Jewish New York in Abraham Cahan's "The Rise of David Levinsky" and Henry James' "The American Scene"

Jewish New York in Abraham Cahan’s “The Rise of David Levinsky” and Henry James’ “The American Scene”.

I have decided to write my paper about Jewish New York and in particular the Lower East Side because it is a very important place in the history of Jewish America. This is a place which is inseparable from general American history, because it was influenced and shaped by immigrant culture. Jewish and American cultures merged and influenced each other on different levels.

The Jews in America had more freedom than anywhere else in the world, Anti-Semitism was milder and could not be compared to its Eastern European form. The English language was influenced by Yiddish, and Yiddish absorbed English words and expressions.

New York became the gateway for immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Rischin, by 1900 immigrants constituted over 76 % of the city’s population. It was the time of the mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe. One third of the Jewish population tried to escape poverty and pogroms coming to America. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Lower East Side became the center of the Jewish population. It represents a whole era and a certain type of life, which its name evokes. “The name “Lower East Side” contains meaning that is automatically understood by all as distinctive, replete with a set of icons associated with it…” (Diner, p. 31). At this time the Lower East Side was an exotic place, which was closed to strangers. Its inhabitants were sealed off from the rest of American world.

Although it is known that not only the Jews lived there, it was a “broad urban borderland”, “a sprawling zone where pockets of Jewish life functioned alongside areas shaped by other peoples, many of whom were also newcomers to America” (Diner, 44), but it came to represent the Jewish history, just as Aushwitz came to represent the Jewish tragedy although people of other nations perished there as well.

“No other ethnic group in America, with the exception of the African-American construction of Harlem, has so thoroughly understood, imagined and represented itself through a particular chunk of space.” (Diner, 50).

Practically all Eastern European immigrants came to the Lower East Side. There were communities which were living according to the geography of the Old World. Their way of life was also that of the countries of origin. The “real” America was inaccessible to the tenement dwellers because they were dependent on the social structure in the Ghetto, the trades they worked in and the Yiddish language.

Since so many people settled in one place, the living conditions in tenements were extremely hard, especially during the hot summer months.

It is a real place which serves as a background for fictional events in Abraham Cahan’s book and, similar to the use of historical events in fiction, the place is used to make fictional events look authentic. The “ I Discover America” section of the book plays “ in the heart of the Jewish East Side”. “The place… shaped David Levinsky’s life and Cahan’s narrative. (Diner, 71).

In the eyes of an outsider it is a horrible, scary place packed with people.

Henry James describes the Lower East Side in “The American Scene”. In New York the observer is surrounded by electric cars, carrying a “foreign load”, which presents “alienism unmistakable…undisguised and unashamed” (James, 125).

The fact that immigrants feel at home in America already after a short time makes him feel strange. He describes the Ghetto in negative terms like “The sense of swarming”, “Jewry that burst all bounds”, “ant-like population”. He is filled with a sense of disgust. Jews are compared to “fish of over-developed proboscis”, snakes and worms – not human beings. The many children are not a source of joy – this is “multiplication with a vengeance”, sign of “Hebrew conquest of New York”. He cannot help but notice the modernizing of “The New Jerusalem”, as he calls it.

There are things like the machinery for producing electricity, fire escapes and phone lines. He notices that there is development in the poorest neighborhoods, but for him it is nothing but “organized cage for the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden... for human squirrels and monkeys. (James,133).

The presence of Jewish shops and the fact that they cater to the needs of immigrants and are „taken for granted“ is a bad omen – the immigrants are successfully appropriating the territory.

A public garden which provides for the recreation of the newly arrived immigrants speaks for him of „Jerusalem disinfected“. The presence of a school is a sign of the uplifting influence America has on the swarming ordes of dirty immigrants. He gives all Jews one „ insistent, defiant, unhumorous, exotic face“, calling them all by a generic name „Jerusalem.“ It reminds one of common middle names like Israel and Sara, which the Nazis gave to all Jews. The word „disinfected“ could not have been associated by James with concentration camps, but it completes the dehumanizing picture that he presents. This alien "sordid, squalid and gross“ presence defies him and takes his America away by inhabiting and appropriating the city and the English language.

In his book Abraham Cahan describes the Lower East Side from the point of view of an insider. One of his goals is to reach an “outsider” Gentile reader and to re-humanize the inhabitants of the Lower East Side in their eyes.

