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 L | ISSN0024-5089 Copyright © 2006 LITUANUS Foundation, Inc. |
Volume 52, No 4 - Winter 2006 Editor of this issue: Violeta Kelertas |
Abraham Cahan’sVilna andtheRoots of ‘Litvak’ Realism
Patrick Chura
PatrickChura isassistant professorof English at the University ofAkron. His bookVitalContact: Downclassing Journeys in AmericanLiteraturefrom Herman Melville to Richard Wright, was published byRoutledgein 2005.
“WhenI think back to myfirst years I remember Podberezy,a small town almost twenty miles from Vilna in Lithuaniawhere I was born on a Saturday, the seventeenth day of Tammuzin the summer of 1860.”1
“GraduallyI arrived at the conclusion that the powerof realistic art arises from the pleasure we derive fromrecognizing the truth as it is mirrored by art.”2
During his lifetime, Jewish-Americanwriter Abraham Cahan(1860-1951) was probably best known for his more than fiftyyearcareer as editor and cofounder of theJewish Daily Forward,a highly successful Yiddish newspaper of socialist outlook that,under Cahan’s direction, became a mainstay of immigrantcommunitiesin eleven major cities from the 1890s onward.3Cahan’sother career, of shorter duration, but perhaps more remarkablefor a nonnative speaker of English, was as an author of storiesand novels – fiction derived from his own experience, writtenin his adopted American idiom, and set in Jewish ghettos ofboth New York and Eastern Europe. Upon publication of hisfirst novel,Yekl,in 1896, Cahan was praised by William DeanHowells as a “new star of realism... a writer of foreignbirthwho will do honor to American letters.”4Fulfilling Howells’sprophecy, Cahan publishedTheImported Bridegroom and OtherStories of the New York Ghetto in 1898, a novel ofrevolutionaryRussia entitledTheWhite Terror and the Red in 1905, and whatmany now consider the quintessential American immigrantnovel,The Rise ofDavid Levinsky, which capped his fiction-writingcareer in 1917.
Like the more famous American-bornrealist writers ofhis day such as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, Cahan’sfiction was known for its objective representations of a sociallandscape that included the sordid underside of Americanurban life. As an immigrant writer, Cahan’s special focus wasthe teeming polyglot population in the ghettos and tenementson New York’s Lower East Side. The uniqueness of his storiesstems in part from their often humorous attention to the “lowlife” of New York – what Howells termed“the ugly delights, aswell as the beautiful”5– along with their convincing portrayalsof the thought processes and daily spiritual struggles of recentimmigrants. As Cahan humanized the downtrodden and gavesubstance to their impoverished surroundings, he furtheredthe development of American realism as an artistic genre andlaid bare a fascinating social stratum about which most nativebornAmericans of the period knew little.
Much of the psychological complexityin Cahan’s intenselyrealistic “local color” is rooted in cross-culturalanalysis,with observations drawn from the author’s first-handknowledgeof the tensions and dilemmas of displaced newcomersin confrontation with modern America. Especially inThe Riseof David Levinsky, revealing comparisons between Americanand Eastern European customs and behaviors proliferate, andthey are handled in a sensitive manner that accepts the needfor immigrant assimilation while simultaneously registeringthe pains and emotional costs of such adaptation. With theacute discernment of an outsider, for example, Cahan’s DavidLevinskydescribessuch negative traits as “the unsmilingsmile” of assimilated Americans and the “scurry andhustle” ofthe American city, along with the more appealing “confidenceand energy” of its people and their “largerambitions and widerscopes” (63) in comparison to the possibilities of his formerlife.In exchange for America’s blessings, however, the immigrantfeels isolation and a poignant loss of tradition: “There isno pityhere, no hospitality” (66). Though Levinsky experiencesbrutalrace hatred in Europe, his appraisal of his adopted culture ismore scathing: “America did seem to be the most cruel placeon earth” (67).
As richly and skillfully as theydepict the American socialscene, Cahan’s novels and stories are about the Old World asmuch as the New. Cahan’s fictional characters, in adapting tosevere economic conditions and to the awkward role of“greenhorn”or outsider in New York, acknowledge conceptual linksto analogous experiences as social “Other” that hadshapedtheir lives in Europe and prompted their emigration. Theirsuccess in the new country is ultimately colored by the knowledgethat in coming to America they have traded one form ofalienation for another, and that, especially for Jews, changesin geography or social status are superficial in comparison todeeper issues of identity and well-being that determine life onboth sides of the Atlantic.
