The Rise of David Levinsky

by Abraham Cahan

CHAPTER IX

The Kaplans occupied a large, old house on Henry Street that had been built at a period when the neighborhood was considered the best in the city. While Kaplan and I were taking off our overcoats in the broad, carpeted, rather dimly lighted hall, a dark-eyed girl appeared at the head of a steep stairway

"Hello, Dave! You're a good boy," she shouted, joyously, as she ran down to meet me with coquettish complacency

She had regular features, and her face wore an expression of ease and self-satisfaction. Her dark eyes were large and pretty, and altogether she was rather good-looking. Indeed, there seemed to be no reason why she should not be decidedly pretty, but she was not. Perhaps it was because of that self-satisfied air of hers, the air of one whom nothing in the world could startle or stir. Temperamentally she reminded me somewhat of Miss Kalmanovitch, but she was the better-looking of the two. I was not in love with her, but she certainly was not repulsive to me

"Good holiday, dad! Good holiday, Dave!" she saluted us in Yiddish, throwing out her chest and squaring her shoulders as she reached us

She was born in New York and had graduated at a public grammar-school and English was the only language which she spoke like one born to speak it, and yet her Yiddish greeting was precisely what it would have been had she been born and bred in Antomir

Her "Good holiday, dad. Good holiday, Dave!" went straight to my heart

"Well, I've brought him to you, haven't I? Are you pleased?" her father said, with affectionate grimness, in Yiddish

"Oh, you're a dandy dad. You're just sweet," she returned, in English, putting up her red lips as if he were her baby. And this, too, went to my heart

When her father had gone to have his shoes changed for slippers and before her mother came down from her bedroom, where she was apparently dressing for supper, Fanny slipped her arm around me and I kissed her lips and eyes

A chuckle rang out somewhere near by. Standing in the doorway of the back parlor, Mefisto-like, was Mary, Fanny's twelve-year-old sister

"Shame!" she said, gloatingly

"The nasty thing!" Fanny exclaimed, half gaily, half in anger

"You're nasty yourself," returned Mary, making faces at her sister

"Shut up or I'll knock your head off."

"Stop quarreling, kids," I intervened. Then, addressing myself to
Mary, "Can you spell 'eavesdropping'?"

Mary laughed

"Never mind laughing," I insisted. "Do you know what eavesdropping means? Is it a nice thing to do? Anyhow, when you're as big as Fanny and you have a sweetheart, won't you let him kiss you?" As I said this I took Fanny's hand tenderly

"She has sweethearts already," said Fanny. "She is running around with three boys."

"I ain't," Mary protested, pouting.

"Well, three sweethearts means no sweetheart at all," I remarked

Fanny and I went into the front parlor, a vast, high-ceiled room, as large as the average four-room flat in the "modern apartment-house" that had recently been completed on the next block. It was drearily too large for the habits of the East Side of my time, depressingly out of keeping with its sense of home. It had lanky pink-and-gold furniture and a heavy bright carpet, all of which had a forbidding effect. It was as though the chairs and the sofa had been placed there, not for use, but for storage. Nor was there enough furniture to give the room an air of being inhabited, the six pink-and-gold pieces and the marble-topped center-table losing themselves in spaces full of gaudy desolation

"She's awful saucy," said Fanny.

I caught her in my arms. "I have not three sweethearts. I have only one, and that's a real one," I cooed

"Only one? Really and truly?" she demanded, playfully. She gathered me to her plump bosom, planting a deep, slow, sensuous kiss on my lips

I cast a side-glance to ascertain if Mary was not spying upon us

"Don't be uneasy," Fanny whispered. "She won't dare. We can kiss all we want."

I thought she was putting it in a rather matter-of-fact way, but I kissed her with passion, all the same

"Dearest! If you knew how happy I am," I murmured

"Are you really? Oh, I don't believe you," she jested, self-sufficiently.

"You're just pretending, that's all. Let me kiss your sweet mouthie again."

