Abraham Cahan
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Abraham Cahan
The Jewish author and journalist Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a prominent Socialist leader and union organizer among Jewish immigrants in the United States.
Abraham Cahan was born in Podberezhie, near Vilna, Lithuania. His father was a storekeeper and later rabbi at Vidz, Vitebsk. In 1866 the family moved to Vilna, where Cahan was educated for the rabbinate and also studied Russian literature. After graduating from the Teachers Institute at Vilna in 1881, he taught for a short time. But, because he belonged to a Jewish idealist group connected with an assassination plot against Czar Alexander II, in 1882 he fled from Russia to the United States.
In New York, Cahan became a journalist and soon founded two Jewish journals, Die neue Zeit (1886) and Arbeiter-Zeitung (1890). From 1894 to 1897 he was editor of the Yiddish journal Zukunft; in 1897 he became the first editor of the Socialist Daily Forward. The following year he joined the staff of the Commercial Advertiser, where he remained until 1902. Cahan then returned to the Forward as editor in chief, a post he held until his death. Under his guidance the Forward's circulation rose from 6,000 to 200,000.
Cahan's career as an author was not limited to journalism. His short story " The Providential Catch" appeared in 1895; it was followed by the novel Yekl in 1896 and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories in 1898. He subsequently published The White Terror and the Red (1905); two volumes on the history of Jewish immigrants in America (1910-1912); the novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917); and his autobiography, Bleter fun mayn Leben (5 vols., 1926-1931). He also contributed many articles to periodicals.
Cahan was a Socialist and an outstanding advocate of what was known as the moderate right wing. He acted as a representative at international socialist congresses in Brussels (1891) and Zurich (1893). He engaged actively in organizing Jewish workers into trade unions. He used Yiddish as a medium to inform the ordinary immigrant of the possibilities for him in America while preserving the richness of his cultural heritage as a Jew. Under his direction the Forward became highly influential in the formation of the Jewish Labor movement.
Cahan also played a significant role in the development of the larger Jewish world community. After a visit to Palestine in 1925, he returned enthusiastic for the restoration of Israel as a national home for Jews. It was largely due to his influence that the State of Israel received the support of the American Jewish Labor movement at a later date.
Cahan died on Aug. 31, 1951, and his funeral was attended by over 10,000 people.
Further Reading
There is no full-length biography of Cahan. His autobiography was translated as The Education of Abraham Cahan (5 vols., 1926-1931; trans., 1 vol., 1969). Much of Ronald Sanders's study, The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation (1969), deals with Cahan.
Cahan, Abraham (kän), 1860-1951, Russian-American journalist, Socialist leader, and author, b. Vilnius, Lithuania. He emigrated to New York City in 1882, entered journalism, and helped found the Jewish Daily Forward (1897); as editor in chief after 1902, he made it the most influential Jewish daily in America. He was a founder of the Social Democratic party in 1897 and after 1902 supported the Socialist party. Active in spreading socialist teachings among Jewish workers, he encouraged the unionization of East Side garment workers and supported them in their strikes. Cahan's writings in English, particularly Yekl: a Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories (1898), and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), are recognized for their historical portrayals of the immigrant experience. He also wrote, in Yiddish, Blätter von mein Leben (5 vol., 1926-31), an autobiography.
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
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Works by Abraham Cahan
(1860-1951)
| 1896 | Yekl, a Tale of the New York Ghetto. After "Mottke Arbel and His Romance," the first story by the future founder and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Daily Forward, had been translated from the Yiddish and published in 1895, William Dean Howells encouraged Cahan to attempt an extended work. This realistic depiction of New York Jewish life is the result. In it, Jake Podgomy attempts to adapt to American culture. The story would serve as the basis for the 1975 film Hester Street. |
| 1898 | The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto. Cahan publishes an important early story collection documenting Jewish life of the period in New York City. |
| 1917 | The Rise of Daniel Levinsky. The founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward provides one of the greatest fictional depictions of the Jewish immigrant experience through the material rise but moral fall of the title character, in New York's garment district. |
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Abraham Cahan
Abraham "Abe" Cahan (July 7, 1860 – August 31, 1951) was a Lithuanian-born American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.
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Biography
Early years
Abraham Cahan was born July 7, 1860, in Podberezhie in Lithuania (at the time occupied by the Russian Empire, into an orthodox Litvak family. His grandfather was a rabbi in Vidz, Vitebsk, his father a teacher of Hebrew language and the Talmud. The family, which was devoutly religious, moved in 1866 to Vilna (Vilnius), where the young Cahan received the usual Jewish preparatory education for the rabbinate. He, however, was attracted by secular knowledge and clandestinely studied the Russian language, ultimately prevailing on his parents to allow him to enter the Teachers Institute of Wilna, from which he was graduated in 1881. He was appointed teacher in a Jewish government school in Velizh, Vitebsk, in the same year.