The specific characteristics ofAbraham Cahan’s nativeculture and early life, as well as their importance to his body ofsuperb fiction, are thus a subject of some significance. Thoughhe is commonly referred to as “Russian Jewish” inethnicity,Cahan may be more accurately identified as a Lithuanian Jewor “Litvak,” born during the reign of TsarAlexander II withinthe Pale of Jewish Settlement in what is now the Lithuaniantown of Paberþë. In 1865, before he was six years old,Cahan’sfamily moved to Vilna, a city then commonly described as “theJerusalem of Lithuania” for its large and important Jewishpopulation,but which was also the capital of the “government”ofVilna in what was officially called “Northwestern Provinces,Russia.” This city, where Cahan lived for sixteen years, isof course the current Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Cahanlefttsarist Lithuania for New York in 1882, but Vilna and its environsretained a strong hold on his imagination. Each of Cahan’snovels is set in part in a city that closely resembles Vilna, andmany of the characters in his fictional works display importantspiritual and biographical connections to Lithuanian settings.
Several concrete anecdotes fromCahan’s life in Vilna asdescribed in his autobiography are notable for their long-terminfluence, first on Cahan’s political outlook and later onhis fiction.His initial inclination toward the “culturallysocialist”philosophy that would later define his politics and underlie theideology of much of his fiction, for example, seems to deriveas much from his childhood in Vilna as from his experiencein America. In the second chapter of his autobiography, theauthor describes a certain Sabbath eve during his childhoodwhen the Jewish inhabitants of Vilna sacrificed their customarymeal because money was needed to buy replacements formilitary service in the tsar’s army. “The moneyusually spentfor the Sabbath meal,” Cahan recalls, “was to beturned overto the Jewish community organization” (27). At the table thatevening, Cahan’s father spoke eloquently of “theneed for all tosacrifice equally for the good of the community” (27).Althoughthe family patriarch was in Cahan’s assessment “asfar fromsocialism as he was from algebra,” Cahan “oftenrecalled” hisfather’s moving plea for mutual assistance as he took upsocialistpolitics years later in New York, believing that “there wasa common social outlook” (27) that bound the Jews of Vilnato the socialist movement of the United States. Accordingly, inCahan’s best novel, rejection of these socialist principlescreatesa rift between the immigrant main character and his formercircle.The Rise ofDavid Levinsky suggests that the alienation ofCahan’s alter ego from his native culture is due in part tothe acceptance of capitalist values over the collectivistethos espousedin the Litvak milieu of his upbringing.
His life in Vilna had adumbratedCahan’s socialism, butit also became a symbolic factor in his ultimate rejection ofanarchism.Reeling from the execution of the Haymarket anarchistsin 1887, at a critical moment in his political development,Cahan effects another imaginative return to the city, recallingthe formative years of his education at the Vilna Teacher TrainingInstitute: “I would dream I was back at the Vilna Institutesitting with my fellow students around the long tables in thedining hall” (332). Testing the practicality of anarchistphilosophy,he then considers what would happen under anarchismif the Vilna Institute students could not agree about such basicmatters as when to have lunch or whether to open a window.With this scene in mind, Cahan confronts the German anarchistleader M. Bachman with the “example of the institutewindow”as a device for measuring the applications of radical philosophy.After Bachmann politely admits that the illustration hadrevealed “an important problem,” Cahan decides tobreak withanarchism: “I returned home from that walk no longer ananarchist”(335). Cahan explains that he “later ...used the substanceof this discussion in lectures and articles” (335), but itsinfluenceis discernible in his fiction as well, most notably inTheWhite Terror and the Red, a novel that uses details fromCahan’sinvolvement in the 1870s with anti-tsarist student groups at theVilna Teacher Training Institute to similarly critique revolutionarymethods and ideology.
Another compelling incident fromCahan’s youth in Lithuaniaillustrates the peculiar potency of the author’s powers ofrecollection and suggests how his fiction drew upon the outlinesof Lithuanian history as an imaginative resource. Walkingwith his mother from Podberezy to Vilna in 1863, the three-yearoldCahan had been struck by the sight of several gallows in acabbage field near the road. Hanging from the gallows, “theirbodies wrapped in white gowns that fluttered in the wind”(4),were Polish landowners who had risen, with support from alarge number of Lithuanian peasants as well, against tsaristpolicies intolerant of manifestations of Polish and Lithuaniannational identity. These local gentry were executed as rebelsin large numbers by the governor general Muravyev, dubbed“the hangman” in popular memory and described byCahan inhis autobiography as the “ruling tyrant” of theprovince. Thethree-year-old Cahan had clearly been awed and terrorized bythe macabre aspect of these victims. Decades later, he notedsuch details of the scene as the “white trousers”and “shinyblack boots” (4) of the corpses, along with the disturbingimageof a boot falling from one of the bodies.
