SOURCE: "A Convert to America: Sex, Self, and Ideology in Abraham Cahan," in The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 64-91.

In the following essay, Girgus examines Cahan's portrayal of the perversion of the American ideal in The Rise of David Levinsky.

The world of European Jewry that sent forth waves of mass immigration to America has been described and dramatized in many tales and stories. This is the world of Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is a world of the ghetto and the schlemiel and of emancipation movements that had to look to the New World for examples of how to treat Jews with freedom and equality. With all its mystery, vitality, and richness, it is also a world of terror and ambiguity, of the loveless Jew, and of the wasted pariah who existed...