On March 13, 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by terrorist members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Reprisals by the Russian state were quick and massive. A visit from the police prompted the young socialist schoolteacher to escape to the United States through emigration.
Cahan in America
Cahan arrived in New York City in June 1882. Cahan transferred his commitment to socialism to his new country, and he devoted all the time he could spare from work to the study and teaching of radical ideas to the Jewish working men of New York. Cahan joined the Socialist Labor Party of America writing articles on socialism and science, and translating literary works for the pages of its Yiddish language paper, the Arbeiter Zeitung ("Workers' News").[1] Cahan saw himself as an educator and enlightener of the impoverished Jewish working class of the city, "meeting them on their own ground and in their own language."[2] Cahan's contribution to Yiddish-language socialist propaganda was massive, as before his arrival educated Jewish émigrés from the old Russian empire tended to speak Russian.
Historian Gerald Sorin notes:
"As early as the summer of 1882, however, Abraham Cahan, in the United States only a very short time, challenged the Russian-speakers by pointing out that the Jewish workers did not understand the propaganda that the intellectuals were disseminating. It was proposed, almost as a lark, that Cahan lecture in Yiddish; and relatively quickly this so-called folk vernacular became the primary medium of communication. For some time, however, the consensus continued to be that Yiddish was strictly an expedient in the conduct of socialist activitiy and not a value in itself."[3]
During his years of activity, Cahan was either originator, collaborator, or editor of almost all the earlier socialist periodicals published in that language in the United States.
From 1903 until 1946, Cahan ran the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts), a socialist Yiddish-language daily in New York. In 1906 he introduced an advice column named A Bintel Brief. As a rule, Cahan was one of the more temperate voices in the Socialist Party of America, respecting his readers' religious beliefs and preaching an increasingly moderate version of the socialist gospel as time progressed.[4] By 1924 Forverts had over a quarter of a million readers, making it the most successful non-English-language newspaper in the U.S. and the leading Yiddish paper in the world.
Cahan quickly mastered the English language, and four years after his arrival in New York taught immigrants in one of the evening schools. Later he began to contribute articles to the Sun and other newspapers printed in English, and was for several years employed in a literary capacity by the Commercial Advertiser, where we was a regular contributor.
Cahan as novelist
While his Yiddish writings are mostly confined to propaganda, his literary work in English is mainly descriptive; and he has few, if any, equals in the United States in depicting the life of the so-called "ghetto," where he lived and worked for more than 20 years. Cahan is regarded as having been one of America's preeminent Yiddish novelists, a language which was previously regarded as a somewhat uncultured jargon of the common folk.
His first novel, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, was published in 1896. (In 1975 it would be released as the film, Hester Street). The graphic story of an Americanized Russo-Jewish immigrant, it attracted much attention and was favorably commented on by the press both in America and in England. W. D. Howells compared Cahan's work to that of Stephen Crane, and prophesied for him a successful literary future (The World, New York, July 26, 1896). Cahan's next work of fiction, The Imported Bridegroom, and Other Stories, published in 1898, was also well received and favorably noticed by the general press. Of his shorter publications, the article on the Russian Jews in the United States, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, July 1898, deserves special mention. His other important work, The Rise of David Levinsky, was published in 1917. Cahan also wrote a 5-volume Yiddish-language autobiography, Bleter fun mayn Leben, the first three volumes of which were translated into English as The Education of Abraham Cahan.
Death and legacy
Cahan died of congestive heart failure on August 31, 1951.[5]
Footnotes
- ^ Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993; pg. 105.
- ^ The words are those of historian Mark Pittenger. Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920, pg. 105.
- ^ Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985; pg. 74.
- ^ Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920, pg. 105.
- ^ Abraham Cahan Jewish Virtual Library.
Works
- "A Dream No Longer," New York Call, vol. 11, no. 129 (May 31, 1918), pg. 6.
- The Rise of David Levinsky. Harper Torch Books (1917; 1945; 1960)
Further reading
- Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt, 1989.
- Ronald Sanders, "The Lower East Side Jews. An Immigrant Generation". Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987
- Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
- Translated by Leon Stein, Abraham Conan and Lynn Davison. "The Education of Abraham Cahan". (Bleter Fun Mein Leben Volumes I and II by Abraham Cahan). Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. 1969.
External links
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
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