In his first novel, Cahan returns tothis imagery in constructingthe scene during which the title character’s fate isdecided.Yekldetails the culture shock, adjustment pains, andeventual spiritual defeat of an immigrant from Povodye, a fictionaltown in “Northwestern Russia” that is probablybasedon Cahan’s Podberezy. On the rooftop of a New York tenementwith his girlfriend Mamie, Yekl, who realizes that he no longerloves the wife he had left behind in a Lithuanianshtetl, resolvesto sever ties with his past and marry Mamie. But as he embracesa future with the new spouse, he notices a white pillowcase“ominously fluttering and flapping” in the wind andimaginesthe figure of his dead father wrapped in burial linen. At thismoment, the scene is transformed from a mood of“passion” toa feeling of “benumbing terror” that is stronglyreminiscent inimagery and emotional intensity to Cahan’s encounter in 1863with the white-shrouded victims of Muravyev on the roadto Vilna. Thus when Mamie declares, “Now it is allsettled”(78), her assertion comprises meaning for both the fictionalcharacterand the author himself, who never lost contact withhis formative spiritual influences, and whose perceptions during hismature life in the New World were persistently shapedand “settled” by his youthful experience in theOld.
The first short story Cahan wrote inEnglish makes prominentreference to elements of Lithuanian cultural history ofthe 1880s. “A Providential Match” (1895) describesthe career ofRouvke Arbel, a Jewish immigrant from Kropovetz, a fictionally-named village located in the “Government of Kovno”andthus near the present-day city of Kaunas. In tsarist Lithuania,Rouvke had been a servant of the well-to-do Jewish distillerReb Peretz. While employed by Peretz, the illiterate worker hadfallen in love with the distiller’s daughter Hanele. Butsince thepenniless laborer had no hope to win the “petdaughter” of thebusinessman and rabbi, the 22-year-old Rouvke – like a largenumber of Jews during this time period – had left for Americawhen his name had appeared on the tsar’s military serviceroll.
From this point in the story,economic forces endemic toboth America and tsarist Lithuania combine to bring about achange in the characters’ fortunes. In New York, Rouvke Arbelworks his way up from struggling “handkerchiefpeddler” to“custom peddler,” becoming a small businessman withcapitalat his disposal. Four years removed from the shtetl, Rouvke,now the proud possessor of the “tzibilized” name ofRobertFriedman, is financially successful, but still lonely and illiterate.One Sabbath at the “Sons of Kropovetz” synagogue,Rouvkeencounters Feive, a Hebrew teacher and part-time professional“match-maker” recently arrived from Kropovetz, andlearns that Hanele is still unmarried, along with the equally importantnews that the distillery of Reb Peretz has been closed,forcing the erstwhile “first citizen” of the shtetlinto greatlyreduced financial circumstances. “I am now richer than RebPeretz...!” Rouvke exclaims. The reversal of the economicrelationbetween Rouvke and the Peretz family makes possible amatch with Hanele. Negotiations by letter ensue, the marriageis agreed upon, and Rouvke sends money for Hanele’s passageto America.
The story’s plot hinges notonly on the easily explainedfinancial rise of Rouvke Arbel in New York, but on the severereduction in financial status of Reb Peretz, the reasons forwhich are less apparent. Describing the difficulties of Peretz, aliquor merchant of the Kaunas region, Feive refers to the“hardtimes the Jews are now having” in tsarist Lithuania. Withoutelaborating on the politics of the situation, Feive indicates thatthe distillery is closed because “A Jew can nowadays hardlyengage in any business, much less in the liquor line” (171).Thestory provides no other explanation for Peretz’s troubles,butCahan biographer Sanford Marovitz concludes that the Peretzdistillery would have been closed by “anti-Semitic governmentdecree” (88).