For David Levinsky it is the first place in America he sets foot in, it is the gateway to his new homeland. The choice of place in this book is not accidental, because as an immigrant, the chances were that Levinsky would settle on the Lower East Side. For him it is not a place of abject poverty and despair, for him it is the first glimpse of America. He sees it in a different light. It is a big improvement over Shtetl life.

People are better dressed than in his home town. On his first day he takes a walk in the Ghetto and sees a family who are evicted from their home sitting on the sidewalk, their belongings and furniture clustered near them.

The furniture of this evicted family would be a sign of prosperity in his native Antomir. The signs of poverty are inverted into a promise of a better future. The first thing for David to do is to look for hospitality in the House of God. But Jewish life in America is not the same as in the Old World and the old and new ways are constantly compared.

“The Beth ha Midrash was no longer the same. This house of prayer and study, literary and dramatic center, home of musical worship, office of mutual aid and brotherly communal devotion, gradually was bereft of its attractions” (Rischin, 146).

Because of his appearance of an observant Jew, everybody can see that Levinsky is a “greenhorn”, a newcomer. At the end of the first American chapter, he is homesick and he swears to his beloved mother to be pious in a godless country. But gradually, he must assimilate and become an Americanized Jew. He describes the fallen women, who are not segregated and live in tenements together with everyone. In his childhood memoirs “Jews without Money” Michael Gold describes how prostitutes were a part of everyday life in the tenements. The “respectable” people suffered from their presence, but nothing could be done to separate them, as long as they paid the rent. The motives were not “moral”, but material. Many young girls were driven to prostitution by harsh poverty.

But this dark side of the Ghetto is not the most important for Levinsky. He undergoes vast changes evolving from a Talmud scholar into a secular person. His interests include general education, English, Yiddish theatre and Hebrew literature – things which were lacking in Russia and which New York could provide for him. He enrolls in a public evening school and diligently learns English still working as a peddler. The longing for education was a typical Jewish trait and America gave immigrants educational opportunities, which they never had in their home countries. Schools were a window to Americanization, where children learned the American ways. “The majority of the students at the College of the City of New York was already made up of Jewish boys, mostly from the tenement houses…

The Ghetto rang with a clamor for knowledge.” (Cahan, 156). Most of the people spoke Yiddish as their first language and had an accent in their English. Just as many of his real counterparts, Cahan’s fictional hero is working hard to master the English language.

The business Levinsky is engaged in was a typical trade for Eastern European immigrant. Strikes in the 1890’s and the heavy depression made unemployed cloak contractors try to establish their own businesses. “The Moths of Division Street” maintained no offices or showrooms, employed no supervisors or designers, and produced goods in slack times at half wages.” (Rischin, 245).

Many of the factories were Sabbath-observant, with daily prayer services, to meet the needs of workers.

The Yiddish theatre was flourishing and Levinsky often goes to “the Jewish theatre”. It was the most popular medium at that time. Theatre existed also in Russia, but in America it acquired a special importance as “educator, dream-maker, chief agent of charity, social center and recreation hub for the family” (Rischin, 133).

Cahan is very particular in naming the places which his protagonist finds himself on. Each street name evokes certain associations, for instance like the lodging-houses on the Bowery, where he sleeps during his “most wretched period” in America.

“The Bowery, way-station of derelicts, transients, and unsuspecting immigrants… with its unsavory establishments” (Rischin, 91)

At the end of the book he celebrates twenty five years of his arrival to America in Waldorf Astoria. His business moves to a Fifth-Avenue location, which signifies his success. But his distance from the collective fate shared by Lower East Side dwellers does not make him happier. He comes back to the Ghetto to look for his former, happier self.

The figure of David Levinsky might be controversial, but it is not an Anti-Semitic caricature and it certainly shows a Jewish immigrant as a deep character with his story of suffering and success.

There is a huge contrast between James’s and Cahan’s representation of the same place. For James, it is a scary, threatening circus bristling with aliens whereas for Cahan it is important to justify the immigrants in the eyes of America in showing their humanity and struggle to assimilate. This shows how one and the same place can be presented in a completely different way when seen through different eyes.

Sources:

Cahan, Abraham. 1993. The Rise of David Levinsky. Penguin books: New York.

Diner, Hasja. 2000 . Lower East Side Memories, a Jewish place in America Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.

James, Henry. 1968. The American sc ene. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rischin, Moses. 1978. The Promised City. New York’s Jews 1870- 1914

Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.