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The Rise of David Levinsky

by Abraham Cahan

Book I - Home and School
Book II - Enter Satan
Book III - I Lose My Mother
Book IV - Matilda
Book V - I Discover America
Book VI - A Greenhorn No Longer
Book VII - My Temple
Book VIII - The Destruction of My Temple
Book IX - Dora
Book X - On the Road
Book XI - Matrimony
Book XII - Miss Tevkin
Book XIII - At Her Father's House
Book XIV - Episodes of a Lonely Life

BOOK I

HOME AND SCHOOL

CHAPTER I

SOMETIMES, 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 his body lay under a white shroud on the floor. I was less
than three years old when he died, so my mother would carry me
to the synagogue in her arms to have somebody say the Prayer for
the Dead with me. I was unable fully to realize the meaning of the
ceremony, of course, but its solemnity and pathos were not
altogether lost upon me. There is a streak of sadness in the blood
of my race. Very likely it is of Oriental origin. If it is, it has been
amply nourished by many centuries of persecution

Left to her own resources, my mother strove to support herself and
me by peddling pea mush or doing odds and ends of jobs. She had
to struggle hard for our scanty livelihood and her trials and
loneliness came home to me at an early period.

I was her all in all, though she never poured over me those torrents
of senseless rhapsody which I heard other Jewish mothers shower
over their children. The only words of endearment I often heard
from her were, "My little bean," and, "My comfort." Sometimes,
when she seemed to be crushed by the miseries of her life, she
would call me, "My poor little orphan." Otherwise it was, "Come
here, my comfort," "Are you hungry, my little bean?" or, "You are
a silly little dear, my comfort." These words of hers and the
sonorous contralto in which they were uttered are ever alive in my
heart, like the Flame Everlasting in a synagogue

"Mamma, why do you never beat me like other mammas do?" I
once asked her

She laughed, kissed me, and said, "Because God has punished you
hard enough as it is, poor orphan mine."

I scarcely remembered my father, yet I missed him keenly. I was
ever awake to the fact that other little boys had fathers and that I
was a melancholy exception; that most married women had
husbands, while my mother had to bear her burden unaided. In my
dim childish way I knew that there was a great blank in our family
nest, that it was a widow's nest; and the feeling of it seemed to
color all my other feelings. When I was a little older and would no
longer sleep with my mother, a rusty old coat of my deceased
father's served me as a quilt. At night, before falling asleep, I
would pull it over my head, shut my eyes tight, and evoke a flow
of fantastic shapes, bright, beautifully tinted, and incessantly
changing form and color. While the play of these figures and hues
was going on before me I would see all sorts of bizarre visions,
which at times seemed to have something to do with my father's
spirit

"Is papa in heaven now? Is he through with hell?" I once inquired
of my mother. Some things or ideas would assume queer forms in
my mind. God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man
wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning,
forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the
form of an oblong box

I was a great dreamer of day dreams. One of my pastimes was to
imagine a host of tiny soldiers each the size of my little finger,
"but alive and real." These I would drill as I saw officers do their
men in front of the barracks some distance from our home. Or
else I would take. to marching up and down the room with
mother's rolling-pin for a rifle, grunting, ferociously, in Russian:
"Left one! Left one! Left one!" in the double capacity of a Russian
soldier and of David fighting Goliath.

Often, while bent upon her housework, my mother would hum
some of the songs of the famous wedding bard, Eliakim Zunzer,
who later emigrated to America.

I distinctly remember her singing his "There is a flower on the
road, decaying in the dust, Passers-by treading upon it," his
"Summer and Winter," and his "Rachael is bemoaning her
children." I vividly recall these brooding airs as she used to sing
them, for I have inherited her musical memory and her passionate
love for melody, though not her voice. I cannot sing myself, but
some tunes give me thrills of pleasure, keen and terrible as the
edge of a sword. Some haunt me like ghosts. But then this is a
common trait among our people.