It seems necessary to acknowledge,however, that RebPeretz’s troubles may be traceable to a historical context ofemerging “economic rivalry”8between Jewish andLithuaniancommunities that attended the period of Lithuanian culturalself-assertion. Because Jews had long occupied the key positionof “intermediary” between rural peasants andnecessary urbangoods and services, their very presence seemed to constitutea check to the growing consciousness of Lithuanian nationalidentity. Concentrated in the cities where Lithuanian farmerssold their goods, wealthier on average than Lithuanians, dominantin the merchant and artisan trades that were needed tosupply farmers, and speaking Russian rather than Lithuanian asa second language,9Jews had often been viewed as economiccolonizers of Lithuania and an element of tsarist attempts atrussification. For advocates of Lithuanian national revitalization,however, the paradox of “a Lithuanian land with Jewishcities” – within which non-Lithuanians held anindispensablecommercial position – was particularly vexing. Recent studiesof Jewish-Lithuanian relations during this period acknowledgean important shift in the prevailing image of the Jewish businessmanfrom that of economic “intermediary” to that ofeconomic“competitor,” an adversary “with whombattle must bejoined.”10
Accordingly, the undergroundperiodicalsAuszraandVarpas–important organs of Lithuanian cultural advancement– issued strong calls for the modernization of Lithuaniansociety while urging their readers to “drive out”Jewish commercialinfluences and “take back business from theJews.”11In an 1899 issue ofVarpas,Jonas Vileišis called onLithuaniansto “start up your enterprise, kindle your commerce, and forceout the foreigners in these areas while creating the variousassociationsthat can join in the elevation of the homeland.”12 OneVarpas writer, reacting to a well-publicized fire that destroyedthe home of a Lithuanian merchant, lamented that it was“difficultfor Lithuanians to wrest business from the dirty handsof the black beards – simply try, and your wealth will burnin. flames.” The writer recommended that Lithuaniansbuild theirstores where there were Jewish homes on both sides, supposedlyin order to forestall future acts of arson, claiming, “TheJew rides on the backs of our farmers like a louse and gnawsat them.”13
Concurrent with these economicallymotivated complaintsagainst Jews, the same elements of the Lithuanianunderground press began in the 1880s to actively propagateanother form of anti-Jewish sentiment, this time based on thepolitically-implicated issue of alcohol production. The roots ofthis conflict extend to the 1850s, when a working relationshiphad developed between Lithuanian temperance associationsand the movement for Lithuanian cultural renewal.14Decadesbefore the historical present of Cahan’s story, at the timeof the1863 uprising, Governor Muravyev, seeking to eliminate localorganizations existing independently of the tsarist government,had outlawed the temperance associations, imposed stiff fineson the clergy who encouraged them, and silenced Lithuanianreligious leaders who advocated temperance to their congregations.The repression of the temperance movement by thetsarist government had been a serious blow to the organizationof nationhood for Lithuania. Historically, Lithuanian Jews hadalso opposed temperance because of the livelihood that largenumbers of Jewish merchants had derived from vodka sales.
As the temperance movement was forcedunderground, astate monopoly on alcohol sales had been instituted by the tsaristgovernment, not in order to limit, but to encourage the saleand use of alcohol among Lithuanian peasants and farmers. AsEidintas observes, “The establishment of the state monopolyon alcoholic beverages... did not reduce the number of Lithuaniandrinkers” and instead “Jewish taverns quickly grewin number” (31). The growth in the number of Jewishalcohol merchants during the period, along with what Eidintasrefersto as “the Jewish controlled monopolistic vodkanetwork” (44),became a severe irritant for leaders of the nationalist movement,in part because of the perceived need for Lithuaniansto reduce alcohol intake, but perhaps more urgently becauseof the aforementioned critical need for ethnic Lithuanians toengage in small business and thus assert themselves in nonagriculturaleconomic spheres.
Not surprisingly, alcohol productionand the Jew becamelinked nefariously in the Lithuanian press of the 1880s. Referringin a tone of condemnation to the proliferation of Jewish alcoholpurveyors, a Lithuanian writer in an 1884 issue ofAuszrahad warned, “Alcohol is the Jew’s strength, hispower to cheatpeople and rob them. These swindlers are not ashamed to waterdown their liquor, but give it potency by mixing in vitriol orother poisons horribly harmful to one’s health.” In1885, Auszrawriter Juozas Kalnënas wrote, “Everywhere one looks, therearetaverns, everywhere the sons of Israel are feeding their victimsand multiplying without end while not doing any heavy work,and each year our breadwinners are becoming more destitute...The gathered fruits of the land go to the Jews for liquor.”15In1886, Petras Vileišis attempted to describe several types ofJewishbusinessmen, beginning his ranking with “The most horribleperson in the villages – the Jewishsaloonkeeper.”16Thecomment in Cahan’s story that a Jew in Lithuania“can nowadayshardly engage in any business, much less in the liquorline” seems likely to refer to these prevalent attitudes,availablein the officially banned but widespread Lithuanian journalismof the period and linked with the evolving movement towardpolitical separatism.
