Title: Abraham Cahan
First published: 1996
Description: In Abraham Cahan, Sanford E. Marovitz relates in telling detail Cahan's rise from green newspaperman to discriminating novelist and shrewd editor of the daily Yiddish Forward. After a difficult start, Cahan, a founder of the Forward, edited the paper for nearly 50 years, bringing its circulation to an impressive quarter million during its heyday in the early 1920s.

An ardent advocate of assimilation, Cahan saw the Forward as a means of acculturating newly arrived Jewish immigrants to America and helping them gain economic stability.

Although Cahan was first and last a newspaperman, he wrote what is still considered one of the best fictional accounts of the American immigrant experience: The Rise of David Levinsky. Written in English (as were all the novels and stories covered in Abraham Cahan) and published in 1917, the novel tells the story of the title character's rise from poor Hebrew scholar in Russia to successful businessman in America and of the psychological and spiritual price he pays for neglecting his emotional life.

For this and other works of fiction - such as the Yekl, A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and the short stories collected in The Imported Bridegroom (1898) - Cahan was both praised and criticized for his brutal realism. He populated his stories with flawed and often conflicted characters and spared his readers few of the grim details of existence in the Jewish ghetto.

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Part of Cahan's motivation for writing fiction in English was to educate non-Jewish American readers about Jewish culture, history, and persecution in both the Old and New Worlds. His novel The White Terror and the Red (1905) particularly dramatized the violence Eastern European Jews suffered at the hands of czarist police.

Another motivation for writing in English was to humanize Jews in the eyes of America's Gentiles, most of whom at that time perceived the Jewish people to be strangely different from themselves. Interestingly, in spite of Cahan's sympathies with the plight of his fellow Jews, he did not practice his religion, but embraced socialism and promoted it as a means to help Jewish immigrants achieve social and economic security.
Subjects: Intellectual life, Criticism and interpretation, Jews, Jews in literature
Places: United States
People: Abraham Cahan (1860-1951)
LC classification: PS3505.A254 Z8 1996