She was a wiry little woman, my mother, with prominent
cheek-bones, a small, firm mouth, and dark eyes. Her hair was
likewise dark, though I saw it but very seldom, for like all
orthodox daughters of Israel she always had it carefully covered
by a kerchief, a nightcap, or--on Saturdays and holidays--by a wig.
She was extremely rigorous about it. For instance, while she
changed her kerchief for her nightcap she would cause me to look
away

My great sport during my ninth and tenth years was to play
buttons. These we would fillip around on some patch of unpaved
ground with a little pit for a billiard pocket. My own pockets were
usually full of these buttons. As the game was restricted to brass
ones from the uniforms of soldiers, my mother had plenty to do to
keep those pockets of mine in good repair. To develop skill for the
sport I would spend hours in some secluded spot, secretly
practising it by myself. Sometimes, as I was thus engaged, my
mother would seek me out and bring me a hunk of rye bread.

"Here," she would say, gravely, handing me it. And I would accept
it with preoccupied mien, take a deep bite, and go on filliping my
buttons

I gambled passionately and was continually counting my treasure,
or running around the big courtyard, jingling it self-consciously.
But one day I suddenly wearied of it all and traded my entire
hoard of buttons for a pocket-knife and some trinkets

"Don't you care for buttons any more?" mother inquired

"I can't bear the sight of them," I replied

She shrugged her shoulders smilingly, and called me "queer
fellow."

Sometimes I would fall to kissing her passionately. Once, after an
outburst of this kind, I said: "Are people sorry for us, mamma?"

"What do you mean?"

"Because I have no papa and we have no money."

Antomir, which then boasted eighty thousand inhabitants, was a
town in which a few thousand rubles was considered wealth, and
we were among the humblest and poorest in it. The bulk of the
population lived on less than fifty copecks (twenty-five cents) a
day, and that was difficult to earn. A hunk of rye bread and a bit
of herring or cheese constituted a meal. A quarter of a copeck (an
eighth of a cent) was a coin with which one purchased a few
crumbs of pot-cheese or some boiled water for tea. Rubbers were
worn by people "of means" only. I never saw any in the district in
which my mother and I had our home. A white starched collar was
an attribute of "aristocracy." Children had to nag their mothers for
a piece of bread

"Mamma, I want a piece of bread," with a mild whimper

"Again bread! You'll eat my head off. May the worms eat you."

Dialogues such as this were heard at every turn

My boyhood recollections include the following episode: Mother
once sent me to a tinker's shop to have our drinking-cup repaired.
It was a plain tin affair and must have cost, when new, something
like four or five cents. It had done service as long as I could
remember. It was quite rusty, and finally sprang a leak. And so I
took it to the tinker, or tinsmith, who soldered it up. On my way
home I slipped and fell, whereupon the cup hit a cobblestone and
sprang a new leak. When my mother discovered the damage she
made me tell the story of the accident over and over again,
wringing her hands and sighing as she listened. The average
mother in our town would have given me a whipping in the
circumstances. She did not

CHAPTER II WE lived in a deep basement, in a large, dusky room
that we shared with three other families, each family occupying
one of the corners and as much space as it was able to wrest.
Violent quarrels were a commonplace occurrence, and the
question of floor space a staple bone of contention. The huge
brick oven in which the four housewives cooked dinner was
another prolific source of strife. Fights over pots were as frequent
and as truculent as those over the children

Of our room-mates I best recall a bookbinder and a retired old
soldier who mended old sheepskin coats for a living. My
memories of home are inseparable from the odors of sheepskin
and paste and the image of two upright wooden screws (the
bookbinder's "machine"). The soldier had finished his term of
military service years before, yet he still wore his uniform--a
dilapidated black coat with new brass buttons, and a similar
overcoat of a coarse gray material. Also, he still shaved his chin,
sporting a pair of formidable gray side-whiskers. Shaving is one of
the worst sins known to our faith, but, somehow, people
overlooked it in one who had once been compelled to practise it
in the army. Otherwise the furrier or sheepskin tailor was an
extremely pious man. He was very kind to me, so that his military
whiskers never awed me. Not so his lame, tall wife, who often hit
me with one of her crutches.

