BOOKS
477
ethnic literature.
From the Ghetto
draws us into Cahan's multicultural
world and explores his literary choices fully.
Interestingly, Cahan's English stories render their immigrant
protagonists' English crudely, interspersed with neologisms, such as
"oyshgreen" (out-green) or "allrightnik,"which float between cultures
as their speakers do; yet the characters' Yiddish is translated into a more
subtle English, indicative of a wider range of perception and emotion.
As Chametzky points out, Cahan's choice of a two-tier English was
adapted and fully developed in Henry Roth's
Call
It
Sleep.
In
"A
Providential Match" immigrant Rouvke Arbel changes his name to
"Friedman," and like the protagonist of Bernard Malamud's "Lady of
the Lake" he is only superficially a "freed" man.
In
another Cahan
story, Rafael Naarizokh discovers that socialism is his "song of songs,"
reminding us of the ending of Mike Gold's
Jews Without Money.
In
Cahan's work, which was praised by Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld,
we can observe the germination of what was to become Jewish–
American fiction.
Cahan published three novels in English, and Chametzky dis–
cusses them in the context of realism, of which Cahan was a lifelong
advocate.
Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto
(1896), recently
popularized by Joan Micklin Silver's movie
Hester Street,
was highly
praised by Howells, who reviewed the book alongside Stephen Crane's
George's Mother. The White Terror and the Red
(1905) was Cahan's
ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to write a popular novel of
conspiratory politics, which interestingly dealt with the question of
anti-Semitism among Russian revolutionaries of the 1870s and 1880s.
Cahan's reputation as a realistic novelist rests on
The Rise of David
Levinsky
(1917), which Chametzky interprets, in his final chapter, in
the context of
The Rise of Silas Lapham
and
Sister Carrie,
and
evaluates as a peer of these books. By merging the themes of cultural
dualism with the plot of success as failure, Cahan managed to create a
complex character in David Levinsky who is a "great egoist" and an
unreliable narrator, frustrated lover and "sad millionaire."
Chametzky carefully and subtly interprets the literary voice of a
man who experienced "the chasm" that has remained a formal and
thematic reference point in the fiction of the second and third genera–
tions. Seen through Cahan's works, there are unifying elements in
American-Jewish literature; and they include, from the very beginning,
"Jewishness"
and
"Americanness."
WERNER SOLLORS
