The Rise of David Levinsky (69 page)

I dream of marrying some day. I dread to think of dying a lonely man.

Sometimes I have a spell of morbid amativeness and seem to be falling in love with woman after woman. There are periods when I can scarcely pass a woman in the street without scanning her face and figure. When I see the crowds returning from work in the cloak-and-waist district I often pause to watch the groups of girls as they walk 526 apart from the men. Their keeping together, as if they formed a separate world full of its own interests and secrets, makes a peculiar appeal to me.

Once, in Florida, I thought I was falling in love with a rich Jewish girl whose face had a bashful expression of a peculiar type. There are different sorts of bashfulness. This girl had the bashfulness of sin, as I put it to myself. She looked as if her mind harbored illicit thoughts which she was trying to conceal. Her blushes seemed to be full of sex and her eyes full of secrets. She was not a pretty girl at all, but her “guilty look” disturbed me as long as we were stopping in the same place.

But through all these ephemeral infatuations and interests I am in love with Anna.

From time to time I decide to make a “sensible” marriage, and study this woman or that as a possible candidate, but so far nothing has come of it.

There was one woman whom I might have married if she had not been a Gentile—one of the very few who lived in the family hotel in which I had my apartments. At first I set her down for an adventuress seeking the acquaintance of rich Jews for some sinister purpose. But I was mistaken. She was a woman of high character. Moreover, she and her aged mother, with whom she lived, had settled in that hotel long before it came to be patronized by our people. She was a widow of over forty, with a good, intellectual face, well read in the better sense of the term, and no fool. Many of our people in the hotel danced attendance upon her because she was a Gentile woman, but all of them were really fond of her. The great point was that she seemed to have a sincere liking for our people. This and the peculiar way her shoulders would shake when she laughed was, in fact, what first drew me to her. We grew chummy and I spent many an hour in her company.

In my soliloquies I often speculated and theorized on the question of proposing to her. I saw clearly that it would be a mistake. It was not the faith of my fathers that was in the way. It was that medieval prejudice against our people which makes so many marriages between Jew and Gentile a failure. It frightened me.

One evening we sat chatting in the bright lobby of the hotel, discussing human nature, and she telling me something of the good novels she had read. After a brief pause I said:

“I enjoy these talks immensely. I don’t think there is another person with whom I so love to talk of human beings.”

She bowed with a smile that shone of something more than mere appreciation of the compliment. And then I uttered in the simplest possible accents:

“ It’s really a pity that there is the chasm of race between us. Otherwise I don’t see why we couldn’t be happy together.”

I was in an adventurous mood and ready, even eager, to marry her. But her answer was a laugh, as if she took it for a joke; and, though I seemed to sense intimacy and encouragement in that laugh, it gave me pause. I felt on the brink of a fatal blunder, and I escaped before it was too late.

“But then,” I hastened to add, “real happiness in a case like this is perhaps not the rule, but the exception. That chasm continues to yawn throughout the couple’s married life, I suppose.”

“That’s an interesting point of view,” she said, a non-committal smile on her lips.

She tactfully forbore to take up the discussion, and I soon dropped the subject. We remained friends.

It was this woman who got me interested in good, modern fiction. The books she selected for me interested me greatly. Then it was that the remarks I had heard from Moissey Tevkin came to my mind. They were illuminating.

Most of the people at my hotel are German-American Jews. I know other Jews of this class. I contribute to their charity institutions. Though an atheist, I belong to one of their synagogues. Nor can I plead the special feeling which had partly accounted for my visits at the synagogue of the Sons of Antomir while I was engaged to Kaplan’s daughter. I am a member of that synagogue chiefly because it is a fashionable synagogue. I often convict myself of currying favor with the German Jews. But then German-American Jews curry favor with Portuguese-American Jews, just as we all curry favor with Gentiles and as American Gentiles curry favor with the aristocracy of Europe.

I often long for a heart-to-heart talk with some of the people of my birthplace. I have tried to revive my old friendships with some of them, but they are mostly poor and my prosperity stands between us in many ways.

Sometimes when I am alone in my beautiful apartments, brooding over these things and nursing my loneliness, I say to myself:

“There are cases when success is a tragedy.”

There are moments when I regret my whole career, when my very success seems to be a mistake.

I think that I was born for a life of intellectual interest. I was certainly brought up for one. The day when that accident turned my mind from college to business seems to be the most unfortunate day in my life. I think that I should be much happier as a scientist or writer, perhaps. I should then be in my natural element, and if I were doomed to loneliness I should have comforts to which I am now a stranger. That’s the way I feel every time I pass the abandoned old building of the City College.

The business world contains plenty of successful men who have no brains. Why, then, should I ascribe my triumph to special ability? I should probably have made a much better college professor than a cloak-manufacturer, and should probably be a happier man, too. I know people who have made much more money than I and whom I consider my inferiors in every respect.

Many of our immigrants have distinguished themselves in science, music, or art, and these I envy far more than I do a billionaire. As an example of the successes achieved by Russian Jews in America in the last quarter of a century it is often pointed out that the man who has built the greatest sky-scrapers in the country, including the Woolworth Building, is a Russian Jew who came here a penniless boy. I cannot boast such distinction, but then I have helped build up one of the great industries of the United States, and this also is something to be proud of. But I should readily change places with the Russian Jew, a former Talmud student like myself, who is the greatest physiologist in the New World, or with the Russian Jew who holds the foremost place among American song-writers and whose soulful compositions are sung in almost every English-speaking house in the world. I love music to madness. I yearn for the world of great singers, violinists, pianists. Several of the greatest of them are of my race and country, and I have met them, but all my acquaintance with them has brought me is a sense of being looked down upon as a money-bag striving to play the Mæcenas. I had a similar experience with a sculptor, also one of our immigrants, an East Side boy who had met with sensational success in Paris and London. I had him make my bust. His demeanor toward me was all that could have been desired. We even cracked Yiddish jokes together and he hummed bits of synagogue music over his work, but I never left his studio without feeling cheap and wretched.

