59 pages • 1 hour read
Abraham CahanThe Rise of David Levinsky
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1917A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Jewish Spirituality, Tradition, and Religion
Content Warning: This guide contains discussion of antisemitism and pogroms. It also references misogynistic views. This novel sometimes uses language that is offensive to people with mental health concerns and contains a depiction of sexual assault.
Cahan focuses on the impact of religion and spirituality on David’s interaction with the world. His entire youth centers on religious educational institutions. This upbringing impacts his interaction with America in three specific spheres, his language, his relationship with women, and his business dealings.
David spends his youth speaking Yiddish and learning Hebrew. While in Russia, he never learns Russian. David’s life in Antomir avoids the secular. When David arrives in America, he realizes that his best chance for acceptance lies in assimilation. He works tirelessly to master the English language as spoken by Americans. He even studies the mannerisms and gestures of Americans to integrate more fully, he explains, “striving to memorize every English word I could catch and watching intently, not only his enunciation, but also his gestures, manners, and mannerisms, and accepting it all as part and parcel of the American way of speaking” (159). David knows that his success as a salesman depends upon his ability to make others comfortable in his presence, and he believes that being as American as possible is his best bet. As he loses his language, he also shaves his face and stops prying before consuming his beverages and meals. David begins to separate himself from his religious upbringing. He maintains some of his religious traditions, including the two Jewish languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. He has to assimilate in the secular, American world and loses his spirituality, tradition, and religion in the process.
As a youth in Antomir, he divides relations with women into two categories, love and lust. In America, he thinks, “There is love of body and soul, and there is a kind of love that is of the body only” (148). He explores lust with various sex workers and attempts to seduce the women around him. His attempts begin clumsily, but he eventually succeeds in seducing his friend Max’s wife, Dora. The two carry out a long affair. David and Dora’s relationship represents a full schism with his faith. He carries on the affair with a married woman in the man’s own home. His next relationship turns full to the love of the soul, in which he proposes to a highly religious man’s daughter. Again, David spurns her in favor of an idealized version. He sees Anna as the full marriage of body and soul, the perfect match of spirituality and tradition, but it is all imagined. He cannot connect fully to his tradition, spirituality, and faith and therefore creates an artificial version of these things. He believes he is finding them in the secular American world, but he is only deluding himself; they are imaginary in this sphere, leading to his continual disappointment and sense of regret.
David’s business dealings part completely with his faith initially. His connection with Gitelson brings him to the manufacturing of cloaks, and though most of the people with whom he works are Jewish, religion and spirituality hold no sway in the factory. The shop David builds allows his employees to integrate their religious and traditional practices into their work schedules. He exploits this desire to get more hours and work from his employees, but he lets the more Orthodox keep their religious hours and strictures. After the shame of the socialist movement impacts his work, David begins to partner more fully with his synagogue, allowing more room for religious tradition in his life. He realizes by the book’s end that he should have helped his community more. He has lost his tradition, spirituality, and religion in a secular, American world, and he bemoans this loss by the novel’s end. An American, secular life has made him lose his connection with everything he once valued; he has moved away from them figuratively and literally with his immigration to the US.
David’s life begins as a fully traditional and religious one. In his youth, that religion becomes more of a sense of general spirituality. By the end of the novel, David wishes he could have held on to more cultural traditions. He laments that he did not engage more with his religious traditions and fights to stay truer to the young man from Antomir. Cahan uses David as an argument for immigrants to not fully abandon their culture for the sake of integration. Cahan suggests that Jewish immigrants will lose themselves and their identities if they try to assimilate too intensely in America. He posits that Jews should stay spiritual and religiously focused instead of giving in to the temptations of secular materialism, as the latter will dissolve any meaningful parts of Jewish life.
Exploitative Socioeconomic Mobility and Capitalism
David describes himself as arriving in America with only four cents in his pocket. He takes those four cents and becomes a millionaire. This myth of the self-made rich person permeates American culture to the extent that it is now referenced as the American dream. David enters America with no real plan. He tries and fails as a peddler, works toward a college education, then starts his own manufacturing business. He initially subscribes to Social Darwinian and Spencerian philosophy but grows more egalitarian and socialist. Cahan uses David to tell the story of American capitalism, landing on the side of the worker. He demonstrates that the American dream can only be accomplished by exploiting others and losing touch with one’s spirituality, values, and traditions.
David’s arrival in America brings him a charitable donor, much like those who kept him fed in Antomir. Mr. Even saves him from sleeping on the street. Cahan shows time and again how David survives on the goodwill of others. He receives aid at critical junctures from others in his community. Mr. Nodelman saves him from destitution after the Western firm fails. Gitelson saves him before that by offering him a job as a cloak maker. Cahan shows the reader how much falsehood lies in the narrative of the self-made man. Cahan demonstrates that goodness is created only through community, and that the best way to preserve one’s traditions and spirituality is through egalitarianism. Capitalism can only exist by exploiting others; David survives only because others help him when he is younger yet eschews such a sense of community once wealthy.
As David amasses more and more wealth, he comes to believe that he must be superior to the men who fail, following Social Darwinian logic to support this theory. He characterizes the working man as “an object of contempt to me—a misfit, a weakling, a failure, one of the ruck” (351). David convinces himself that he has a right to exploit the worker as the worker would do the same in his position. Cahan emphasizes the disparity between those who have power and those who must fight tooth and nail to receive livable conditions and wages. David’s argument that he is fitter leaves out the times when his community and sheer luck brought him into power and money. He forces a Social Darwinian narrative, and this allows him to exploit others.
