The Rise of Abraham Cahan

The founder and editor of the Forward wrote one of the most important American immigrant novels ever.

Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

 

Abraham Cahan was born in a small village near Vilna (the city that Napoleon had called "the Jerusalem of Lithuania") into an Orthodox family. His father was a melamed (teacher of small children), his mother a housewife, his grandfather a rabbi. He attended a teacher‑training academy, studied secular subjects, learned Russian well, and read the radical anti-czarist literature of the day. When the czar was assassinated in St. Petersburg in 1881, Cahan and his friends were in danger of arrest, so he fled his provincial teaching post and joined a group leaving for the United States at the very beginning of the mass exodus of Eastern European Jews to America. He was not to see his parents again until a trip to Europe in the 1890s, by which time the chasm between his and their ways of life was vast and unbridgeable. Although best known as an editor and journalist, Cahan wrote well‑received fiction for 25 years, in which mediation and transitions between seemingly irreconcilable cultures among the immigrants of his generation were to be a major theme.

 

In the 1880s, Cahan rapidly became known as a political speaker (in 1882, he lectured in Yiddish on Karl Marx), trade‑union organizer, writer, and editor in English and Yiddish for radical journals. He was a founder in the 1890s and, from 1902 until his death, the imperious editor of the great Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily For­ward (Forverts). He took a sectarian journal of the Social Democratic party with 6,000 subscribers and made if the most successful foreign‑language newspaper in America and the leading Yiddish paper in the world. At its high point in 1924, it had over a quarter of a million readers. Cahan combined sensational stories, human‑interest features (A bintl briv was his invention), culture, and education within a humanistic, pro-labor framework. The Yiddish used was "plain," Americanized (corrupted, accord­ing to purists), easy to read; it played a crucial role in the acculturation of America's Jews.

 

From 1892 until 1917, Cahan aspired to a literary career in English, although he still wrote some fiction and almost all of his journalism in Yiddish. He admired Tolstoy and Chekhov, but it was the American realist novelist and editor William Dean Howells who, in a sense, discovered Cahan and encouraged him to write about the life of the Jewish ghetto in New York. The result was his first book, the novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), which won high praise from Howells and esteem for Cahan, but did not sell well. Joan Micklin Silver's film Hester Street(1975) was based on this tale, so it still lives and resonates. It is the story of a callow young immigrant who sloughs off many of his Old World values (and the wife he sends for from Europe) while adopting superficial aspects of the new American life, ending with an uneasy feeling about his future.

 

The theme of losses, emotional and spiritual, that accompany the gains in the acculturation process, was to appear in most of Cahan's stories and novels. Two years after Yekl, Cahan published a volume of five short stories called The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (1898), which included A Ghetto Wedding. It is a story of two young sweatshop workers who plan an elaborate wedding they can ill afford, in the expectation that the value of the gifts they receive will exceed what they have laid out. But their invited guests are as poor as they are--it has been a slack season in the garment trades--and the results are disappointing. In the description of the wedding itself, Cahan gives us an unparalleled view of an Orthodox wedding ceremony as conducted on the Lower East Side of the period. After the wedding, the couple, Goldy and Nathan, forlornly walk the dark streets, tormented by street toughs (to add insult to injury), toward their meager apartment. But the pathos of the situation is surprisingly redeemed by an upsurge of love and joy in each other that they suddenly experience. Despite its gritty and bittersweet portrayal of the poor life of the Lower East Side, the story is one of Cahan's most charming.

 

The fullest expression of Cahan's major themes is The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the story of a wealthy garment manufacturer looking back at his rise from immigrant rags to capitalist riches, who finds that he, too, is unsatisfied spiritually; the two halves of his life, he says, "do not comport well." Although Cahan wrote no more fiction after that ambitious book, which has been considered one of the very best American immigrant novels, he remains one of the most influential figures in Yiddish journalism, cultural life, and politics.