SOURCE: "The Fall of David Levinsky," in Preserving the Hunger, edited and introduced by Mark Shechner, Wayne State University Press, 1988, pp. 152-89.

In the following essay, originally published in 1952, Rosenfeld reviews The Rise of David Levinsky, noting the novel's study of "Jewish character" and its examination of American business culture.

I had long avoided The Rise of David Levinsky because I imagined it was a badly written account of immigrants and sweatshops in a genre which—though this novel had practically established it—was intolerably stale by now. It is nothing of the kind. To be sure, it is a genre piece, and excellence of diction and sentence structure are not among its strong points; but it is one of the best fictional studies of Jewish character available in English, and at the same time an intimate and sophisticated account of American business culture, and it ought to...