The Rise of David Levinsky (70 page)

 

86:1 in the
original Hebrew:
The translations of Psalm 104 that follow are from the King James version of the Bible.

 

91:29 “
All right
”: This phrase, the first learned by Levinsky, was the basis for Cahan’s invention of the word
allrightnik,
a mildly contemptuous epithet he used against self-satisfied or complacent Jewish parvenus.

 

93:26
“greenhorn”
: a patronizing term applied to recently arrived immigrants during this period—perhaps originally having reference to the immature horns of young animals.

 

133:5 a
heeler:
a pejorative term—usually “ward-heeler”—applied to a minor political functionary or servile supporter of a politician operating in small electoral districts.

 

137:9
a Reformed synagogue:
In the early part of the nineteenth century , “reformers” of Orthodox Judaism in Germany began a movement to make Judaism more consonant with contemporary life—using the vernacular and music in the services—in an attempt to liberalize and modernize procedures generally. Reform Judaism took root in American life in the midnineteenth century, the great majority of Jews of the period being of German descent. Conservatism, which mediates between Orthodoxy and Reform, is the major religious branch of American Judaism today. Reconstructionism, even more syncretic, is a recently evolved fourth branch with many adherents in the United States.

 

144:11 his thin,
firm
...: an obvious typographical error, as the word “mouth” is missing; it should read “his thin, firm mouth opening and snapping shut.”

 

159:4 The Yiddish stage in America: With roots in Romanian troupes of traveling actors in the 1870s, the Yiddish theater arrived in America in 1882. After a period marked by much melodrama and hack work, the theater assumed new seriousness after 1891 with the arrival of Jacob Gordin (1853-1909), one of the most prominent Yiddish playwrights and, incidentally, for many years an object of Cahan’s attacks. The Yiddish stage flourished into the interwar period as a source of entertainment and instruction for its relatively large and avid public, nourishing as well a host of performers and directors who went on to careers and renown in English-speaking or American theater and film. With the precipitous decline of a large Yiddish-speaking public, it has for all practical purposes disappeared, despite periodic efforts at resurrecting a play or a notable performance.

 

161:23-24
people on the stage should not talk as they would off the stage:
it should be noted that this view is exactly the opposite of Cahan’s own, often expressed in his theatrical criticism, in which he came out strongly against this kind of artificial, unlifelike kind of language. He was for “the plain accents of every-day life.”

 

165:15
Young Men’s Hebrew Association:
The first YMHA was organized in New York City in 1874, on the model of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), first organized in Boston in 1851. The original YMCAs were established in Great Britain.

 

168:5
City College
: The College of the City of New York (CCNY), or City College as it has always been popularly called, now located at Broadway and 139th Street in Manhattan, was incorporated in 1853 after its original founding as the Free Academy in 1847. At present it is one of twenty-one community colleges, schools, and colleges comprising the City University of New York (CUNY).

 

173:1
Cloak-Makers’ Union:
The United Hebrew Trades was established in 1888 in New York City. In its first year its members set up the Cloak Makers’ Society, which was then reorganized in 1889 and became the Dress and Cloak-Makers’ Union of New York.

 

 

174:12
Socialism:
Cahan was a socialist of one kind or another practically all his long life. He welcomed the formation of the Socialist Party of the U.S. under Eugene Debs’s leadership in 1901 and as a member actively worked for the election of socialist candidates.

 

175:33-34
Felix Adler’s ethical-culture lectures:
The New York Ethical Culture Society was established by Felix Adler (1851-1933) in 1876. Adler was a philosopher and teacher who founded the ethical culture movement to further a nonreligious morality and work toward social, labor, and child reforms.

 

177:1
Pendennis
: a novel by the English author Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) that appeared originally in serial form in England, 1848—1850. It recounts the ups and downs of Arthur Pendennis, a youth from a poor but good family as he searches for wealth and position.

