The Rise of David Levinsky Read Online Free PDF
Author: Abraham Cahan
Levinsky the question still looms large, and the answer is not yet fully in. It remains a haunting and prophetic book about an American identity that must find a more fulfilling destiny, morally and spiritually, than material wealth if it is to achieve a secure sense of self. 15
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cahan, Abraham. Bleter fun Mein Leben (Pages From My Life). New York: The Forward Association, 1926-1931.
Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.
Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Harap, Louis. The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
Stein, Leon, et al., trans. The Education of Abraham Cahan. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Rise of David Levinsky, copyrighted by Abraham Cahan in 1917 and 1945, was first published by Harper and Brothers in 1917. No extant manuscript has been discovered.
There have been several reprints of that edition, using its plates and pagination: Grosset & Dunlap in 1928, Peter Smith in 1951 and 1966, as a Harper Torchbook (paperback) edition in 1960 with an introduction by John Higham.
A 43-page abridgment, with a teacher’s guide for a minicourse to be used in grades 10-12, was published by the Board of Jewish Education in New York in 1976, on the occasion of the bicentennial. A musical play version was done in New York in 1987, the 100-page libretto published in 1988 by Samuel French (New York).
The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics annotated edition is the first new one since the novel’s original publication.
BOOK I
HOME AND SCHOOL
THE RISE OF
DAVID LEVINSKY
CHAPTER I
S OMETIMES, 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. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.
When I was young I used to think that middle-aged people recalled their youth as something seen through a haze. I know better now. Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be. The last years that I spent in my native land and my first years in America come back to me with the distinctness of yesterday. Indeed, I have a better recollection of many a trifle of my childhood days than I have of some important things that occurred to me recently. I have a good memory for faces, but I am apt to recognize people I have not seen for a quarter of a century more readily than I do some I used to know only a few years ago.
I love to brood over my youth. The dearest days in one’s life are those that seem very far and very near at once. My wretched boyhood appeals to me as a sick child does to its mother.
I was born in Antomir, in the Northwestern Region, Russia, in 1865. All I remember of my father is his tawny beard, a huge yellow apple he once gave me at the gate of an orchard where he was employed as watchman, and the candle which burned at his head as his body lay under a white shroud on the floor. I was less than three years
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Cahan, Abraham. Bleter fun Mein Leben (Pages From My Life). New York: The Forward Association, 1926-1931.
Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.
Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Harap, Louis. The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974.
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
Stein, Leon, et al., trans. The Education of Abraham Cahan. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Rise of David Levinsky, copyrighted by Abraham Cahan in 1917 and 1945, was first published by Harper and Brothers in 1917. No extant manuscript has been discovered.
There have been several reprints of that edition, using its plates and pagination: Grosset & Dunlap in 1928, Peter Smith in 1951 and 1966, as a Harper Torchbook (paperback) edition in 1960 with an introduction by John Higham.
A 43-page abridgment, with a teacher’s guide for a minicourse to be used in grades 10-12, was published by the Board of Jewish Education in New York in 1976, on the occasion of the bicentennial. A musical play version was done in New York in 1987, the 100-page libretto published in 1988 by Samuel French (New York).
The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics annotated edition is the first new one since the novel’s original publication.
BOOK I
HOME AND SCHOOL
THE RISE OF
DAVID LEVINSKY
CHAPTER I
S OMETIMES, 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. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.
When I was young I used to think that middle-aged people recalled their youth as something seen through a haze. I know better now. Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be. The last years that I spent in my native land and my first years in America come back to me with the distinctness of yesterday. Indeed, I have a better recollection of many a trifle of my childhood days than I have of some important things that occurred to me recently. I have a good memory for faces, but I am apt to recognize people I have not seen for a quarter of a century more readily than I do some I used to know only a few years ago.
I love to brood over my youth. The dearest days in one’s life are those that seem very far and very near at once. My wretched boyhood appeals to me as a sick child does to its mother.
I was born in Antomir, in the Northwestern Region, Russia, in 1865. All I remember of my father is his tawny beard, a huge yellow apple he once gave me at the gate of an orchard where he was employed as watchman, and the candle which burned at his head as his body lay under a white shroud on the floor. I was less than three years
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