The prevailing terms ofJewish-Lithuanian interaction would improve in the firstdecades ofthe twentieth century,17but during the period covered by Cahan’s first short story,“itwas a strange, even antipodalrelation for the [two] social classes;as Lithuanians moved toward business and commerce, circumstancescompelled the two groups toward conflict and confrontation.”18 Asone Lithuanian historian explained, Litvaks“were always ‘caught between the hammer and theanvil’; theRussian state viewed them as untrustworthy potential traitors,while Lithuanians simultaneously saw them as sycophants toRussian authority – and more importantly, as economiccompetitors.”19Lithuanians as well, who had difficulty establishingthemselves in the larger cities, found themselves in “anunenviableposition”20that – while it did not produceinstitutionalizedanti-Semitism,21– could not fail to produce specifictensions ofeconomic origin.
The climax of Cahan’s“The ImportedBridegroom” occurswith Hanele’s arrival in New York. In preparation, Rouvkedresses in his best American attire and hires a pair of elegantcarriages to meet his future bride in style. When Hanele disembarksat New York’s Castle Garden, however, she is armin-arm with a stylishly dressed Russian-Jewish“collegian” shehas met in the steerage of the vessel, who is now herfiancéeand her true “providential match.” Adding insult toinjury, theyoung man smugly promises to pay Rouvke for Hanele’stransatlanticticket, explaining that he has “a rich brother inBuffalo.”It had appeared that in Kropovetz, a place troubled by politicaland ethnic rivalry, Hanele could hope for neither romanticlove nor financial security. By taking the risk of emigration tobe with Rouvke, she had apparently sacrificed love for money.In the end, however, she appears to have gained both. Thestory’s surprise ending suggests that the loss in socialstatusbrought about by the closing of the Peretz distillery is highlygeographically dependent, that such local animosities are negatedby the new set of economic and cultural circumstances.From Rouvke’spoint of view, however, newfound prosperityin America proves insufficient to overcome the intractableclass divisions of the older society. The complex cultural conditionsthat had prompted the Peretz family’s financial demise,Hanele’s emigration, and the ambivalent outcomes that follow,epitomize the destinies of thousands of Lithuanian Jews wholeft the country in increasing numbers during the last two decadesof the nineteenth century.
A similar type of mutuallyilluminating relation betweenJewish Lithuania and Jewish New York in Cahan’s fiction isapparentinThe Rise of DavidLevinsky. Here the title character, likeRouvke in “A Providential Match,” continuallyacknowledgesthat the years he spent in his native land linger indelibly in hismemory. Even after twenty-five years and a successful career inNew York, Levinsky claims that he has “a betterrecollection”of incidents from his “childhood days” than hisrecent life-history.Like Cahan in his autobiography, David Levinsky describesan “excruciatingly homesick” feeling afteremigration,a susceptibilityto “pangs of yearning” that does not abateeven in the “Golden Land.” The spiritual malaisethat pursuesLevinsky despite his material success is the direct result of hisinability to reconcile the “essential” personalityproduced andshaped by old-world life with the “civilized”American he hasbecome. His expression of final awareness – “Icannot escapefrom my old self” (372) – is a cry of both joy andanguish. Itindicates not simply the depth of the author’s attachment tothedistant culture in which he had experienced greatest pain andgreatest happiness, but the continuing importance of Lithuaniaas Cahan’s historical backdrop and imaginativecatalyst.
The opening chapters of The Rise ofDavid Levinsky describean incident from the protagonist’s teenage years in Antomir,a fictional city clearly modeled on Vilna:
TheJewish Passover often concurs with the Christian Easter.This was the case in the year in question. One afternoon – itwas the seventh day of our festival – I chanced to becrossing theHorse-market. As it was not a market day, it was deserted savefor groups of young Gentiles, civilians and soldiers, who wererolling brightly colored Easter eggs over the ground. My newlong-skirted coat and side-locks provoked their mirth until oneof them hit me a savage blow in the face, splitting my lower lip.Another rowdy snatched off my new cap – just because ourpeopleconsidered it a sin to go bareheaded. And, as I made my way,bleeding, with one hand to my lip and the other over my barehead, the company sent a shower of broken eggs and a chorus ofjeers after me.
...WhenI entered our basement and faced my mother, shestared at me for a moment, as though dumbfounded, and then,slapping her hands together, she sobbed:
“Woeis me! Darkness is me! What has happened toyou?”
