Of all the tribes, sects and cultures in the world, perhaps no single group of humans has suffered more from the onslaught of moral inequities and physical persecutions than have the Jews. In spite of, or because of, those humanitarian injustices, the Jewish people have survived; in the process of surviving, however, whether Russian pogroms or Nazi genocide, the Jewish people have slowly been losing what had distinguished them as being different: their identity. It is not the identity that others have recognized as being “Jewish” that is in jeopardy, but the identity that Jews, especially American Jews, have recognized as being Jewish. In the process of this historical evolution, one particular period seems to be significant: 1880– 1920. In the process of portraying the genesis of this evolution and in contributing it to us, one particular writer presents himself as significant: Abraham Cahan.

The word contribute has been interpreted in numerous ways. In some cases, it has been defined as “to add to,” and in others as “to bring together”; however, the origin of the word is Latin and can best be defined as “to bestow,” and nowhere is that definition more applicable in a discussion of great Jewish contributions to American society than in the life and literature of Cahan, especially his novel The Rise of David Levinsky. The novel is a significant point of departure in understanding the fabric of the Jewish-American immigrant experience, its evolution, notions of otherness and the concomitant assimilation of a people into a place unlike its own. Both its literary and sociohistorical content establish it as a seminal influence in American letters.

Cahan was Russian born and immigrated to the United States in 1882 at the age of 22. Born near the small town of Vilna, Cahan's grandfather was a rabbi and his father a schoolteacher. Possibly because of those influences, Cahan was an imaginative and inquisitive student who was more apt to question the existing order of things than to capitulate to it. Upon leaving the Vilna Teacher's Institute in 1881, Cahan utilized those critical faculties and became involved in the more radical political movement of that era, namely Marxism. By the time he had reached America, Cahan was lecturing on Marxist philosophy to Jewish workers.