A Talmud student from Antomir arrives at Ellis Island 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 half a century; this 1917 novel is the great book of the Jewish immigration, and Levinsky's success is described exactly as the disaster it is.