The Rise of David Levinsky

A Talmud student from Antomir lands in New York with four cents, and rises to be a millionaire of the New York cloak trade — losing, item by item, everything he came with. Cahan fled the Tsar after the 1881 pogroms and edited the Jewish Daily Forward for more than forty years; this 1917 novel is the great book of the Jewish immigration, and Levinsky's success is described exactly as the disaster it is. Fifty-nine plates, from Winslow Homer's shore scenes to James Bard's Hudson River steamboats, follow the immigrant's passage from the old world to the new.