Whenshe had heard my story she stood silent a while, lookingaghast, and then left the house.
...Fifteenminutes later she was carried into our basementunconscious. Her face was bruised and swollen andthe back of her head was broken. She died the same evening.
Ihave never been able to learn the ghastly details of herdeath. The police and an examining magistrate were said to beinvestigating the case, but nothing came of it. (35)
The origins of this hate crime andits apparent concealmentby the Gentile community are multiple, and they includeracial pretexts both recent and ancient, both geographicallywidespread and culture-specific. At the time of Cahan’swriting,various forms of xenophobic anti-Semitic prejudice hadbeen present for centuries among folk cultures of nearly everynation in Europe, including tsarist Lithuania.22Arguably, thehorrific violence Cahan describes could have happened almostanywhere in Eastern Europe or Russia during the last fivecenturies.
But the incident is also grounded inspecific historicalmotivations. Cahan’s narrator indicates that an“epidemic ofanti-Jewish atrocities” in Russia during 1881 and 1882 wasstill“fresh in one’s mind” when it took place.He is referring to thebrutal pogroms that immediately followed the assassinationof Tsar Alexander II and began on Easter of 1881. As a recenthistorian of the period explains, the fact that a large number ofJews had participated (as Cahan himself did) in revolutionarystudent organizations that had called for the tsar’soverthrowgave rise to “a strong anti-Jewish feeling in the highestlevelsof the tsarist government.”23The resultant pogroms, whichthe tsarist government pretended were due to a spontaneousoutburst of popular indignation against the Jews but were actuallyfomented by tsarist authorities,24took place mainly inElisabethgrad, Kiev and Odessa, with atrocities smaller in scalespreading to “over 200 places.”25The prevailingmood of theiraftermath comprises the immediate historical context for theharassment and murder described in the fictionalized Vilna ofCahan’s novel.
In addition to broadly racial anddiscreet historical motivationsfor its anti-Semitic violence, it is interesting to notethe ways that the incident also resembles traditions at leastpartially specific to the religious culture of nineteenth-centuryLithuania, where the image of the “Jew as infidel”had beena standard archetype during the Easter period of the liturgicalcalendar. Ritual Lithuanian Easter masques, for example,involved actors who portrayed both Jews and soldiers in a violentstruggle over the sacred symbols of Christianity. In thesedramas, recently described by Laima Anglickienë, a masquerdisguised as a typical Jew would enter the church during Eastervigil services to steal the Christian crucifix, only to be repulsedby armed soldiers in a staged skirmish. Eventually, the intrudingJew would do battle not only with the soldiers but withthe entire congregation, interrupting prayers and performingill-mannered tricks, all the while mumbling disturbingly in anunintelligible language. Other versions of this ritual could involvea pair of Jews who torment churchgoers before mountingthe scaffold in preparation for a sacrilegious sermon, whereuponthe church sexton physically intervenes to silence them.Related Jewish scapegoating rituals took place on Easter morning,during which a masquer Jew would disrupt the Easterprocession with noises and strange antics. These popular playswere “widely diffused”26in nineteenth centuryLithuanian religiousobservance. According to Anglickiene, worshippers upuntil the mid-twentieth century would sometimes even attenda church other than their own on Easter if the Jewish masqueswere not offered locally.27
Easter-day violence toward DavidLevinsky seemsgrounded in a symbolic context identical to that of the religiousmasques. Wearing a new cap and a dark-colored “new coat...with absurdly long skirts,” Levinsky is dressed in thecustomaryJewish attire that was also used in the masques. Throughouttsarist Russia, this traditional dress had in many cases beena rationale for intenseanti-Jewish feeling.28InterruptingChristian civilians and soldiers during a rite involving Eastersymbols, young Levinsky seems to have made an all-too alluringtarget for the Gentiles in the deserted square, who wouldalmost certainly have been versed in a Jew-baiting tradition,perhaps even to the point of having earlier that day enactedor witnessed a public masque portraying the Jew as infidel.As in the ritual plays, Levinsky initially provokes“mirth” forthe concelebrants, and his humiliation and eventual expulsionfrom the Gentile Easter observance are in accordance with thegenre’s dramatic conventions. The consequences become grave,however, when his mother fights back – defying the behavioralexpectations and limitations of the drama. The overflow of the“mirthful” but vicious harassment into the terms ofhorrificmurder of a Jewish mother is an apt figuration of the status ofthe Jew in relation to the folklore and operant myths of adjoiningGentile communities before, during and after tsarist rule.Looking at the harassment and murder in light of thedramatic rituals underscores the distant origin of anti-Semiticviolence in longstanding cultural predisposition.