When I think of these things, when I am in this sort of mood, I pity myself for a victim of circumstances.

At the height of my business success I feel that if I had my life to live over again I should never think of a business career.

I don’t seem to be able to get accustomed to my luxurious life. I am always more or less conscious of my good clothes, of the high quality of my office furniture, of the power I wield over the men in my pay. As I have said in another connection, I still have a lurking fear of restaurant waiters.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4:3
Antomir:
a large village in what is now Poland, about halfway

between Poznan and Lodz.

 

5:31
Eltakim Zunzer:
Wedding bards were hired to compose and sing or recite spontaneous lyrics at Jewish weddings in Eastern Europe, a custom carried on briefly in the New World. Eliakim Zunzer (1836—1912) was the best known among these bards, coming to New York in 1889, where he sporadically continued the tradition.

 

9:32
“Christ-killer!”:
an old calumny against the Jews and an epithet often used as a prelude to Christian violence against them. Horrified by the Holocaust, many Christian leaders—especially Pope John XXIII in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)—repudiated and condemned this tradition.

 

27:26
Preacher’s Synagogue:
Wandering preachers (Maggids in Hebrew ) were a feature of Russian and Polish Jewish communities from the seventeenth century onward. Many communities had synagogues well known for their popular preachers (in addition to their rabbis). The Maggid Schul in Vilna, where Cahan was born, was one of the most famous as a place of instruction.

 

27:29
Talmud:
The Hebrew word for “teaching” or “learning.” the Talmud :is a compilation of eight centuries of study with discussions and commentaries by scholars working in the academies of Palestine and Babylon. The Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud was completed about 400 c. E., the Babylonian (the larger and more influential) about 500 c. E. It is the source of Jewish law and its study the basis of Jewish religious life.

 

30:30 Day of the Rejoicing of the
Law:
Public reading of a portion of the law (the Pentateuch, or Torah) takes place on all sabbaths and various other festivals and holidays during the Hebrew year. The Pentateuch is divided into fifty-four parts for this purpose. The day on which the annual readings concludes is called Simhat Torah (the Rejoicing of the Law), whereupon the process begins again.

 

31:7-8 a certain book of exhortations: probably one of the canonical or mostly extracanonical writings in the Jewish tradition concerned with eschatology—the expectation of the end of this world and the hope for a blissful world to come.

 

38:6-7
Tanaim
...
Amoraim: Tanaim
were teachers and students of the Oral Law (as distinct from the Written Law, or the Scriptures), who last flourished after the destruction of the Second Temple (in 70 c. E., by the Roman Emperor Titus). They were succeeded by the Amoraim (“discoursers”), interpreters of the written text (the Mishnah) of the oral tradition.

 

4340: her hair covered with a wig: Married women are forbidden in the Talmud to display their hair loosely in the street. Among the rigidly orthodox, from the fifteenth century onward, a married woman was expected to shave her hair and never appear in public without a wig. It is a custom rarely observed among contemporary Jews.

 

51:1 Purim, the Feast of Esther: a festival commemorating the delivrance of the Jews of the Persian Empire from extermination by Xerxes I (or Ahasuerus, 485—465 B. c. E.). The story is told in the Book of Esther. During its recital, whenever the name of Haman, the emperor’s chief minister and exponent of the extermination policy, is mentioned, the children raise a great racket with their Purim rattles.

 

 

51:7 the great
eight-day festival of Passover:
The annual celebration of the Exodus of the Jews from their bondage in Egypt, involving the eating of unleavened bread (matzoth) and the holding of seders on the first two evenings, elaborate and ceremonious feasts during which the tale is retold through a reading of the Haggadah. In Israel it is a seven-day holiday, with only one seder.

 

 

52:30
anti-Jewish atrocities
of 1881 and 1882: After the assassination of Czar Alexander Il in St. Petersburg in 1881 by a group of terrorists, a wave of pogroms broke out in Russian cities, instigated by the authorities to deflect anger against the regime. Cahan gives a detailed account of these events in his 1905 novel,
The White Terror and the Red.

 

 

53:6 “Seven Days” (of
mourning):
For seven days after the death of an immediate family member, Jews customarily remain at home in mourning, seated upon boxes or low stools, a custom called “sitting Shivah.”

 

57:19 Doctor Rachaeles, a famous Hebrew writer: probably an invent character, much like his son-in-law, “a poet named Abraham Tevkin,” who appeared in the original McClure’s Magazine version of Levinsky as an essay writer (and not a poet at all).

 

58:8 the Hebrew word for
“life”:
Kabbalists—Jewish mystics who specialize in esoteric interpretations of Scripture—assign numerical values to each Hebrew letter. The first letter in the alphabet, aleph, is one, the second, bet, is two, and so on. Thus the letters in the Hebrew word for life, chat, add up to eighteen.

 

75:29 Mr. Gymnasist: Footnotes in the original text are Cahan’s own.

 

81:3 anniversary of my
mother’s
death: For a full year Jewish mourners offer special prayers at frequent and regular intervals for deceased members of the immediate family. Thereafter the special prayers are said upon the anniversary date and high holidays.

 

85:27
phylacteries:
two small leather cases containing Scripture secured by straps and worn on the forehead and left arm by Orthodox Jewish males over the age of thirteen at daily morning prayers.