 

191:4
Central Park:
major park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, designed by the noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead (1822—1903) and his partner Calvert Vaux in 1857, completed in 1876. It was designed to be one half mile wide and two and a half miles long.

 

224:23
plain Yiddish folk
:
“Prosteh Yidn”
(Yiddish for “plain Jews”) was a term that could be used proudly or pejoratively, much like the English word “common.”

 

254:6 syle: a typo; “syle” should obviously be “style.”

 

 

269:4—5
Educational Alliance:
The alliance was founded in 1889 by prominent German Jews on the Lower East Side of New York, for the express purpose of “Americanizing” the new immigrants from Eastern Europe. English and civics lessons were offered, American holidays celebrated and explained, and a host of social, cultural, and athletic activities furthered. It flourished for many decades.

 

272:29
walking delegates:
a term used in the late nineteenth century for union organizers. It was to learn about “walking delegates” for his utopian-novel-in-progress A
Traueler from
Altruria (1894) that William Dean Howells—the “Dean of American Letters,” as he came to be known—ventured down to the Lower East Side to meet the socialist editor Abraham Cahan, of whom he had recently heard.

 

273:9 Arbeiter
Zeitung:
Yiddish-language organ of the Socialist Labor Party, for which Cahan wrote extensively and edited (1891—1894).

 

282:9—10
Herbert Spencer’s Sociology:
Herbert Spencer (1820—1903) was the founder of evolutionary philosophy, the principle, he argued, that lay behind all phenomena (along with an inscrutable force).
His Study of Sociology
appeared in 1873,
Principles of Sociology
from 1876—1896.
Social Statics
(1851) was his first published work. Spencer provided in his time a chief impetus to the movement known as Social Darwinism, which attempted to apply in the social sphere the Darwinian principles of “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection.” The naturalist Charles Darwin’s (1809—1882) immensely influential and great work
The Origin of Species
appeared in 1859,
The Descent
of
Man
in 1871.

 

248:30
“how the other half lived
”: Jacob A. Riis (1849—1914), a noted journalist of the day, published a book titled
How the Other Half
Lives in 1890 about bad living conditions among New York’s immigrant and ethnic poor. Riis led campaigns that eventually resulted in tenement reforms. The phrase was originally used by the French writer Rabelais (1494—1553) in
Gargantua and Pantagruel
: “One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.”

 

 

299:35
Yiddish, which is merely a German dialect:
Modern linguists consider Yiddish a language, not “a dialect,” which developed out of Middle High German. But this view was popular, as well as a contended point, among some Jewish intellectuals of the period.

 

300:3 Yom
Kippur:
This is the most solemn of Jewish holy days, the climax of the “Days of Awe, ”the ten-day period from the first day of Rosh Hashonah (the beginning of the New Year in the Jewish calendar) that is marked by meditation, reflection, and prayers for forgiveness of past sins and a better new year.

 

326:2—3 Emerson, or Schopenhauer: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803- 1882), the author of “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar,” among other works, which are classic celebrations of American individualism and character. Artur Schopenhauer (1788—1860) was the author of
The
World as
Will
and Idea (1819), expounding a fashionably pessimistic philosophy in which “will” is the only reality—the “thing-in-itself”—and the world is an illusion created by it.

 

353:2
Lexington Avenue
car: a streetcar or “trolley” car, which was powered by overhead electrical lines and ran on tracks embedded in the road.

 

353:6
Normal
College: The Female Normal and High School was founded in 1854, primarily to train young women as teachers and modeled on the Free Academy for males, which had been established in 1847. In 1855 the name was changed to Normal College. Later its name was changed to Hunter College, after its first principal, Thomas Hunter. It has since become co-educational and a component of the City University of New York (CUNY).

 

380:20 Max Nordau: A philosopher and Zionist leader, Nordau (1849—1923) was the author of
Conventional Lies of Our Civilization,
a book that went through seventy editions and was translated into fifteen languages.

