Third in a series on landmarks in American Jewish literature

In American literature, the critic Leslie Fiedler once quipped, nothing succeeds like failure. But among American Jewish writers, something like the reverse is closer to the truth: for many of their fictional characters, nothing fails so miserably as success. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the first classic of Jewish fiction in America.

Written by Abraham Cahan, editor of the Yiddish daily Forward from 1903 to 1946, The Rise of David Levinsky adopts the rags-to-riches formula of Horatio Alger's wildly popular books for boys, but with a twist. David Levinsky comes to America a penniless immigrant and rises to success as a cloak-and-suit manufacturer "worth more than two million dollars"—only to find his life empty and insignificant. He fails to complete his education, fails to marry, fails to create a home for himself in his new land. He advances in the garment trade only through his "personation" of more successful men; deep inside, in the privacy of his soul, he experiences himself as a fraud.

How has this happened? The novel opens in the Russian "Pale of Settlement," and its early pages conjure up the atmosphere of poverty, violence, and zeal for learning that characterizes the lives of Jews there. Much of this ground had been covered by Ezra Brudno's earlier novel The Fugitive, but Cahan's treatment is livelier and more exacting. Indeed, early reviewers praised the Russia section as perhaps the best part of the novel.

When his mother dies at the hands of anti-Semites, David is thrown upon charity. He distinguishes himself as a student of Talmud—Cahan may have been the first to propose that talmudic study explains why "our people represent a high percentage of mental vigor"—and a rich benefactor rewards him with free room and board. He promptly falls in love with the daughter of the house, who wants something better for him than Talmud. She raises the money to send him to America, where he hopes to become an educated man.

Once in the American "golden land," David takes work in a sewing shop to earn money for college, but his life is changed forever—he is "led astray," he later says—when he accidentally spills a bottle of milk on a pile of silk coats. Abused by his boss, David plots revenge by stealing the company's designer, whose "Americanized copies of French models had found special favor with the buyer of a certain large department store," and starts up a garment business.

To get a drop on the competition, David lets his skilled tailors take Saturdays off instead of Sundays. In gratitude, the Sabbath-observant Jews are willing to work for lower pay. Such "cheap labor," which he candidly admits is his "chief excuse for being" as a clothing manufacturer, gives him "an advantage over the princes of the trade." When the Cloakmakers' Union goes on strike, David makes a pretense of joining the industry-wide lockout but clandestinely permits his tailors to keep working, picking up the orders that other manufacturers have left unfilled. "What was a great calamity to the trade in general," he reflects, "seemed to be a source of overwhelming prosperity to me."

Thus the fictional David Levinsky's rise, accomplished by cheating the competition and exploiting labor. Small wonder he will conclude his life story by declaring that, for all the "thrilling sense of my present power" when compared with his "days of need and despair," nevertheless his "sense of triumph is coupled with a brooding sense of emptiness and insignificance," and the "lack of anything like a great, deep interest."

The Rise of David Levinsky, written and published in English, has been called the first Yiddish novel in America. It might be more aptly called the first Russian novel, as Cahan adapts the tradition of Turgenev's and Tolstoy's realism to the American Jewish scene. Although the book purports to be its protagonist's autobiography, Cahan is at his best when he shoulders aside his narrator to become a savvy street-level observer of Jewish immigrants, reporting the strange customs they adopt in turn-of-the-century New York.

He transcribes, for example, the "uncouth language" of the Jewish pushcart man firing a "volley of obscenities at a departing housewife who had priced something on his cart without buying it." He narrates the comic struggles of native Yiddish speakers in night school, butchering English in a hopeless effort to master "real Yankee utterance." Newly wealthy Jews who parade their munificence in synagogue before their former Russian neighbors; unhappy Jewish housewives who dream of romance and squirm with guilt; affluent Jewish vacationers in the Catskills who rise to their feet at the American national anthem, "offering thanksgiving to the flag under which they were eating this good dinner, wearing these expensive clothes"; Yiddish writers "of two opposing schools" who quarrel at the top of their voices in a Bohemian café: through portraits like these Cahan delivers a continually fascinating first-hand report of a lost place and time.

In the end, however, this book is driven less by sharp-eyed realism or a keen novelistic imagination than by a fixed idea, and is the poorer for it. Although he himself was an entrepreneur, building up the Forward to a circulation of 275,000 at its peak, Cahan neither understood nor appreciated business success. That starting a business enterprise and getting it to flourish requires not just hard work and luck but courage and real talent—"aptitudes," in the words of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, "present in only a small fraction of the population"—is entirely alien to Cahan's philosophy. He could not believe that, for a businessman like David Levinsky, the garment trade might itself constitute a "great, deep interest." For Cahan, any capitalist venture was exploitative by definition, a means of legalized theft. Success in that realm spelled failure, inner if not outer.

The Rise of David Levinsky was not the first novel by an American Jew to favor radical ideas—that honor belongs to Elias Tobenkin, whose Witte Arrives was published a year earlier. But as the critic Ruth R. Wisse has written, Cahan's novel served as the model for many later works of American Jewish literature "in which the hero's emotional sterility is the predictable price for his financial satiety." Levinsky would become a familiar type: the successful Jew who is embarrassed if not made ashamed by his "satiety."

Nor does this inner failure earn his creator's sympathy. Instead, what most arouses that sympathy, and redeems the novel for the reader, are the loud streets teeming with the Jews whom Levinsky has left behind—many of them, perhaps, consoling themselves with fantasies of socialist revolution and the downfall of the rich. Perhaps better than any other book, The Rise of David Levinsky depicts a Jewish world in which, on the page if not in life, losers are emotionally more alive, more successful, than winners.

D.G. Myers is a critic and literary historian at Texas A&M University and the author of A Commonplace Blog.