She did, and then, breaking away at the sound of her mother's lumbering steps, she threw out her bosom with an upward jerk, a trick she had which I disliked

Ten minutes later the whole family, myself included, were seated around a large oval table in the basement dining-room. Besides the members already known to the reader, there was Fanny's mother, a corpulent woman with a fat, diabetic face and large, listless eyes, and Fanny's brother, Rubie, a boy with intense features, one year younger than Mary. Rubie was the youngest of five children, the oldest two, daughters, being married

Mr. Kaplan was in his skull-cap, while I wore my dark-brown derby.

Everything in this house was strictly orthodox and as old-fashioned as the American environment would permit

That there was not a trace of leavened bread in the house, its place being taken by thin, flat, unleavened "matzos," and that the repast included "matzo balls," wine, mead, and other accessories of a Passover meal, is a matter of course

Mr. Kaplan was wrapped up in his family, and on this occasion, though he presided with conscious dignity, he was in one of his best domestic moods, talkative, and affectionately facetious. The children were the real masters of his house

Watching his wife nag Rubie because he would not accept another matzo ball, Mr. Kaplan said: "Don't worry, Malkah. Your matzo balls are delicious, even if your 'only son' won't do justice to them. Aren't they, David?"

"They certainly are," I answered. "What is more, they have the genuine Antomir taste to them."

"Hear that, Fanny?" Mr. Kaplan said to my betrothed. "You had better learn to make matzo balls exactly like these. He likes everything that smells of Antomir, you know." "That's all right," said Malkah. "Fanny is a good housekeeper. May I have as good a year."

"It's a good thing you say it," her husband jested. "Else David might break the engagement."

"Let him," said Fanny, with a jerk of her bosom and a theatrical glance at me. "I really don't know how to make matzo balls, and Passover is nearly over, so there's no time for mamma to show me how to do it."

"I'll do so next year," her mother said, with an affectionate smile that kindled life in her diabetic eyes. "The two of you will then have to pass Passover with us."

"I accept the invitation at once," I said

"Provided you attend the seder, too," remarked Kaplan, referring to the elaborate and picturesque ceremony attending the first two suppers of the great festival

I had been expected to partake of those ceremonial repasts on the first and second nights of this Passover, but had been unavoidably kept away from the city. Kaplan had resented it, and even now, as he spoke of the next year's seder, there was reproach in his voice.

"I will, I will," I said, ardently.

"One mustn't do business on a seder night. It isn't right."

"Give it to him, pa!" Fanny cut in.

"I am not joking," Kaplan persisted. "One has got to be a Jew. Excuse me, David, for speaking like that, but you re going to be as good as a son of mine and I have a right to talk to you in this way."

"Why, of course, you have!" I answered, with filial docility

His lecture bored me, but it did me good, too. It was sweet to hear myself called "as good as a son" by this man of Talmudic education who was at the same time a man of substance and of excellent family

The chicken was served. My intended wife ate voraciously, biting lustily and chewing with gusto. The sight of it jarred on me somewhat, but I overruled myself. "It's all right," I thought. "She's a healthy girl. She'll make me a strong mate, and she'll bear me healthy children."

I had a temptation to take her in my arms and kiss her. "I am not in love with her, and yet I am so happy," I thought. "Oh, love isn't essential to happiness. Not at all. Our old generation is right."

Fanny's reading, which was only an occasional performance, was confined to the cheapest stories published. Even the popular novels of the day, the "best sellers," seemed to be beyond her depth. Her intellectual range was not much wider than that of her old-fashioned mother, whose literary attainments were restricted to the reading of the Yiddish Commentary on the Pentateuch. She often interrupted me or her mother; everybody except her father. But all this seemed to be quite natural and fitting. "She is expected to be a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper," I reflected, "and that she will know how to be. Everything else is nonsense. I don't want to discuss Spencer with her, do I?"

