From Yiddishkeit to American Modernity: Alienation and Identity in The Rise of David Levinsky.

Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) has traditionally been interpreted as a narrative of fractured assimilation, depicting the immigrant experience as a traumatic rupture between Old World piety and New World materialism. Challenging this binary reading, this thesis argues that Levinsky’s trajectory represents not a break from his past, but a profound continuity of alienation that predates his migration to the United States. By employing a theoretical framework grounded in Marxist analysis of commodification and labor, this study demonstrates how the ascetic discipline, physical punishment, and structural deprivation of the Eastern European cheder are not abandoned but rather "refunctioned" within the American capitalist marketplace. The research posits that Levinsky’s transformation from Talmudic scholar to garment industry magnate relies on the transposition of religious rigor into economic efficiency. Contrary to the genre of the immigrant success novel which naively celebrates upward mobility, Cahan constructs a critique of the American Dream, revealing it as a performative image defined by "consent" rather than genuine belonging. Through a close reading of Levinsky’s engagement with fashion, language, and domesticity, the thesis illustrates how his adoption of American norms serves as a form of "cultural camouflage". This camouflage allows for social mobility while intensifying the commodification of the self, leaving Levinsky in a state of "emotional emptiness" that Marx identifies as the structural outcome of capitalist success. Furthermore, the study analyzes Levinsky’s failed romantic relationships as symptomatic of this condition, where intimacy is subordinated to the logic of accumulation. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that Cahan subverts the expectations of the rise-narrative by portraying success not as the resolution of immigrant displacement, but as the institutionalization of an alienation that was forged in the Old World and perfected in the New.