The Rise of David Levinsky

Content Warning: This guide contains discussion of antisemitism and pogroms. It also references misogynistic views. This novel sometimes uses language that is offensive to people with mental health concerns and contains a depiction of sexual assault.

Throughout the novel, David searches for a new home, which symbolizes safety, family, and something to live for. David’s mother struggles to provide David with a home in his youth. This first home, the one-room apartment shared by four families, acts as the backdrop for his life for its first two decades. David does not feel the weight of his mother’s death until he moves out of his childhood home:

As I went to bed on the synagogue bench, however, instead of in my old bunk at what had been my home, the fact that my mother was dead and would never be alive again smote me with crushing violence. It was as though I had just discovered it. I shall never forget that terrible night (72).

David loses his home, his safety, and his reason for working.

David spends the remainder of his life looking for a new home, full of the chaos and love of his childhood home. He finds an echo of it in the Minsker home, but he is cast out when the father returns. David inserts himself into the Margolis family, only to lose it all when Dora breaks off their affair. David sacrifices the Kaplan family home, as he would never be the leader of the family. He finally settles on the Tevkin family as the perfect home. It has the chaos and conflict of his childhood apartment. He would be the primary earner, so the patriarch. Yet, his obsession with the perfect home causes him to overlook the importance of Anna as an individual: “But the great point was that I was literally intoxicated by my new interests, and the fact that they were intimately associated with the atmosphere of Anna’s home had much—perhaps everything—to do with it” (604). The idea of being a part of the Tevkin home motivates David to cast aside his own best interests and do all in his power to make it his home. He sees the Tevkins as a symbol and in the abstract, a place full of safety, family, and passion. David convinces himself that Anna must want him to stay, so he proposes. She, of course, refuses him. He never finds his home.