Abraham Cahan’s epic masterpiece is the American novel of immigration par excellence, as it should be: no one knew the millions of Eastern European Jews who arrived in America between 1881 and 1924 better than Cahan did. As the longtime editor of the Forvets, the Yiddish daily newspaper that at its peak claimed more than 200,000 subscribers, Cahan communicated directly with his readers in an advice column (the famed Bintl Briv) and knew their successes and suffering firsthand.

Cahan’s writing in English benefited from the support of the turn-of-the-century literary heavyweight William Dean Howells, and The Rise of David Levinsky obviously took inspiration from Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). At the same time as he was being embraced by readers of the nation’s most prestigious magazines, though, Cahan was also a fierce socialist and staunch supporter of the working men and women in the trade unions. The novel, which describes the rise of the title character from an orphan in Russia to the owner of a major cloak-making firm in New York, registers these tensions: fabulously wealthy by the book’s end—he even learns to eat unkosher restaurant meals, thanks to a non-Jewish associate—Levinsky never quite finds satisfaction.

Levinsky’s aimlessness comes through most powerfully in his romantic relationships. After losing his mother to mob violence in the old country, the character dallies with one woman after another—a divorcee with revolutionary ideas, a prostitute, the wife of one of his best friends, the daughter of a Hebrew poet—but never meets his match. Unlike characters of the same period who solved this problem by marrying out of the fold, Levinsky remains alone, and ambivalent about the overall trajectory of his life: “I cannot escape from my old self,” he admits, “My past and my present do not comport well.” Experiencing the pull of the Old World and the rush of the New, the thrills of capitalism as well as its stings, Levinsky captures much of what it meant to be an American Jew in the first decades of the 20^th century.