David Levinsky

7 Pages 1651 Words

INTRODUCTION

Published in 1917, The Rise of David Levinsky is considered to be the first American novel to chronicle the Jewish American immigrant experience at the end of the 19th century. Almost a century later, it can be difficult to imagine the significance of this book at the time of its publication and in the intervening years.

Certainly before the turn of the last century, and undoubtedly since, we are proud to proclaim our nation a country of immigrants. We have developed an awareness of the immigrant experience through a variety of media—newspapers, books, magazine articles, television documentaries, radio shows and movies. We hardly can help but be aware, to some degree, of the unique challenges that have faced immigrants from such diverse places as Vietnam, Mexico, Cuba, China and Korea, to name a few. Even over the last thirty years within our own Jewish community we have come to appreciate the experiences of Russians, Iranians, Israelis, South Africans and South Americans starting their lives over in their adopted homeland.

What became the book The Rise of David Levinsky originally appeared as four related short stories in the English-language McClure’s Magazine. Immediately, what might have otherwise been available only to the new Jewish immigrants themselves, if it had been published in Yiddish, ultimately engaged a readership far beyond the streets of the Lower East Side in New York. The struggle for success, the challenges of building a new life while your heart lives in another continent, and the support as well as distrust that existed within the Jewish immigrant community were all laid out for everyone—immigrant and American alike. In this way, America began to learn how a land of opportunity could also feel like a land of lost souls.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), the son of a rabbi, was born and raised in Vlinius, where he trained as a teacher in the Jewish Folk Schools. Steeped i...