The Rise of David Levinsky (3 page)

The obsessive quality of the article and its subtext of mounting Jewish ubiquity in and “control” of American business and wealth obviously fed a certain kind of anti-Semitic paranoia. Needless to say, there were no articles in
McClure’s
or elsewhere, so far as I know, that identified the main wealth and power of the American economy as being largely in the hands of people specifically labeled white Protestants (as it was then, as it is now). But that way madness lies.

The final paragraph of the article reads as follows:

 

Hendrick was an associate editor of
McClure’s,
a respected muckraker who left the magazine later that year to become an editor of
World’s Work.
In the 1920s he won three Pulitzer prizes for his histories and biographies. He became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1923, the same year in which he published
The Jews in America,
a book whose purpose, as a contemporary reviewer wrote, was “propaganda for further restriction of immigration.” In it he tries to demonstrate that the Russian-Polish Jews are a different race and civilization from previous Jewish immigrants and should be prevented from entering the United States.
⁷

Cahan could not have known any of this at the time, and he would not have seen the Hendrick piece when he composed his first two essays. Nor could he have foreseen the egregious direction the illustrations for his pieces by the artist Jay Hambidge (and their accompanying captions) were to take in parts three and four. But Cahan was surely familiar enough with the milieu he was contributing to, and it is surprising that he does not comment on any of this in his memoirs.

The direction taken by the illustrations deserves more extensive comment. Those drawn for the first two installments are relatively innocuous, though one showing the religious youth being asked to put his arms around a woman can be rather titillating, as it shows his hands on what may be her bustle. Taken with the synopsis provided in episode two, which refers to “his strange love affair with a young Russian girl who provided him with money to take passage to America,” and the others thereafter, it unmistakably distorts the text. Along with the slant taken later, we get a definite pandering to images of a lustful and salacious Jew.

The June contribution has on its first page a cigar-smoking and lowering image of Levinsky the successful manufacturer, looking intently and somewhat forbiddingly at an almost full-page image of a stylish young woman. The next image is of a working girl clutching her breast, asking a gesticulating, bearded Jew, “What do you want of me, murderer that you are?” Only by reading the text almost to its conclusion do we learn that the transaction taking place involves the honest working girl of the story, Gussie, being asked once again for a contribution to the union by a “slender young man with glowing eyes”—which she thereupon gives, as is her wont. In the process Cahan has subtly transformed the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Svengalilike character who always has “glowing eyes” into an idealistic union organizer whom Cahan clearly sympathizes with, although the caption writers have reversed his intention.

In the last number the stops are really pulled out. The first image is again of a stylish woman promenading with a man some paces behind her, ogling her figure. The caption reads: “Many a time, when I see a well dressed American woman in the street, I follow her for blocks.” On the next page we can read the whole sentence, which gives quite another meaning to the scene: “I follow her for blocks,
scanning the make-up of her cloak, Jacket or suit
[italics added]. I never weary of studying the trend of the American woman’s taste. The subject has become a veritable
idée fixe
with me. ”This is hardly the sexual or prurient interest suggested by the illustration and caption. The same page has a derby-hatted, large-nosed Jew stroking his beard as he contemplates the parade of a dozen well-dressed women. Levinsky’s nose has grown and become perceptibly hooked compared with earlier illustrations, like the noses of numerous “Jewish mechanics out for their lunch hour” depicted on a street that “swarmed” with them. Henry James used the image of a “swarm” in The American Scene (1905) when he recoils at the frightening and alien (to him) people of the Lower East Side. It is not, however, Cahan’s word or intention. The final illustration shows Levinsky being rejected by a seated woman with her back half-turned, telling him he doesn’t know what love is.

All in all, we have a distortion into stereotypes of Cahan’s efforts to display a real person, one certainly not entirely admired by Cahan—he was, after all, a class enemy—but not someone ineffably alien or essentially threatening. The writer cannot be held responsible for the slanting of his material and intentions, but the presentation by
McClure’s
shows the distressing prevalence at the time of unquestioned anti-Semitic assumptions and stereotypes in the respectable mainstream of American publishing.
⁸
Cahan surely knew about all that—was he therefore insensitive, uncaring, complicit somehow? My sense is that he welcomed the opportunity to write on a subject he had spent a lifetime preparing for and in the process assume the role he had played for many years as a mediator and interpreter between the cultural worlds he inhabited. Typically, he used his writing in American newspapers and journals to demystify, explain, and “normalize” Jewish life, even as he showed its differences, rendering it less threatening and less alien to an American public. On this occasion he was also being released from the stresses of everyday life in Yiddish New York, especially the bruising strikes in the garment industry from 1909 onward. Primarily, Cahan transformed his assignment from the “exposé” that
McClure’s
was expecting into a sketch for a serious study of an important part of the American story, with a most interesting person at its center—however misinterpreted or misused it would be by its editors.

His first crucial decision was to write the story as a first-person narrative. The persona is that of a wealthy manufacturer at the age of fifty-two (Cahan’s own age when he began the series—not the only basis for seeing the author and the character as some kind of “secret sharers”) looking back upon his life. He reflects upon his rise from immigrant rags to capitalist riches, how it occurred, and what it means to him. Cahan deftly individualizes him: He is not merely a type, despite the editors’ views. His background is similar to Cahan’s despite their vast differences socially and politically. Cahan drew upon a lifetime of extraordinary experience among the Jews in New York, close knowledge of its largest industry, and on his own emotional life, unlocking deep resources in himself. Ultimately he was to tell the story of an individual and a people: the East European immigrant Jews in the United States and “the life they found and made,” in Irving Howe’s splendid phrase. In doing so he held in balance celebration and criticism-a difficult balancing act, for which he had practiced most of his lifetime.