David comes to realize his errors in thinking by the end of the novel. He realizes not only that did he not make his fortune on his own, but also that he possesses no special intelligence or skill to have gotten it. He relays his realization as “the business world contains plenty of successful men who have no brains. Why, then, should I ascribe my triumph to special ability?” (661). Cahan demonstrates his skepticism of any self-made man by showing David’s realization. David’s regret for exploiting his workers and establishment of charities and large contributions to them further illustrate his change of heart. In this way, the novel inverts the rags to riches story. Even though David does go from rags to riches, he realizes that he did not do so with his own skill but did so only by exploiting others. He then changes his mind, valuing the people who do not have much money and who do not exploit others. He begins channeling his money to the poor. The novel ends with the riches returning to rags materially, while he gains a glimmer of meaning in his life as he eschews material wealth.
Cahan’s novel centers on a man who takes four pennies and turns them into millions. Yet, Cahan shows all the help and luck David needed to achieve his financial success. The thematic exploration of socioeconomic mobility and capitalism demonstrates the room for exploitation of workers that thrives in unregulated capitalism and the need for strong worker unions to advocate for their interests. Cahan argues that the workers cannot rely on the charity of the rich to receive a fair deal. He suggests people can only pull themselves out of poverty by exploiting others. If one does not want to exploit others, then that person will forever remain in poverty.
Losing Jewish Identity to the American Melting Pot
David characterizes his arrival in the United States as a rebirth. He tells the reader that the immigrant will forget his birthday before he forgets the day he arrived in his new country. Like a birth, David starts his life completely anew. He learns a new language, subscribes to new values, and finds a new reason for his life. Cahan shows David’s willingness to assimilate into American culture and the exacting toll it takes on his well-being. He does not mix his Jewish identity into the melting pot but instead loses his identity to it, it being only an amalgam of secular materialism. Cahan suggests it is not possible to assimilate cultural identity into the American melting pot; the American melting pot of secular materialism is specifically opposed to cultural identity. The melting pot is another American myth, in a sense. Cahan believes Jews should retain their cultural identity and not try to assimilate so intensely in American life.
When David first arrives, he cannot believe the joy he feels in the adventure. He notices that even the poorest man has a starched white collar. He sees that the cats in America are the same as the cats in Antomir. Yet, David also immediately realizes that the skills and values that he had in Russia have little to no meaning or merit in the United States. The businessman that recruits his shipmate, Gitelson, tells him that reading the Talmud is “no business in America” but that “if a fellow isn’t lazy nor a fool he has no reason to be sorry he came to America” (114). David seems sorry he came to America. He dreams of Antomir every night as he fails to adapt to his new environment. He continues to go to the synagogue to find some comfort. He resolves to learn English and more fully adapt to American culture; he shaves his beard, wondering what his Russian rabbi friend would think. He longs for his Jewish identity but eventually realizes he has to lose it to assimilate.
As David resolves to no longer be a greenhorn, he enrolls in a school for English. At this point, he has already sacrificed his customs and appearance to be more acceptable to Americans. The next step to succeed, he realizes, is to talk like one. He applies the same rigor he learned while studying Talmud to learning English. He studies not just what people say but how they say it. Once he masters the language, he is determined to control the women. He fully embraces his “unrestrained misconduct” as he searches out sex workers. For David, this is just another step away from the boy he was to an American man. He consoles himself and the loss of his home with the women, stating, “Intoxicated by the novelty of yielding to Satan, I gave him a free hand and the result was months of debauchery and self-disgust” (153). David fully embraces his secular life of sexuality. This culminates in his affair with a friend’s wife. He has had to lose all of his Jewish identity to assimilate into the American melting pot. The American melting pot is no identity at all but is simply a culture-less, exploitative secular materialism.
David leaves Russia with the goal of becoming an educated man. He initially works tirelessly toward this goal, putting in 16-hour shifts at the shop to save enough money for college. Yet, this dream too is cast aside for the more American business goal. David sees an opportunity to make money and takes it. Initially, he comforts himself by telling himself he can do both. In the end, he never goes to school, giving his life to business instead. He succeeds spectacularly in business by making shrewd investments, exploiting his workers, and leveraging connections and luck. At the end of the novel, he confesses that he is deeply unhappy. He closes his story with the statement:
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 (663).
David never reckons his past self, whom he views as his true self, with his present self. He has “assimilated”; in other words, he has lost his self and his traditions to the American melting pot. He retains nothing of his Jewish identity and therefore has lost his true self, as it has been absorbed by secular materialism. Cahan continues to warn Jews against assimilating and losing their identity.
The Rise of David Levinsky shows that immigrants struggle to maintain their cultural identity in the face of overwhelming pressure to assimilate. David’s contradictions and hypocrisies show the deep struggle all immigrants face when trying to reconcile their layered identities. Cahan argues that the most content immigrants are those who bring their culture to their new home and don’t assimilate. The artists David so admires marry their worlds to create something new. Cahan advocates for this path in his novel. He suggests Jews should keep their identities and traditions and not lose them to the American melting pot. Just as David must exploit others to rise toward the American dream, he must exploit his own traditions and faith to assimilate and rise toward that success.
