Dressing the American Jewish woman: Clothing, Gender, and the Limits of Assimilation in Abraham Cahan's Yekl and The Rise of David Levinsky

This essay reads Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) as novels in which the figure of the American Jewish woman is produced, contested, and made legible through dress. Criticism has long read Cahan through the lens of immigrant alienation and the gendered performance of Americanness; this essay argues that clothing is the medium through which that performance is most intimately staged on the female body. Building on Barbara A. Schreier’s history of Jewish immigrant women’s clothing, Anna Scacchi’s account of the shawl’s shifting cultural coding, Clay Motley’s reading of gendered assimilation in Yekl, Donna Gabaccia’s history of immigrant women, and theories of fashion and modernity from Elizabeth Wilson and the contributors to The Cambridge Global History of Fashion, the essay traces a single cultural logic across both novels: the discarding of Old World coverings—the sheitel, the kerchief, the shawl—and the assumption of structured, market-driven American dress. In Yekl, Gitl’s wig becomes the battleground of her Americanization, yet she emerges with a dignity her assimilation-hungry husband never attains. In Levinsky, the women who embody modern femininity—Matilda, Dora, Anna Tevkin—are evaluated against the sacrificial, head-covered mother of the shtetl, while Levinsky grows rich manufacturing the very cloaks that clothe them. Read together, the two novels reveal that for the Jewish woman, becoming American was first, and most consequentially, a matter of what she wore—and that the garment promised a belonging it could never fully deliver.