She was the bane of my life. The bookbinder's wife was much
younger than her husband and one of the things I often heard was
that he was "crazy for her because she is his second wife," from
which I inferred that second wives were loved far more than first
ones.

The bookbinder had a red-haired little girl whom I hated like
poison. Red Esther we called her, to distinguish her from a Black
Esther, whose home was on the same yard. She was full of fight.
Knowing how repulsive she was to me, she was often the first to
open hostilities, mocking my way of speaking, or sticking out her
tongue at me. Or else she would press her freckled cheek against
my lips and then dodge back, shouting, gloatingly: "He has kissed
a girl! He has kissed a girl! Sinner! Shame! Sinner! Sinner!"

There were some other things that she or some of the other little
girls of our courtyard would do to make an involuntary "sinner" of
me, but these had better be left out

I had many a fierce duel with her. I was considered a strong boy,
but she was quick and nimble as a cat, and I usually got the worst
of the bargain, often being left badly scratched and bleeding. At
which point the combat would be taken up by our mothers

The room, part of which was our home, and two other single-room
apartments, similarly tenanted, opened into a pitch-dark vestibule
which my fancy peopled with "evil ones." A steep stairway led up
to the yard, part of which was occupied by a huddle of ramshackle
one-story houses. It was known as Abner's Court. During the
summer months it swarmed with tattered, unkempt humanity.
There was a peculiar odor to the place which I can still smell.

(Indeed, many of the things that I conjure up from the past appeal
as much to my sense of smell as to my visual memory.) It was
anything but a grateful odor

The far end of our street was part of a squalid little suburb known
as the Sands. It was inhabited by Gentiles exclusively. Sometimes,
when a Jew chanced to visit it some of its boys would descend
upon him with shouts of "Damned Jew!" "Christ-killer!" and sick
their dogs at him. As we had no dogs to defend us, orthodox Jews
being prohibited from keeping these domestic animals by a
custom amounting to a religious injunction, our boys never
ventured into the place except, perhaps, in a spirit of dare-devil
bravado

One day the bigger Jewish boys of our street had a pitched battle
with the Sands boys, an event which is one of the landmarks in the
history of my childhood

Still, some of the Sands boys were on terms of friendship with us
and would even come to play with us in our yard. The only
Gentile family that lived in Abner's Court was that of the porter.
His children spoke fairly good Yiddish

One Saturday evening a pock-marked lad from the Sands, the son
of a chimney-sweep, meeting me in the street, set his dog at me.
As a result I came home with a fair-sized piece of my trousers
(knee-breeches were unknown to us) missing

"I'm going to kill him," my mother said, with something like a sob.
"I'm just going to kill him."

"Cool down," the retired soldier pleaded, without removing his
short-stemmed pipe from his mouth

Mother was silent for a minute, and even seated herself, but
presently she sprang to her feet again and made for the door

The soldier's wife seized her by an arm

"Where are you going? To the Sands? Are you crazy? If you start a
quarrel over there you'll never come back alive."

"I don't care!"

She wrenched herself free and left the room.

Half an hour later she came back beaming

"His father is a lovely Gentile," she said. "He went out, brought his
murderer of a boy home, took off his belt, and skinned him alive."

"A good Gentile," the soldier's wife commented, admiringly

There was always a pile of logs somewhere in our Court, the
property of some family that was to have it cut up for firewood.
This was our great gathering-place of a summer evening. Here we
would bandy stories (often of our own inventing) or discuss
things, the leading topic of conversation being the soldiers of the
two regiments that were stationed in our town. We saw a good
deal of these soldiers, and we could tell their officers,
commissioned or non-commissioned, by the number of stars or
bands on their shoulder-straps. Also, we knew the names of their
generals, colonels, and some of their majors or captains. The more
important manoeuvers took place a great distance from Abner's
Court, but that did not matter. If they occurred on a Saturday,
when we were free from school--and, as good luck would have it,
they usually did--many of us, myself invariably included, would go
to see them. The blare of trumpets, the beat of drums, the playing
of the band, the rhythmic clatter of thousands of feet, the glint or
rows and rows of bayonets, the red or the blue of the uniforms, the
commanding officer on his mount, the spirited singing of the men
marching back to barracks--all this would literally hold me
spellbound

