The Rise of David Levinsky
Mon., December 22, 12:00 PM
Reading this book was a Project. It took me a long time, but keep in mind that it’s more than five hundred pages of not-quite-modern English. I was wondering why I hadn’t read this book before, not in 1912 when it first came out, of course, but when it was reprinted. So I checked its dates; the reprint came out in 1960, when I was still attending college and could afford to read only books that were in the library. The library never bought this one. Oh.
A fictional biography like this is always interesting as a comparison to what you know of history, and from that viewpoint I enjoyed it a great deal. It begins with David’s childhood as an orphan in “Antomir,” a Jewish settlement in Russia. He’s an orphan, a student of Talmud. Orphans were supported by the community, even when many of the citizens don’t have much themselves. And one rich woman actually gives him the money for a ticket to America. He’s a comparatively early immigrant; he came before there the Statue of Liberty was in New York Harbor.
David begins his life in America as an itinerant peddler, but he’s not very good at it. He does somewhat better working in a cloak factory. Meanwhile, however, he also goes to night school to learn English. He manages to start his own factory and eventually becomes a wealthy owner in the cloak-and-suit business.
There’s a lot of history of the beginning and evolution of the business. The availability of ready-to-wear clothing, especially for women, had a huge impact of society as a whole. Most of the stories of Jewish immigrants in New York are from the viewpoint of the workers, unionists against the capitalists. David Levinsky is one of those capitalists. Lots of times, I don’t like him very much. Oh, yes, he’s very successful, and he is charitable when he has the wherewithal. But as I read about his relations with other people, I found myself saying, “David, don’t do that!” After reading about the theories of Darwin and Spencer, he adopted “survival of the fittest” as his new religion, considering himself better than other people because he had survived in business.
The story isn’t really over when the book ends. The time is twenty-five years after he arrives in America, which means he’s still fairly young. And, if you’re familiar with any history of unions, you realize that the unions were still not very strong, because they gained more power after the Triangle Factory fire in 1911, and that could not have been ignored in any story of New York.
Abraham Cahan was the long-time editor of the Forward, which David Levinsky would categorize as “one of those socialist Yiddish newspapers.” The Forward had great influence on the Jewish immigrants, bringing them not only news, but information about American life and a sampling of good literature. (My mother remembered my grandfather reading aloud, stories like “Tevya the Dairyman,” the basis for “Fiddler on the Roof.”)
The introduction to the reprint suggests that the book did not sell very well because the people who might have bought it were those Jewish immigrants who had been successful enough to move on, and they were vaguely ashamed of their early backgrounds. I suspect that prospective buyers were just not interested in the viewpoint of the capitalists.
There is also some background about how the Russian Jews eventually moved the German Jews out of clothing manufacture. There was always a pecking order. The German Jews felt inferior to the Portuguese who had been there before, but they figured they were better than the Russians. And they all considered themselves superior to the Poles and Romanians.
From time to time I wondered whether Cahan was playing with the reader. David’s experiences at night school reminded me a little of The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. (Well, night school could always provide some funny stories.) But there is a prolonged discussion about the difference between the perfect and imperfect tenses – in which the final answer is wrong, not open to interpretation, but just plain backwards. Did he do that on purpose?
I’m inclined to play with names, their meaning or translation, wondering whether the choice of names was intentional. For example, a young woman of David’s acquaintance, Miss Tevkin, is called Anna. Anna Tevkin? Could it be related to Annatevka, the shetl in “Fiddler on the Roof”? More likely coincidence, I guess. And I kept wondering why Levinsky sounded so familiar to me. It’s not that uncommon a name – formed from common name roots – but there was something else. And then I realized that a variation of it had become infamous just a few years ago. Monica?
Don’t mind me. I think my brain is frozen.