 

382:12
Cooper Institute
: Now known as Cooper Union, this institution was founded in 1857—1859 by the inventor and philanthropist Peter Cooper (1791—1883) in downtown Manhattan to provide free instruction in engineering, the sciences, and art. It has been the site of several important speeches in U.S. history, notably an address by Abraham Lincoln in 1860 that helped win him the Republican nomination for the presidency.

 

382:16—17
the Jews were among its foremost and bravest leaders:
The failed revolution of 1905 was sometimes called the first Russian Revolution. Cahan and his Forward followed and supported this revolutionary movement avidly. In the aftermath of its failure, many Jewish militants emigrated to the U.S. and provided new leadership in the trade-union and radical movements.

 

389:34—3534—35
the gallery reserved for her sex:
In Orthodox Jewish synagogues or schuls, men and women were kept separate. The women sat in a gallery if one was available, behind a curtain or screen of some kind if it were only a one-story schul. Such a practice is now followed only in extremely Orthodox houses of prayer.

 

391:27 1928
“a greater tenor than Jean de Rezske”:
a Polish singer (1850—), one of the finest tenors of the nineteenth century. From 1891 to 1901 he was the leading tenor of the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City. From 1902 until his death he was a teacher in Paris.

 

3931—2: Henry Street: a street on the Lower East Side, the site of the Henry Street Settlement House, which was an effort to provide nursing and health services to the immigrants. It later branched out into experimental education, theater, and dance.

 

395:35
“matzo balls”:
a variation of a dumpling or German
Knoedel,
made largely with matzo meal and eggs, eaten usually in soups.

 

407:35
It isn’t some kike:
an offensive term for a Jew, used usually by anti-Semites to express contempt and hostility. It perhaps derives from the -ski or -sky ending of many East European Jewish names.

 

 

 

426:2
Atlantic City:
a resort on the southern shore of New Jersey.

 

 

451:7
the Astor library:
established in 1854 on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan with money from the fortune of John Jacob Astor. Along with the Lenox Foundation, its holdings became in 1895 the basis of the great New York Public Library. The original building, saved from destruction and refurbished, has been the home of the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre.

 

 

456:26 it’s: a typo; it should be “its.”

 

473:31
incredable:
a typo; it should be “incredible.”

 

 

474:3
Zangwill’s modified Zionism or Territorialism
: Israel Zangwill (1864—1926) was a prominent English Jewish literary figure, a novelist and playwright best known in the U.S. for his play The Melting Pot (1907). In 1905 he established, with other famous Zionists and non-Zionists, the Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO). It sought suitable territory outside Palestine in which to establish an autonomous Jewish community. The group disbanded in 1925.

 

474:23
East Side art students:
One of the most talented was Jacob Epstein, who did the illustrations for Hutchins Hapgood’s
The Spirit of the Ghetto
(1902), for which Cahan was a primary informant. Epstein went to live and work in England, primarily as a sculptor, where he was ultimately awarded a knighthood.

 

493:14—15
the Jewish Ingersoll:
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) was a pop- ular American orator and author of
Why I Am an Agnostic
(1896).

 

511:5—6
their Yiddish daily:
undoubtedly Cahan’s own
Jewish Daily
Forward.

 

516:15
hetsiated:
a typo; it should be “hesitated.”

 

519:2
the corruption of the mighty:
Between 1902 and 1912 many of the nation’s writers and journalists produced exposes of the exploitative and socially destructive side of capitalism and its social system, in journals like
McClure’s
(in which Cahan’s first version of
David Levinsky
appeared),
Cosmopolitan, Collier’s,
and
The Arena.
Theodore Roosevelt, recalling
Pilgrim’s Progress,
derided these “rakers of muck,” and the term “muckrakers” for this generation of socially conscious reporting was born. By 1912 the impulse had spent itself: Willa Cather had left
McClure’s
as managing editor, and the magazine commissioned Lincoln Steffens to write a series called “The Fame of the Cities”—as opposed to his earlier scathing and more famous
Shame of the Cities,
an exposure of “the corruption of the mighty.”