Kaplan quoted the opening words of a passage in the Talmud bearing upon piety as the bulwark of happiness. I took it up, finishing the passage for him

"See?" he said to his wife. "I have told you he remembers his
Talmud pretty well, haven't I?"

"When a man has a good head he has a good head," she returned, radiantly

Rubie went to a public school, but he spent three or four hours every afternoon at an old-fashioned Talmudic academy, or "yeshivah." There were two such "yeshivahs" on the East Side, and they were attended by boys of the most orthodox families in the Ghetto. I had never met such boys before. That an American school-boy should read Talmud seemed a joke to me. I could not take Rubie's holy studies seriously. As we now sat at the table I banteringly asked him about the last page he had read. He answered my question, and at his father's command he ran up-stairs, into the back parlor, where stood two huge bookcases filled with glittering folios of the Talmud and other volumes of holy lore, and came back with one containing the page he had named

"Find it and let David see what you can do," his father said

Rubie complied, reading the text and interpreting it in Yiddish precisely as I should have done when I was eleven years old. He even gesticulated and swayed backward and forward as I used to do. To complete the picture, his mother, watching him, beamed as my mother used to do when she watched me reading at the Preacher's Synagogue or at home in our wretched basement. I was deeply affected

"He's all right!" I said

"He's a loafer, just the same," his father said, gaily. "If he had as much appetite for his Talmud as he has for his school-books he would really be all right." "What do you want of him?" Malkah interceded. "Doesn't he work hard enough as it is? He hardly has an hour's rest."

"There you have it! I didn't speak respectfully enough of her 'only son.' I beg your pardon, Malkah," Mr. Kaplan said, facetiously

The wedding had been set for one of the half-holidays included in the Feast of Tabernacles, about six months later. Mrs. Kaplan said something about her plans concerning the event. Fanny objected. Her mother insisted, and it looked like an altercation, when the head of the family called them to order

"And where are you going for your honeymoon, Fanny?" asked
Mary

"That's none of your business," her sister retorted

"She's stuck up because she's going to be married," Mary jeered

"Shut your mouth," her father growled

"Do you know my idea of a honeymoon?" said I. "That is, if it were
possible—if Russia didn't have that accursed government of hers.
We should take a trip to Antomir." "Wouldn't that be lovely!" said
Fanny. "We would stop in Paris, wouldn't we?"

Fanny and her mother resumed their discussion of the preparations for the wedding. I scarcely listened, yet I was thrilled. I gazed at Fanny, trying to picture her as the mother of my first child. "If it's a girl she'll be named for mother, of course," I mused. I reflected with mortification that my mother's name could not be left in its original form, but would have to be Americanized, and for the moment this seemed to be a matter of the gravest concern to me

My attitude toward Fanny and our prospective marriage was primitive enough, and yet our engagement had an ennobling effect on me. I was in a lofty mood.

My heart sang of motives higher than the mere feathering of my own nest. The vision of working for my wife and children somehow induced a yearning for altruism in a broader sense. While free from any vestige of religion, in the ordinary meaning of the word, I was tingling with a religious ecstasy that was based on a sense of public duty. The Synagogue of the Sons of Antomir seemed to represent not a creed, but unselfishness. I donated generously to it. Also, I subscribed a liberal sum to an East Side hospital of which Kaplan was a member, and to other institutions. The sum I gave to the hospital was so large that it made a stir, and a conservative Yiddish daily printed my photograph and a short sketch of my life. I thought of the promise I had given Naphtali, before leaving Antomir, to send him a "ship ticket." I had thought of it many times before, but I had never even sought to discover his whereabouts. This time, however, I throbbed with a firm resolution to get his address, and, in case he was poor, to bring him over and liberally provide for his future

My wedding loomed as the beginning of a new era in my life. It appealed to my imagination as a new birth, like my coming to America. I looked forward to it with mixed awe and bliss

Three or four months later, however, something happened that played havoc with that feeling