Abraham " Abe" Cahan (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם קאַהאַן; July 7, 1860 – August 31, 1951) was a Lithuanian-born Jewish-American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.[Sanford E. Marovitz, Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. 1-5.] Cahan was one of the founders of The Forward (), an American Yiddish publication, and was its editor-in-chief for 43 years.
Early life and childhood
Abraham Cahan was born July 7, 1860, in Paberžė in
Lithuania (at the time in Vilnius Governorate,
Russian Empire), into an
Orthodox Judaism,
Lithuanian Jews family.
His grandfather was a
rabbi in
Vidzy,
Vitebsk Region, his father a teacher of
Hebrew and the
Talmud. The devoutly religious family moved to
Vilnius in 1866, where the young Cahan studied to become a rabbi. He, however, was attracted by secular knowledge and clandestinely studied
Russian language, ultimately demanding that his parents allow him to enter the Teachers Institute of Vilnius from which he graduated in 1881. He was appointed as a teacher in a Jewish school funded by the Russian government in
Velizh, Vitebsk, in the same year.
[Marovitz, Abraham Cahan, pp. 1-12.]
Immigration to the United States
In
Russian Empire, repression from both the government and the Russian Orthodox Church restricted the travel, settlement, and educational opportunities of Jewish subjects, who were subject to discrimination and brutality.
[Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Jewish History: East European Jews in America, 1880-1920: Immigration and Adaption. New York: Routledge, 1998; pg. 60.] By 1879, when Cahan was still a teenager, he had associated himself with the growing radical revolutionary movement in Russia.
[Marovitz, Abraham Cahan, pp. xvii-xix.] After the Emperor Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by a member of the
Narodnaya Volya in March 1881, all revolutionary sympathizers became suspect to the Russian police. In 1882 the Russian police searched Cahan’s room for radical publications that could be linked to the revolutionaries.
The visit from the police prompted the young socialist schoolteacher to join the great emigration of Russian Jews to the United States.
Cahan arrived by steamboat in Philadelphia on June 6 of 1882 at the age of 21 and immediately traveled to New York City, where he would live for the rest of his life.
[Isakov Vladimir, "The Conspiracy Conception in the Radical Socialist Thought of Russia of the 1840s-1880s: Periodization and Typology." Social Sciences, vol. 38 (2007), pg. 35.]
Career
In July 1882, barely a month after arriving in the United States, Cahan attended his first American socialist meeting, and a month later he gave his first socialist speech, speaking in Yiddish.
[Ehud Manor, Forward: The Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) Newspaper: Immigrants, Socialism and Jewish Politics in New York, 1890-1917. Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2009; pg. 28.] Although he found American society to be a vast improvement over life in Russia, he began to express certain criticisms of American conditions from a
Marxism perspective.
Cahan quickly mastered English language. In addition to writing for various publications, by 1883 he dedicated much of his time to teaching English to working class Jewish immigrants. He taught at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association ( YMHA) and often incorporated socialist speeches into his lesson plans.[Jirousek-Falls, "Abraham Cahan and Jewish Immigrant Education: For Men and Women," pp. 38-40.] He also briefly taught in the English Department at the Orthodox Etz Chaim Yeshiva.[William I. Gleberzon, "'Intellectuals and the American Socialist Party, 1901-1917," Canadian Journal of History, vol. 11 (1976), pg. 48.] Cahan’s education in Russian and English and his literary and journalistic abilities allowed him to excel as a socialist, and toward the end of his career he was considered a leading figure of the radical Jewish left.[Lori Jirousek-Falls, "Abraham Cahan and Jewish Immigrant Education: For Men and Women." Studies in American Jewish Literature 27 (2007), pg. 36.]
In keeping with his socialist politics, Cahan believed that immigrants needed to combine formal learning with informal studies about local life and community customs to achieve not only an education but also integration into American society.[Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985; pg. 74.][Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993; pg. 105.] He also encouraged women to use labor and education to elevate their status in society.[Wade, Jewish American Literature, 32.]
