CAHAN, ABRAHAM 1860-1951

Editor and novelist

An Exiled Russian Radical

Born in Lithuania, Abraham Cahan immigrated to New York in 1882 to escape persecution for his socialist views. A fiery speaker, he helped to organize the first Jewish tailors' union on the Lower East Side in 1884. Cahan dominated the intellectual and public life of the rapidly expanding Jewish immigrant community on the Lower East Side of New York City from 1900 to 1920 as editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. He was brilliant, with a grim temperament, and could be quite spiteful. He both symbolized and shaped the power of the immigrant press at a time when 20 percent of the nation's population was foreign born.

The Forward.

The Yiddish-language daily the Jewish Daily Forward was founded on 22 April 1897 with Cahan as editor. He soon resigned over conflicts with its publishers about who wielded ultimate control of the paper. The publishers wanted the paper to be an outlet for socialism, while Cahan would have patterned it after the papers of Pulitzer and Hearst. He went to the New York Commercial Advertiser, where his editor was Lincoln Steffens. When Steffens left to become an editor at McClure's in 1901, Cahan lost interest and began writing fiction. In 1902 Cahan was re hired by the Forward, with the mandate of telling stories rather than spouting socialist ideology. Circulation soared, but some intellectuals accused him of low taste and vulgarity, and he was once again forced out after six months. In 1903 he returned with assurances of complete control.

Yellow Journalism for Jews

Cahan remained at the helm of the Forward for more than forty years, aiming it at an audience of laborers and housewives. He wanted to provide them with useful information and compelling stones in which they recognized themselves rather than with anti-capitalist dogma. The introduction of a sports page to the Forward caused quite a stir. In 1906 he inaugurated the famous "Bintel Brief" (Bundle of Letters) feature, with letters from readers sharing their views and tales on subjects ranging from marriage to proper American behavior. Illiterate people sometimes visited the paper's offices to dictate their stories. Cahan remained a socialist but was never dogmatic. His politics aimed at practical improvements in the lives of his readers. He crusaded first and foremost for better working conditions in the garment industry, where many Jewish immigrants worked.

Literary Achievements

Cahan published his first short story, "A Providential Match," in 1895 and attracted the interest of Atlantic editor and novelist William Dean Howells. Howells helped Cahan to find a publisher for his first novel, Yekl: A Tale of the Ghetto (1896). In 1913 McClures serialized his autobiography, and in 1917 he published a fictionalized version of it called The Rise of David Levinsky.

Political Trouble during the War

The constituency of the Forward, many of whom had fled persecution in czarist Russia, tended to support the Germans after the outbreak of World War I in Europe. This unpopular position endangered the paper's third-class mailing privileges, and Cahan soon backed off. When the United States entered the war and the Russian Revolution took the Russian army out of it, circulation soared to over two hundred thousand. While Cahan initially supported the goals of the Bolshevik Revolution, by the late 1920s he became one of Joseph Stalin's harshest critics. In the 1920s the Forward added Los Angeles and Boston editions, and by the 1930s it was far removed from its radical socialist beginnings. Cahan died in 1951 at the age of ninety-one.

Source:

Jules Chametzky, From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan (Amtierst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).