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).

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. □

Abraham Cahan , 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.

Mogulesko, [Zelig] Sigmund (1858?–1914), comic actor. The bantam, droll comedian was born in Romania and was established as a popular favorite there and on other European Yiddish stages before he arrived in America in 1886. He immediately became the premier Yiddish comedian of his generation. Typical of Mogulesko's virtuosity was his New York debut in Coquettish Ladies, in which he played a different part in each act: a young pimp, an old drunk, and a gossipy lady matchmaker. His acting was scarcely realistic, but exaggerated in the fashion of the Yiddish stage. Nonetheless, Abraham Cahan, the well‐known Jewish publisher and historian, wrote, “A born genius he was, and his personality was as marvelous as his art. His talent and charm lit that foolish play with rays of divine fire. He bewitched us with his singing and his acting alike.”

Cahan, Abraham (1860–1951), who came to the U.S. from Russia (1882), was long the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Besides works in Yiddish he wrote realistic fiction in English, including Yekl, a Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories (1898), and The Rise of Devid Levinsky (1917), a novel of the good and bad in a Jew's Americanization in New York. He also wrote an autobiography (5 vols., 1916–36). His journalism (1897–1903) was collected and posthumously published in Grandma Never Lived in America (1988).