The Rise of David Levinsky is a novel by Abraham Cahan. It was published in 1917, and remains Cahan's best known work. The book is told in the form of a fictional autobiography. The main character, David Levinsky, is born in 1865 in Antomir, a city of 80,000 in northwestern Russia. His father dies when he is three, leaving him and his mother to fend for themselves. He grows up in abject poverty, he and his mother sharing a single basement room with three other families. His mother scrounges together money to send him to a private cheder for elementary instruction in Judaism and the Torah,... because the public cheder are known for the inferiority of their education. When payments are late, the headmaster threatens to throw David out of school; his mother convinces the headmaster to let him stay, promising to pay every penny. Owing to his poverty, he suffers frequent abuse at the hands of the teachers, who cannot take their aggression out on the richer students. From all of this abuse, he becomes one of the tougher kids. But also he excels academically. Furthermore, he receives the respect of the other students after beating up richer kids.
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