The Rise of Abraham Cahan

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

For students of early twentieth-century Jewish American literature and culture, Seth Lipsky’s compact chronicle of the life and times of Abraham Cahan will be of only limited interest. Distilled from a modest range of primary and secondary sources—above all from Cahan’s autobiography, The Education of Abraham Cahan (1969); Ronald Sanders’s still richly evocative The Downtown Jews (1969); and an unpublished 1959 dissertation on Cahan’s life by Theodore Marvin Pollock—Lipsky offers a fiercely chronological and surprisingly partisan account of Cahan’s life.For Lipsky, as all previous students of Cahan have observed, Cahan’s journey to America in 1881 mirrors the collective uprooting of millions of Jews—exiles from across the Pale of Settlement seeking new lives in a bewildering, and often unwelcoming, new world. In his journalism and above all in his fiction, Cahan registered the anxieties and hopes of his fellow immigrants. Lipsky argues that Cahan himself, like his famous alter ego David Levinsky, remained forever caught between the claims of Jewish memory (and with it, “the wonder of Jewish life”) and the appeal of secularism, above all the embrace of socialist beliefs, forged in his youth. Yet Cahan’s early radical ethos was ultimately deflected, adjusted by various political turns, especially on the matter of Zionism and support for the state of Israel later in the twentieth century (Cahan died in 1951). Eventually, Lipsky remarks about Cahan’s politics, “all the beliefs that Cahan and his comrades on the left held so dear would be profoundly shaken. . . . Cahan and the Forward soon grasped that Communism was a flawed, even evil enterprise.”In this respect The Rise of Abraham Cahan is unfortunately marred by Lipsky’s political agenda to vindicate his own legacy as the founder and editor of a revived English-language edition of the Forward, which he launched in 1990. (The Yiddish Forward had continued daily publication after Cahan’s death, but had become a weekly by 1983.) A few years into his editorship Lipsky was deemed, in his own words, “an unfit heir”1 to Cahan; the Yiddish newspaper’s executive council found his politics distasteful. As an avowed neoconservative, Lipsky had supported American policy in Vietnam and embraced Ronald Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies. In the effort to “re-right” history, Lipsky now claims that Cahan’s political positions at midcentury anticipated subsequent world-shattering events like the fall of communism in 1989. “Strikingly,” Lipsky argues, “in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the issues that Cahan championed in his later years at the Forward were picked up not by partisans of the left but by factions that had moved to the right.”Whatever the ultimate truth or relevance either of Cahan’s or the Forward ’s shifts in politics over time might reveal, Lipsky’s claims about Cahan’s imagined political turns clearly touched a raw nerve for those who associated the Forward with a left-leaning, social democratic ethos. Historian John Higham observed about Cahan’s legacy, “Eventually [Cahan’s] socialism faded into a cherished memory.”2 To have the founder’s memory impugned, and thus his legacy betrayed, by the Forward ’s conservative new editor appears to have been judged an intolerable situation.Despite such weirdly self-serving assertions about its subject, The Rise of Abraham Cahan is strongest and most interesting when chronicling the intramural political squabbles among the various Yiddish dailies in early twentieth-century New York. Lipsky narrates Cahan’s own education as a journalist, above all his stint from 1897 to 1903 as a features reporter for Lincoln Steffens’s Commercial Advertiser and other English-language publications (collected by Moses Rischin in Grandma Never Lived in America [1985]). Perhaps most helpful for students who know little of Cahan’s fascinating biography is Lipsky’s account of Cahan’s trips in the 1920s, the heyday of his Forward editorship, from New York to Europe, the Middle East, and Russia. Reporting from Palestine on the emergence of Israel, Cahan softened his previously anti-Zionist stance: “My feelings have changed, positively,” he confessed, “toward the socialist segment of the Zionist movement.” For Lipsky it was Cahan’s openness to change and the Forward ’s democratic ethos to encourage, from the beginning, the expression of a range of opinions about the status and future of the state of Israel that marks Cahan’s achievement as a major figure in the history of U.S. journalism. “He had succeeded,” Lipsky argues, “in creating a newspaper flexible enough to accommodate a no-holds-barred debate on what he now, belatedly, comprehended was a defining issue of Jewish identity in the twentieth century.”Lipsky, however, is less helpful for students of Jewish American literature and culture when he tries to explain the achievement—and importance—of the Forward itself, which was legendary for its arts and cultural criticism and the serializing of major and