“To forget your place”: Translation and Irretrievability in Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken   Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

Autobiographical Narratives

Imagine, for Any First-Person Narrative, That the narrator is a real person. Take Jane Eyre as an example, advertised on the title page as “an autobiography.” Jane has lived an adventurous life and now strives to record it. She tells the story of her past in order to project a certain self-image, and she may thus reveal at least as much about her present self as she does about her past self. In the telling her childhood is revised and altered—perhaps even distorted to the point that some of the recollections would not be corroborated by others. We can recognize the artifice in her retrospective telling, since she records childhood conversations with the presumption of word-for-word memory. But there are also changes that she would be less aware of. Her memories of childhood, like anyone’s memories, have drifted imperceptibly in accordance with interests, values, and preoccupations developed later in her life. We can say, more generally, that Jane does not see the lens through which she sees her own reality, and her past is part of that reality. Readers might decide that they can identify her biases in ways that she cannot, and, in an effort to see the past as it really was, take what Jane reveals about her values as a mature narrator and then subtract the elements that seem to be later revisions. Of course, this would not be simple arithmetic, and it may even seem implausible. After all, the perspective from which someone sees something, childhood or otherwise, cannot be stripped away as if it were just another layer. But despite the logical difficulty, this exercise in subtraction is nevertheless a temptation because it responds to our desire to know the truth beneath a mere account. When we read a work of autobiography or observe testimony in a courtroom that we regard as unreliable, we frequently compensate for its evident partiality rather than entirely discard the information it contains. The operation becomes even more complex, and more interesting, when we imagine what it would be like if Jane spoke a different language as a child.

Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, from 1917, is one of many examples that feature this added degree of complexity. Cahan’s narrator, David Levinsky, is the one who retrospectively writes the story, the adult who has lived through the events of the last page before he begins to write the first page, and who has therefore already gone through the learning process that the narrative describes. He is the adult looking back, and he is also that same person at an earlier age, a child and an adolescent in the Russian village of Antomir. In such a novel, are the recollected events from childhood accurate? Well, the autobiographical genre generally does not permit readers to discover discrepancies between the lived past and the past that has been selected by the present-day consciousness; everything comes through the filter of the mature self.¹

Cahan’s novel recounts the story of David Levinsky’s Orthodox Jewish childhood in Antomir, his Americanization, and his commercial success. It is told by Levinsky in his forties, apparently regretful about the shift in his life toward business, and about his loneliness, which he regards as the consequence of his business pursuits. When David is fifteen, his mother has her skull crushed in the Antomir marketplace, by a Gentile. Not long after this catastrophe happens, a benefactor, Shiphrah Minsker, takes an interest in David and makes the continuation of his studies of the Talmud possible. But it is at just this time that David falls away from his religious devotion. With no family ties holding him back, he dreams of going to America. He is able to get the money for passage, but...