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Abstract
One of the ways in which Cahan remained culturally Russian was his devotion to the kind of literary realism that embodies a clear system of values. This article examines the kind of values Cahan promoted, looking specifically at how this writer of educative but realist fiction dealt with the disconnect between socialist ideals and immigrant life. It follows the evolution of Cahan’s literary formula from the transparency of the early stories to the cynicism of The Rise of David Levinsky, seeing the seeds for transformation in the “Bintel Brief” advice column of the Forverts, which was executed and possibly written under Cahan’s direction. The moral vision of Levinsky is compared to that of two predecessors with which Cahan was familiar: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Pyotr Boborykin’s 1881 Russian novel Kitaigorod.
Notes
1. Cahan, “The Younger Russian Writers,” 120.
2. Cassedy, “A Bintel Brief,” 117.
3. Ibid.
4. Morovitz, “The Lonely New Americans of Abraham Cahan,” 198.
5. Barbara Gitelstein’s unpublished dissertation, “Versions of the Yiddish Literary Tradition in Jewish‐American Literature,” notes the association in Cahan’s fiction between failure in marriage and failure as a human being: “To point up the Allrightnik’s emotional corruption, Cahan consistently depicts him as unhappy in love and marriage” (209). “Allrightnik” was Cahan’s term, derived from English “all right,” to describe a Jew aggressively involved in making money.
6. Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom, 93–162.
7. Ibid., 163–87.
8. Does Cahan the Russian intellectual uphold the values of the culturally superior pair at the end of this story, or is his populism more in evidence? We really don’t have enough information to say. Cahan does not follow the couple any further; his interest is in the businessman Rouben. The end of the story presents Rouben’s despair. His cries over money (but what else can he cry over in public?) are seconded by those of his matchmaker, for whom the loss is indeed strictly financial. The desperate Rouben looks for a policeman to set things right, but is shoved aside by an agent from an immigrant hotel who makes an insulting remark about his uncouthness and whisks the couple away.
9. Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom, 188–202.
10. Ibid., 1–89.
11. Adapting the term “cultural capital” from Bourdieu, Barrish makes the point that Cahan identifies “high culture” as an aspect of materiality: “The Genuine Article,” 646–8. Barrish’s focus is on the Levinsky novel, but, as I try to show here, Cahan was incubating this viewpoint earlier.
12. Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom, 203–23.
13. I disagree with Jules Chametzky, who in From the Ghetto, his book about Cahan’s fiction, writes that “Tanya is a well‐educated, sensitive Russian woman. Her standards are inspiring, and there is a sweetness and delicacy in Cahan’s portrayal of her thought processes, her excitement about literature, her general spirit. All of these estimable qualities are undercut by the pragmatic necessities of American life” (79–80). Tatyana’s intellectual interests are worthy of respect, but the Russian literary lens through which she views life is presented with evident satire. Tatyana is superficial from the outset; she is more interested in Russian criticism than in her husband’s plight as a workingman; her attraction to Dalsky and disaffection from her husband is completely mediated through Russian fiction. When, at the end of the story, she leaves her marriage and winds up herself in a shop, the sound of someone singing a Russian song with a Yiddish accent drives her to distraction.
14. Cassedy, To the Other Shore, 135.
15. Forverts, January 20, 1906.
16. Ronald Sanders shows how important it was to “Bintel Brief” contributors and readers to have the ear of the editor himself. The column was preceded by a feature in a competing paper, the Varhayt, where, however, readers themselves responded to letters. Letter writers quickly switched their loyalties. See Sanders, The Downtown Jews, 359–60.
17. Cassedy outlines this controversy in “A Bintel Brief,” 105–6.
18. See, for example, the “Bintel Brief” columns of April 24 and May 5, 1913. An interesting connection between letters and realist fiction is pointed out by Sanders, The Downtown Jews, 356, who notes that the “Bintel Brief” column was preceded by an attempt, in December 1903, to have readers send in autobiographies for publication in the newspaper. Not a lot came in, and those that did were too contrived to use. The mechanism of letter‐writing seems to have served the same function, but without intimidating anyone.
19. Forverts, February 12, 1906.
20. Forverts, May 7, 1908.
21. Forverts, July 3, 1906.
22. Forverts, June 23, 1908.
23. Forverts, May 1, 1906.
24. Forverts, January 7, 1907.
25. Forverts, February 1, 1906.
26. For example, Forverts, March 21, 1913.
27. For example, Forverts, February 11, 1906.
28. Forverts, August 7, 1913.
29. Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky.
30. Forverts, May 11, 1906.
31. A number of critics have singled out this self‐referential aspect of the novel. In “Cahan’s David Levinsky: An Inner Profile,” Weinstein talks about Levinsky’s continuous self‐revelation; in “The Genuine Article,” 653, Barrish focuses on Levinsky’s constantly expanding interpretations not only of his own behaviour, but of the social world that surrounds him, and writes perceptively of Levinsky’s “reading of his own reading.”
32. Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky, 201.