it reads more like fact than fiction, the autobiography of one of these Russian Jews, his struggles and failures, his successes and his tragedy.… The Rise of David Levinsky is not a pleasant book, nor is David himself an especially likable or appealing individual.… But he is a very real one, a genuine human being. For the dominant quality in this novel is the effect it gives of being altogether real.… [It is] a vivid portrayal … of the eternal struggle between idealism and materialism, between intellectual and business interests, between selfishness and generosity, good and evil, as it was fought out in the soul of David Levinsky.

  John Macy, writing in The Dial, described Cahan as a “seer.” From the beginning, the reviewers discussed the degree to which the novel was autobiographical. They cited the obvious parallels, starting with the fact that Cahan and Levinsky were looking back on life from the same age. Both had risen from poor, Orthodox families, and both had come from small towns in czarist Russia. Both had been educated Jewishly and flirted with secular education in Russia. Both fell away from religion. Both decided as young men to go to America, where both went to night school and attempted a variety of trades before climbing t
o the top in one. Cahan became certified as a schoolteacher in New York before entering the newspaper business; Levinsky tried his hand at peddling before entering the garment industry. Cahan’s friend William Dean Howells called The Rise of David Levinsky a “pretty great autobiographical novel.” And Ronald Sanders remarks that one need only substitute the words “Yiddish press” for “cloak and suit trade” in the novel’s first paragraph, and “David Levinsky seems to become Abraham Cahan.” The young Levinsky, Sanders says, is so much like the young Cahan “that it must have been extremely difficult for Cahan to formulate the crucial point at which Levinsky’s life and career diverged from his own.”

  The two lives do diverge, however, and as Cahan biographer Sanford Marovitz has suggested, “the differences between the author and his central character are far more important than their likenesses.” Levinsky forsook political engagement and the causes to which Cahan devoted his life. Levinsky evinced little interest in Zionist issues. Levinsky was a capitalist businessman, but it was Cahan who would come to play an active role in the long struggle against Soviet Communism by supporting the anti-Communist wing of the labor movement.

  It’s not clear, however, if these differences were apparent, or important, to Cahan while he was writing the novel. Levinsky’s struggle, his journey—and Cahan’s own journey in writing it—is internal. Levinsky is extraordinarily self-absorbed. When he takes an interest in others, it is almost always in hope of gaining something in exchange. Levinsky never manages to find a wife, much less maintain a lasting relationship with one woman. His patronage of prostitutes is accompanied by loathing and self-loathing. He is obsessed with his own problems, successes, frustrations, and yearnings. He cheats, he lies, he two-times, he trades up—not only in business but also in his romantic pursuits. His association with literature and culture is superficial. His personality appears to be the very opposite of Cahan’s, who maintained long and steady relationships with individuals and institutions throughout his life.