as yet undiscovered Yiddish writers. “In my home,” the longtime Forward labor columnist Gus Tyler recalled, “the Forward was treated like the Bible. You didn’t tear, cut or muddy the pages of the Forward any more than you did the Torah.”3 What’s missing from Lipsky’s account of Cahan’s life and the newspaper upon that he placed his indelible stamp is a thick enough description of the rich cultural-emotional-intellectual atmosphere of Yiddishkeit that Cahan’s Forward generated and sustained for its avid readers, hungry for Jewish knowledge. How did the Forward, at least in the early years, help ease its transplanted readers through the passage from greenhorn to citizen? “Cahan saw his paper as embodying the potentialities and contradictions of the entire immigrant experience,” Irving Howe asserts in World of Our Fathers.4 In Lipsky’s account, the Forward’s evocation of an immigrant world remains, alas, opaque.Despite the requisite nods to the famous “Bintel Brief” advice columns or Cahan’s imperial editing style, Lipsky is, for the most part, unable to recover or convey what he himself describes as the newspaper’s crucial office as “an enlightened cousin who had been in America just that much longer and could serve as a guide to the country’s strange ways.” By contrast, the stunning archive of photographs in the recent A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward (2007) reveals how Cahan’s newspaper carried images of Jewish family life (the gallery of missing husbands, for example), popular culture, and the looming political traumas from around the world. In this respect the Forward facilitated the immigrants’ adjustment to America, assuaging the ache of new world displacement. It also became, as the Jewish newspaper of record, a source of Jewish memory, a witness to world events. About Cahan’s key texts like Yekl (1896), “The Imported Bridegroom” (1898), or The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the reason why we continue to care about him as a figure in American literary history, Lipsky provides dutiful plot summaries, offers a description of the works’ reception in the contemporary press, revisits the familiar account of how William Dean Howells encouraged and promoted Cahan’s career as a writer in English. In the case of David Levinsky, Lipsky recognizes the range of ironic parallels between Cahan’s biography and his alter ego, a character out of his own haunted past that he conjured during a period of great personal stress. In a brief but compelling reading Lipsky shows how the figure of Levinsky recapitulates Cahan’s own “internal” struggle with his discarded religious past, and the “paradox of America as a place where immigrants, capitalists or not, could quickly rise to power and prominence. At some point Cahan must have realized that while he was a socialist and the Forward a complex profit-sharing association, he had risen to great heights by bringing to light the issues of the working poor and striving immigrants. In the process, he himself had become a captain of industry.”In the end, however, despite Lipsky’s limited interest in Cahan as a literary figure, The Rise of Abraham Cahan invites us to reconsider Cahan’s place in the canon of Jewish American literature, a reassessment clearly under way. “Cahan was a gifted writer,” Irving Howe observed, “more so in English, a language he never spoke with ease, than in Yiddish.”5 Recent scholarship situates Cahan’s writing along the linguistic border of English and Yiddish, thus highlighting the dislocations (assimilating English contesting a demotic mongrel “Yinglish”) within both “white” and “immigrant” readers. Engaging this rich multi-lingual-cultural field, Aviva Taubenfeld charts Cahan’s mode of “translinguification,” while Sara Blair notes “the energetic bivalence of Cahan’s dialect” as part of his “collage aesthetic,” in the process revealing the implicit modernist aspect of Cahan’s late-nineteenth-century fictions. Recent work also situates Cahan’s work in terms of discourses of masculinity and blackness. And in a recent essay Michael P. Kramer shows how midcentury Jewish literary intellectuals (like Howe himself, along with Isaac Rosenfeld) seized on the figure of Cahan’s Levinsky as a projection of their own haunted Jewish filiality and sense of homelessness; in the process these famous literary critics, sons of immigrant parents, invented the canon of Jewish American literary history, with Cahan placed at its origin, and the figure of Levinsky already anticipating the future of Jewish American experience imagined as “completed,” “exhausted”—the so-called “end” of Jewish American literature that Howe mis-prophesied in 1977, but had already implicitly predicted a generation earlier.6Thus Abraham Cahan remains a crucial author for Jewish literary studies. Lipsky’s biography helpfully charts the arc of Cahan’s career as the foremost Yiddish journalist of the twentieth century, but Cahan’s presence as a figure in Jewish and American, indeed in world history, remains elusive. He still awaits a fuller, truly immersive accounting of his life and times.