ngs to the American nation. As far
back as the year in which Stephen Crane stirred many sensibilities with
his _Maggie_, the story of an Irish slum in Manhattan, Mr. Cahan
produced in _Yekl_ a book of similar and practically equal merit
concerning a Jewish slum in the same borough. But it and his later books
_The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories_ and _The White Terror and
the Red_ have been overwhelmed by novels by more familiar men dealing
with more familiar communities. The same has been true even of his
masterpiece, the most important of all immigrant novels, _The Rise of
David Levinsky_. It, too, records the making of an American, originally
a reader of Talmud in a Russian village and eventually the principal
figure in the cloak and suit trade in America. But it does more than
trace the career of Levinsky through his personal adventures: it traces
the evolution of a great industry and represents the transplanted
Russian Jews with affectionate exactness in all their modes of work and
play and love--another conquest of a larger Canaan. Here are fused
American hope and Russian honesty. At the end David, with all his New
World wealth, lacks the peace he might have had but for his sacrifice of
Old World integrity and faith. And yet the novel is very quiet in its
polemic. Its hero has gained in power; he is no dummy to hang maxims on.
Moving through a varied scene, gradually shedding the outward qualities
of his race, he remains always an individual, gnawed at by love in the
midst of his ambitions, subject to frailties which test his strength.

The fact that Mr. Cahan wrote _David Levinsky_ not in his mother-tongue
but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that
American literature no less than the American population is being
enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods. The methods of
the Yiddish writers are, as might be expected, those of Russian fiction
generally, though in this they were anticipated by the critical
arguments of Howells and Henry James and are rivaled by the majority of
the naturalistic novelists. Their materials, as might not be expected,
have a sort of primitive power by comparison with which the orthodox
native materials of fiction seem often pale and dusty. The older
Americans, settled into smug routines, lack the vitality, the industry
of the newcomers. They are less direct and more provincial; they are
bundled up in gentilities and petty habits; they hide behi