Cahan, Abraham

CAHAN, ABRAHAM (1860–1951). Best known to the American public as the author of the highly praised immigrant novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Cahan was also the longtime editor of the influential social democratic Yiddish-language newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward, in its day the most widely read Yiddish publication in the world. Cahan helped found the paper in 1897 with a group of Jewish trade unionists and Socialist Labor Party members who had become estranged from Daniel De Leon and the party as too rigid and sectarian. Thereafter, for about five years, Cahan pursued a literary and journalistic career in English, returning to reign as editor of the Forward from 1903 until his death.

Born near Vilnius in Lithuania, Cahan joined a revolutionary reading group while a student at the Teachers Training Institute, and feared arrest after the assassination of the czar in 1881. He fled to the United States in 1882, became one of the very earliest American socialist agitators in the Yiddish language, and was active in the New York of the 1880s–1890s in Jewish labor and socialist politics. Sent as a delegate to the second and third congresses of the Socialist International in 1891 and 1893, he worked as editor and writer for five Yiddish radical periodicals, including the earliest journal, Di Zukunft, and the earliest notable newspaper, Di Arbeter Zeitung.

Cahan’s politics evolved from the pre-Marxist amalgam of idealized socialism and anarchism he brought from Russia to an increasingly right-wing social democratic position. He welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917, but from the middle 1920s onward was bitterly and actively anticommunist, a position the Forward urged upon the Jewish public. Nominally a socialist all his life, Cahan helped found the American Labor Party in 1936 along with Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky, primarily to support Roosevelt and the New Deal.

At least as important as his formal politics was Cahan’s view of Yiddish and Yiddishkayt (culture using Yiddish language in daily life and arts). He advocated that the Jewish immigrant masses Americanize themselves as rapidly and effectively as possible, even though his own literary work frequently showed the social and psychological price such a course exacted. Cahan’s position put him severely at odds with Yiddishists, many religious groupings, Zionists, and other advocates of Jewish cultural autonomy (including some Marxists). Paradoxically, by its use of Yiddish—however Americanized or vulgarized—and by its attention to Jewish workers’ lives, the Forward heightened and has maintained to date a considerable degree of Jewish consciousness.

Cahan, Abraham. Bleter fun Mayn Lebn (Pages from my life). 5 vols. New York: Forwards Publishing Association, 1926–1931.

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

Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

Sanders, Ronald. Lower East Side Jews: An Immigrant Generation. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999.

Guide to the Papers of Abraham Cahan (1860-1951). YIVO Institute for Jewish Reseach. http://www.yivoarchives.org/index.php?p=collections/findingaid&id=34284&q=Freie+Arbei
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