In its final, deepened, and much expanded version, Cahan wrote a book that, as John Higham so perceptively observed, combines the American theme of success with a Jewish subject and a Russian artistic sensibility.
⁹
The result is a major American work, standing at the beginning of the great development of Jewish-American literature in this century. Its central character is frequently as puzzling but as interesting and significant as one of the titans of industry drawn by Theodore Dreiser—another author contemporary with Cahan fascinated by the dazzle of American life and with people of humble origin who aspire to success and all its ambiguities.

Ronald Sanders has suggested in his excellent work that Cahan’s vision darkened after 1913, and a great strain of melancholy and sadness develops in the final version of David Levinsky.
¹⁰
This increasing pessimism in Cahan’s outlook can be traced to a number of significant historic events. First, the Leo Frank case made news in Georgia in 1913 and came to its grim conclusion in 1915. Frank was a New York Jew who was business manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta when a young Christian girl employee was found brutally murdered. Largely on the testimony of a black handyman at the factory, Frank was convicted. After his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the governor, he was dragged out of jail and lynched. Cahan and the
Forward
covered the case in great detail—over two hundred of the final pages of his autobiography are devoted to the trial and its consequences—with Cahan himself interviewing Frank in jail in 1914. There was also the case of a Russian Jew named Mendel Beiliss who by 1913 had already been in jail for two years in Kiev. He was being investigated for the murder of a young Christian boy (he was subsequently acquitted), presumably for the purpose of using his blood in a Jewish ritual—the horrible “blood libel” against Jews begun in the Middle Ages. As Sanders so cogently observes, such clear evidence of anti-Semitic frame-ups in both the country he had left and the one he had come to must have made Cahan pessimistic about the destiny of Jews in both places.

In addition, the hope for a socialism capable of uniting the world’s working people toward a common goal of uplifting humanity suffered a grievous blow with the assassination of Jean Jaurés, head of the French socialists, and the voting of war credits to the Kaiser by the German Social Democrats, which in large part made possible the First World War. The war in Europe had by 1917 trapped millions of Jews in Eastern Europe, inflicting terrible suffering upon them. The Forward was deeply concerned with this, becoming for its anxious readers a key source of news about their relatives and friends there. It was also caught in conflicting loyalties between Anglo-American interests and its long-standing anticzarist position. The entry of America into the war in 1917 and the Russian Revolution fully resolved that problem, but the stresses and strains of those years were inescapable.

On the other hand, when we look at the text itself, the melancholy of Levinsky is mixed with a great deal of self-satisfaction and brio, especially when he is telling in detail the story of the ready-made garment industry and his rise to success in it. In those portions of the work the novel provides an unparalleled inside look at the origins of this great industry and the dynamics by which East European Jews replaced German Jews as its leaders. Cahan gives us much more as well along these sociological lines. He shows the lively street life of the immigrant quarters, with vivid portraits of peddlers, politicians, prostitutes, and its cafe life, where artistic pretentions and the imperatives of making a living occupy the same table. We get inside the shops of “cockroach manufacturers” like the early Levinsky and the sleek show-rooms of the arrived millionaire. There are scenes involving workers, union activists, radicals at public meetings; others show drummers selling on the road—“a great school of life,” where Levinsky learns about hotels, dining out, train smoking cars; deals and fortunes made and lost on the “curb” in New York’s immigrant-inspired real estate boom. One of the book’s gems is the scene in the burgeoning Catskill summer resorts where a newly emerging Jewish middle class is as eager to display its American patriotism as it is to arrange marriages.

We also see Orthodox Jews in Old World study halls and in the New World, and we register the changes that ensue. Traditional ways erode, like the beards that are inevitably shorn in order to get along in America. Old centers of belief give way to new, as when Levinsky designates the City College as his Temple (but which, despite a sentimental yearning, he for-goes with apparent ease for Business—which was actually the truer path, historically, for Jewish upward mobility).
¹¹
The early portions of Levinsky’s life, in a less than idyllic shtetl existence and then down and out in New York, are especially vivid examples of Cahan’s honest realist’s eye. As he explores the lower depths, seeing corruption in the political wards, in sex, among pushcart entrepreneurs, he becomes “a greenhorn no longer. ” The New World reveals itself as heartless at times but interesting and full—where “an American day seemed far richer in substance than an Antomir year.”

Almost no dimension of Jewish-American life of the time is left out. We learn about an incipient Jewish intelligentsia, devoted to various “-isms.” The Tevkin family includes Zionists, Territorialists, various kinds of socialists, aesthetes, and a father who is a failed Hebrew poet covertly introducing some of the old pieties into a secular Passover seder.

Cahan put everything he had learned into this novel, and mostly it is done with great relish. There are, however, the notes of “sadness,” “loneliness,” “yearning,” and “discrepancy” (these four key words appear more frequently than any others in the book). They are most evident in Levinsky’s failures in love—his emotional life as it is played out with various women—and the sense of dislocation and fractured identity he comments on so poignantly at the beginning and end of his narrative. One splendid recent essay argues that Levinsky is the very prototype of alienated modern man, but I believe the axis of the book’s narrative is along a more personal and
^a
more American line.
¹²