The Jewish Daily Forward
Soon after arriving in America Cahan wrote articles on socialism and science, and translated literary works for the pages of the Yiddish language newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party, the
Arbeiter Zeitung ()
Cahan edited the
Arbeiter Zeitung from 1891 to 1895, and followed that position with an editorship at the paper
Di Tsukunft () through 1887.
[Jirousek-Falls, "Abraham Cahan and Jewish Immigrant Education: For Men and Women," pg. 36.] Afterward, Cahan was made a full-time reporter for the
New York Commercial Advertiser, and it was this position as an apprentice of reporter
Lincoln Steffens that prepared Cahan for his coming role as a founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward.
[Yaavoc Goldstein, Jewish Socialists in the United States (Portland: Academic Press, 1998), 73-75.] Cahan founded the
Forward while he was still juggling several newspaper jobs and published its first issue in 1897.
[Manor, Forward, pg. 38.]
The horror of the Kishinev pogrom, which the Forward covered extensively, prompted Cahan to take on leadership of the Forward full-time in 1903, taking over total editorial control and running the newspaper full-time until 1946.[Manor, Forward, pg. 37.] In his years working at the Forward, Cahan transformed the self-identified socialist newspaper from an obscure paper with only 6000 readers to the forefront of Yiddish journalism. The Jewish Daily Forward became a symbol of American socialism and Jewish immigration, and assumed the role of an Americanizing agent instructing its readers in the social, economic, political, and cultural aspects of the United States.
Fiction writing
Cahan distinguished himself through not only Yiddish literature but also his English
fiction that dealt with the
Sociology and
History process of immigrants becoming Americans. By 1896, Cahan had published his first short story, “A Providential Match”, and just a year later he published his first novel,
(later filmed as
Hester Street). By 1901, Cahan had published six of his stories in a variety of popular magazines.
Cahan’s most popular novel was
The Rise of David Levinsky, a semi-autobiographical account that mirrored Cahan’s own experiences of immigration, describing a Jewish immigrant's process of Americanization
and showcasing the Jewish-socialist cultural establishments in New York.
[Tony Michaels, "Exporting Yiddish Socialism: New York's Role in the Russian Jewish Workers' Movement," Jewish Social Studies, vol. 16 (2009), pg. 4.]
Death and legacy
Cahan died of congestive heart failure on August 31, 1951, at the age of 91, in Beth Israel Hospital in New York City.
He was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York.
Cahan’s education of immigrants, his work through the Jewish Daily Forward, and his commitment to socialism influenced the Jewish immigrants in New York who came into contact with his work. In addition to influencing American Jews culture, his works were published in Russia, leaving a mark on the workers' movement.
Works
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" 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)
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"The Education of Abraham Cahan." Translation of Bleter Fun Mein Leben, Volumes I and II by Leon Stein, Abraham Conan, and Lynn Davison. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.
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"Bleter Fun Mein Leben"
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The Imported Bridegroom, and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, 1898, Boston, New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company.
-
. New York D. Appleton and Company 1896.
See also
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Yiddish literature
-
Yiddishist movement
-
History of the socialist movement in the United States
-
Democratic socialism
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Jewish views and involvement in US politics
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General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia
Footnotes
Further reading
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Jules Chametzky, From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.
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Tobias Brinkmann, Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
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Melech Epstein, Profiles of Eleven. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965.
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Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt, 1989.
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Seth Lipsky, "The Rise of Abraham Cahan." New York, NY: Nextbook/Schocken, 2013.
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Ernest Poole, "Abraham Cahan: Socialist — Journalist — Friend of the Ghetto," The Outlook, Oct. 28, 1911.
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Ronald Sanders, The Lower East Side Jews: An Immigrant Generation. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1987.
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Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
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French Strother, "Abraham Cahan, A Leader of the Jews," The World's Work 26, pp. 470–474.
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Leon Wexelstein, "Abraham Cahan," The American Mercury 9, No. 33 (Sept. 1926), pp. 88–94.
External links
