The work of Abraham Cahan, especially his novel The Rise of David Levinsky, is a significant point of departure in understanding the fabric of the Jewish-American immigrant experience, its evolution, and the assimilation of a people in a new homeland. Both its literary and socio-historical content establish it as a seminal influence in American letters. Abraham Cahan was Russian-born and immigrated to the United States in 1882 at the age of twenty-two.

Born near Vilna (today in Lithuania), Cahan’s grandfather was a rabbi and his father a schoolteacher. Possibly because of those influences, Cahan was an imaginative and inquisitive student who was more apt to question the existing order of things than to capitulate to it. Upon leaving the Vilna Teachers’ Institute in 1881 as a teacher, Cahan applied those critical faculties and got involved in the radical politics of the day. By the time he reached America he was giving lectures on Marxist philosophy to Jewish workers. He went on to establish himself as a Yiddish journalist, which eventually led to a career in creative writing.

By 1886 Cahan was contributing short journalistic pieces to a Jewish-Russian weekly called Russky Yevrey with pieces devoted to what would eventually become a Cahanian motif, immigrant life in America.

In 1897 Cahan founded the New York Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper which he edited from 1903 until his death in 1951, and which offered him a unique opportunity to deal with the varieties of Jewish experience on New York’s burgeoning East Side. His editorial experience there enabled him to mediate between various social and ethnic levels: the Yiddish, the Russian and the American, so to speak. Cahan’s familiarity with these various cultures made Cahan’s contribution to North American literature and social history significant, since as a Russian-Jewish-American writer privy to this cultural richness, Cahan, more than any other writer before him. laid the foundations for one of the major themes in Jewish-American writing of the twentieth century: the problems inherent in cultural readjustment or ’acculturation’.

As can be witnessed in later Jewish writing in North America, Cahan influenced Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Phillip Roth, I.B. Singer, and Mordecai Richler who are all, in some way, indebted to Cahan for an approach to the difficult dualities of Jewish Europe and Jewish America.

Cahan established himself as a serious novelist in his three novels in English: Yekl A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) The White Terror and the Red (1905): and his masterpiece The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). This work is especially influential in his marvellous adaptation of American Jewish experience in the dialect of his immigrant characters. Cahan invigorates his characters by making them speak in a raw, idiomatic fashion which exposes the vulgarizing effect that America has had on them. Cahan’s use of Judeo-American dialect predates the work of Henry Roth or Bernard Malamud.

Cahan’s work reflects the change in Jewish perceptions of the world, specifically through the loss of language. In Cahan’s fiction we see the slow but definite assimilation of his characters into American society, as expressed in their use of language. This is most poignant in Cahan’s last and best known novel, The Rise of David Levinsky. Here the language of his characters expresses most fully their complete or nearly-complete assimilation into American society and, concomitantly, their gradual loss of their most important source of identity: their native language.

What Cahan presented in a way not presented before was a unique narrative treatment of a slowly evolving social, ethnic, and linguistic process which transformed the European Jew, with all his cultural, ritualistic, and mystical sensibilities, into an American Jew almost devoid of any tradition.

The novel begins with a successful middle-aged David Levinsky flashing back on his apparent rise to fortune. In the first four sections of the book, Levinsky recounts growing up in and finally leaving Antomir, his Russian village home. Eventually he gets the money needed to emigrate to America. The remaining nine sections deal with David’s gradual disassociation from his heritage and assimilation into a new culture, for once David is in America he undergoes the slow process of acculturation. He shaves his beard, loses his chastity, learns English, begins his business career in the garment industry, falls in and out of love and finally becomes a successful businessman. Yet with all his apparent success he is not fulfilled. The lack of fulfilment and the loss of homeland and language have been a large price to pay for success in America.

Cahan’s masterpiece prophesies that without a willingness to reinstate the past prosperity of Jewish-American roots, American Jews are doomed to an existence of increasing dispirited spiritual poverty while living within the luxury of American materialist ’darkness’. In short, Jewish-Americans are doomed to live, like David Levinsky, within the success of his failure.

’Sometimes 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. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America in 1885 with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.’