That we often played soldiers goes without saying, but we played
"hares" more often, a game in which the counting was done by
means of senseless words like the American "Eeny, meeny, miny,
moe." Sometimes we would play war, with the names of the
belligerents borrowed from the Old Testament, and once in a
while we would have a real "war" with the boys of the next street

I was accounted one of the strong fellows among the boys of
Abner's Court as well as one of the conspicuous figures among
them. Compactly built, broad-shouldered, with a small, firm
mouth like my mother's, a well-formed nose and large, dark eyes,
I was not a homely boy by any means, nor one devoid of a certain
kind of magnetism

One of my recollections is of my mother administering a
tongue-lashing to a married young woman whom she had
discovered flirting in the dark vestibule with a man not her
husband

A few minutes later the young woman came in and begged my
mother not to tell her husband

"If I was your husband I would skin you alive."

"Oh, don't tell him! Take pity! Don't."

"I won't. Get out of here, you lump of stench."

"Oh, swear that you won't tell him! Do swear, dearie. Long life to
you.

Health to every little bone of yours."

"First you swear that you'll never do it again, you heap of dung."

"Strike me blind and dumb and deaf if I ever do it again. There."

"Your oaths are worth no more than the barking of a dog. Can't
you be decent? You ought to be knouted in the market-place. You
are a plague. Black luck upon you. Get away from me."

"But I will be decent. May I break both my legs and both my arms
if I am not. Do swear that you won't tell him."

My mother yielded

She was passionately devout, my mother. Being absolutely
illiterate, she would murmur meaningless words, in the singsong
of a prayer, pretending to herself that she was performing her
devotions. This, however, she would do with absolute earnestness
and fervor, often with tears of ecstasy coming to her eyes. To be
sure, she knew how to bless the Sabbath candles and to recite the
two or three other brief prayers that our religion exacts from
married women. But she was not contented with it, and the sight of
a woman going to synagogue with a huge prayer-book under her
arm was ever a source of envy to her.

Most of the tenants of the Court were good people, honest and
pure, but there were exceptions. Of these my memory has retained
the face of a man who was known as "Carrot Pudding" Moe, a
red-headed, broad-shouldered "finger worker," a specialist in
"short change," yardstick frauds, and other varieties of
market-place legerdemain. One woman, a cross between a beggar
and a dealer in second-hand dresses, had four sons, all of whom
were pickpockets, but she herself was said to be of spotless
honesty. She never allowed them to enter Abner's Court, though
every time one of them was in prison she would visit him and
bring him food

Nor were professional beggars barred from the Court as tenants.
Indeed, one of our next-door neighbors was a regular recipient of
alms at the hands of my mother. For, poor as she was, she seldom
let a Friday pass without distributing a few half-groschen (an
eighth of a cent) in charity. The amusing part of it was the fact
that one of the beggars on her list was far better off than she

"He's old and lame, and no hypocrite like the rest of them," she
would explain

She had a ferocious temper, but there were people (myself among
them) with whom she was never irritated. The women of Abner's
Court were either her devoted followers or her bitter enemies. She
was a leader in most of the feuds that often divided the whole
Court into two warring camps, and in those exceptional cases
when she happened to be neutral she was an ardent peacemaker.
She wore a dark-blue kerchief, which was older than I, and almost
invariably, when there was a crowd of women in the yard, that
kerchief would loom in its center

Growing as I did in that crowded basement room which was the
home of four families, it was inevitable that the secrets of sex
should be revealed to me before I was able fully to appreciate
their meaning. Then, too, the neighborhood was not of the purest
in town. Located a short distance from Abner's Court, midway
between it and the barracks, was a lane of ill repute, usually full
of soldiers. If it had an official name I never heard it. It was
generally referred to as "that street," in a subdued voice that was
suggestive either of shame and disgust or of waggish mirth. For a
long time I was under the impression that "That" was simply the
name of the street.