Looking atthe same events in conjunction with Cahan’s description oftheperiod’s assassination-prompted Jewish pogroms reveals theworkings of race-hatred as a function of the state’scalculatedresponse to what it viewed as political terrorism. Together,these perspectives suggest the ways that Cahan’s narrativeconstitutes in sum an unusually nuanced depiction of theJew’svulnerability to violent social scapegoating under terms ofboth immediate, politically determined tsarist policy and deepseatedlocal tradition.
In Cahan’s novel, the maincharacter comes to recognizethe roots of his being in this incident, exploring its spiritualsignificance and using it as a template for evaluating his immigrantexperience. In America, he is haunted by a feeling ofintense guilt for allowing his mother to die for him.“Excruciatingly homesick” soon afterhis arrival in New York, Levinskyrealizes that “She had died so that I might... make a goodstartin America” (71). Considering that he was eighteen years old,nearly an adult at the time of the incident, and that he had notattempted to either verbally dissuade or physically prevent hismother from leaving the house in his defense, Levinsky’sguiltdoes not seem misplaced. His indelible remorse is foremostamong many emotional habits and psychic intrusions thathinder his ability to either fully give himself over to Americanlife, or to sever spiritual ties with Lithuania: “My heartwentout to my poor dead mother... I thought of her and of all ofAntomir”(71).
Near the end of the novel, Levinskyis drawn back to thesynagogue of the Sons of Antomir for a traditional prayer serviceon the anniversary of his mother’s death. In this scene, theirreconcilable contradictions between the Lithuanian Jew andthe American businessman become apparent and disabling.First, Levinsky meets in the synagogue a celebrated cantorfrom his native town who had been enticed to emigrate by theexorbitant sum offered by the local Sons of Antomir to sing fortheir congregation in New York. This incident is based onCahan’sown encounters in New York with several former VilnaJews – a renowned Cantor Cooper, a noted chief rabbi YankevYoisef, a popular folk singer Eliakim Zunser – all of whomhadbeen brought from Vilna by New York congregations, and allof whom had experienced one form or another of tragic disappointmentin their new surroundings.29From the once-famouscantor, Levinsky learns of the “modernized” tastesof Americanaudiences and the myriad cultural factors that have reducedthe erstwhile celebrity to a state of confused displacement and“servility” in the new world. Speakingnostalgically of life inAntomir, Levinsky and the cantor become aware that they areboth “like a plant torn out of the soil and transplanted intoahothouse.”30When the service begins and Levinsky prays forhis mother, “memories and images” overwhelm him andturn his “present life into adream” and his“Russian past into a reality”(271). Here his state of deep attachment to Antomir recallsthat of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’sThe Scarlet Letter,whoseattachment to Boston and the scene of her infamy proves equallyindissoluble. As Hawthorne explains,
Thereis a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that ithas the force of doom, which almost invariably compels humanbeings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spotwhere some great and marked event has given color to theirlifetime; and still more irresistibly, the darker tinge that saddensit. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struckinto the soil... All other scenes of earth... were foreign to her incomparison.
For the same reason Hester cannotleave Boston, Levinskycannot mentally transcend the scene of his life’s greattragedy.Having physically escaped Europe, he is forever trappedthere spiritually. His attachment to the culture of his youth, andhis inability to come fully to terms with the new American selfhe has created, stem from his mother’s death, the“great andmarked event” that has “given color to [his]lifetime.” Paradoxically,the event most indicative of his outcast status in hisculture of origin perpetuates his exiled condition in his currentenvironment. Despite succeeding in America beyond his wildestexpectations, his relation to the American social order persistsin mirroring his relation to the society of tsarist Lithuania.Like Rouvke in “A Providential Match,” Levinskyawakens tothe ineradicable and self-constituting hegemony of the nativesoil.
It is significant that Levinsky isculturally displaced inboth Europe and America. During his youth, the Jews of tsaristRussia had been “made to realize that their birthplace wasnottheir home” (42) and emigration had followed. Considering areturn trip to Antomir in his middle years, Levinsky realizesthat he would encounter the same oppressive anti-Semitismthat accounted for his mother’s murder, that only if“Russiadidn’t have that accursed government of hers” (278)wouldsuch a trip be possible. In America, Levinsky at one point be65comes engaged to an American-born Jew and looks forward tofatherhood, musing that if he has a daughter“she’ll be namedfor [his] mother” (278). Immediately, however, he“reflectedwith mortification that [his] mother’s name could not be leftin its original form, but would have to be Americanized.”Thatthe name change becomes “a matter of grave concern”(278) forLevinsky is an indication of the incompleteness of his culturalassimilation. The reason it matters, and the reason his marriagenever takes place, is best articulated in the Sons of Antomirsynagogue on the anniversary of his mother’s death:“My heartwas all in Antomir” (273).
