Novel
The Rise of David Levinsky
Abraham Cahan · 1917
Opening lines
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.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
David Levinsky, born in 1865 in Antomir, a town in Russia, loses his father at the age of three and grows up studying the Talmud, which his mother pays for with her toil. When young Christians beat him, she goes to confront them and dies of it. With a few dozen roubles given by a patroness, he leaves for New York, where he arrives with four hundred. He peddles, learns English at evening classes, enters the manufacture of coats and, with a designer who adapts French models, sets up his own business. He tells all this thirty years later, as a millionaire.
Context
The book originates in a commission: in 1912, McClure's asked its author for a series on the Jewish garment manufacturers, which appeared in four instalments from April to July 1913 under another title, before being taken up as a novel by Harper in 1917. The title answers The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells, who hailed the book as an artistic triumph. Some Jewish readers received it badly, fearing it would supply arguments to antisemites, and its author wrote no further novel.
Who it is for
A long novel in the first person, whose narrator constantly justifies himself: it is better read as one reads a deposition. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the first great novels of Jewish immigration to the United States, praised on its publication by William Dean Howells.
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