One summer day--I must have been eight years old--I told my
mother that I had peeked in one of the little yards of the
mysterious lane, that I had seen half-naked women and soldiers
there, and that one of the women had beckoned me in and given
me some cake

"Why, you mustn't do that, Davie!" she said, aghast. "Don't you
ever go near that street again! Do you hear?"

"Why?"

"Because it is a bad street."

"Why is it bad?"

"Keep still and don't ask foolish questions."

I obeyed, with the result that the foolish questions kept rankling in
my brain

On a subsequent occasion, when she was combing my dark hair
fondly, I ventured once more: "Mamma, why mustn't I come near
that street?"

"Because it is a sin to do so, my comfort. Fie upon it!"

This answer settled it. One did not ask why it was a sin to do this
or not to do that. "You don't demand explanations of the Master of
the World," as people were continually saying around me. My
curiosity was silenced. That street became repellent to me,
something hideously wicked and sinister

Sometimes some of the excommunicated women would drop in at
our yard. As a rule, my mother was bitterly opposed to their visits
and she often chased them out with maledictions and expressions
of abhorrence; but there was one case in which she showed
unusual tolerance and even assumed the part of father confessor to
a woman of this kind. She would listen to her tale of woe,
homesickness and repentance, including some of the most intimate
details of her loathsome life. She would even deliver her donations
to the synagogue, thus helping her cheat the Biblical injunction
which bars the gifts of fallen women from a house of God

My mother would bid me keep away during these confabs of
theirs, but this only whetted my curiosity and I often overheard far
more than I should

Fridays were half-holidays with us Jewish boys. One Friday
afternoon a wedding was celebrated in our courtyard. The
procession emerged from one of the rickety one-story houses,
accompanied by a band playing a solemn tune.

When it reached the center of the vacant part of the yard it came to
a halt and a canopy was stretched over the principal figures of the
ceremony.

Prayers and benedictions were chanted. The groom put the ring on
the bride's finger, "dedicating her to himself according to the laws
of Moses and Israel "; more prayers were recited; the bridegroom
and the bride received sips of wine; a plate was smashed, the
sound being greeted by shouts of "Good luck! Good luck!" The
band struck up a lively tune with a sad tang to it

The yard was crowded with people. It was the greatest sensation
we children had ever enjoyed there. We remained out chattering
of the event till the windows were aglitter with Sabbath lights

I was in a trance. The ceremony was a poem to me, something
inexpressibly beautiful and sacred.

Presently a boy, somewhat older than I, made a jest at the young
couple's expense. What he said was a startling revelation to me.
Certain things which I had known before suddenly appeared in a
new light to me. I relished the discovery and I relished the deviltry
of it. But the poem vanished. The beauty of the wedding I had just
witnessed, and of weddings in general, seemed to be irretrievably
desecrated

That boy's name was Naphtali. He was a trim-looking fellow with
curly brown hair, somewhat near-sighted. He was as poor as the
average boy in the yard and as poorly dressed, but he was the
tidiest of us. He would draw, with a piece of chalk, figures of
horses and men which we admired. He knew things, good and
bad, and from that Friday I often sought his company. Unlike most
of the other boys, he talked little, throwing out his remarks at long
intervals, which sharpened my sense of his wisdom. His father
never let him attend the manoeuvers, yet he knew more about
soldiers than any of the other boys, more even than I, though I had
that retired soldier, the sheepskin man, to explain things military
to me.

One summer evening Naphtali and I sat on a pile of logs in the
yard, watching a boy who was "playing" on a toy fiddle of his own
making. I said: "I wish I knew how to play on a real fiddle, don't
you?"

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