Throughout his long life, Cahanhimself missed fewchances to express a similarly evocative preoccupation withthe land of his birth. Even after he became a personificationof immigrant success and a living archetype of American upwardmobility, he repeatedly acknowledged how strong werethe ties of his origin, how his thoughts were still dominatedby what he called “the Old Country.” Cahan did notspeak theLithuanian language,31but in his autobiography he mused atlength about the influence of Vilna, recalling among his earliestimpressions that the city “frightened me and bewitchedme”(12). Later describing “sudden moments” ofhomesickness inNew York, the author laments, “My dreams were filled withvistas of Vilna or visions of my father and mother. I dreamt... ofVilna. My heart would be filled with a crushing longing”(241).Cahan’s literary protagonists, like the author, arefrequentlysubject to such intense nostalgia. Though they literally cannotgo home again, they long for, describe, and return imaginativelyto the world of their ancestors, a sometimes forbidding butstill beloved land of rural shtetls and urban ghettos. Probably,their figurativereturnto the old world is powerful and convincing because Cahan’sownexperience led in a similardirection,away from Vilna and Podberezy, but backward in timeand place as he reworked his experience into fiction.
One of the major differences betweenliterary realismand the romance fiction that preceded it is that realism movedaway from a distant historical past in order to concentrate on amore immediate historical present. Among its core characteristics,literary realism attempted to show how new commercialinfluences had interrupted the older cultural rhythms and putin motion processes that alienated the individual and devaluedfamilial and human relationships. Drawing its underlying assumptionsfrom Darwin and Spencer, realism and its naturalisticoffshoot accepted the biological principle that ontogenyrecapitulated phylogeny – that the species could be describedthrough the unflinching portrayal of the life-history of a singleorganism. David Levinsky’s financial rise in New Yorkconfirmsthat he had in a sense won the evolutional and biological battlefor survival, that he was in his own assessment “one of thefittest...in a Darwinian sense” (241). Levinsky realizes, however,that “there are cases when success is a tragedy”(371) and thatwhat he has tragically lost is his connection to the milieu thathad formed him, the society that had conferred his essentialidentity, without which his life is lonely and without meaning.In Cahan’s realism-naturalism, it seems, forces of themarketplaceare more easily managed than self-constituting culturalforces of social derivation.
As a reference point forunderstanding Cahan’s fiction,tsarist-Lithuanian social history yields considerable insightsthat argue for the relevance of nuanced culture-based approachesto the work of immigrant writers in general. Fromthe start of Cahan’s career, Howells noticed the resonance ofCahan’smultiple and overlapping perspectives, stating that,“he brings in aid of his vision the far and rich perceptionsofhis Hebraic race.”32In praising Cahan’s earlystories in 1902,Hutchins Hapgood also considered it important to observe that“Cahan came to Americaa mature man with the life ofone community already a familiar thing to him.”33 Morerecently,Sanford Marovitz’s superb critical biography exploresthe ways that Cahan’sinternational ties and Jewish experience“gave him access to attitudes and materials that weregenerallyinaccessible to Gentile American authors.”34The method andsubject matter of Cahan’s fiction have been referred to as“Jewish-American realism,” but any description of his art shouldprobably acknowledge the uniqueness of its “Litvak”elementas well, along with its rich context of Eastern European historyand its immersion in concerns of particular moment to tsaristLithuania in the late-nineteenth century. That Cahan’scharactersinhabit two worlds with neither completely dominant, andthat they do so in psychologically plausible and complex ways,is a fact which suggests the author’s ability to view hischaractersin precise relation to both native and adopted cultures,with sympathy for both. The strength of Cahan as a realist iscommensurate with the depth of this uniquely immigrationderivedanxiety as transmitted in his fiction. It was this dualperspective – highly appropriate for an immigrant writer butoutside the available ken of native-born writers of the period–that most markedly distinguished Cahan’s fiction andengenderedwhat is now being recognized as “a vital new componentin American realism.”35
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Alltranslations from Lithuanian language texts are by the author.