Abraham Cahan

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Abraham Cahan.

Abraham Cahan (July 7, 1860 - 1951) was an Russian-American novelist and labor leader.

He was born in Podberezhye, Lithuania, into a Jewish Orthodox family. His grandfather was a rabbi and preacher in Vidz, Vitebsk; and his father was a teacher of Hebrew and Talmud. The family, which was devoutly Orthodox, moved in 1866 to Wilna; there young Cahan received the usual Jewish preparatory education for the rabbinate. He, however, was attracted by secular knowledge and clandestinely studied the Russian language, ultimately prevailing on his parents to allow him to enter the Teachers Institute of Wilna, from which he was graduated in 1881. He was appointed teacher in a Jewish government school in Velizh, Vitebsk, in the same year; but a domiciliary visit by the police, resulting from his connection with the revolutionary movement, caused him to flee the country.

In 1881 he emigrated to the United States to escape the mass roundups of revolutionaries following the assassination of Russia's Tsar Alexander II. After many vicissitudes, he arrived in New York City in June, 1882. Having become an ardent socialist while in Russia, he devoted all the time he could spare from work and study to spread his favorite ideas among the Jewish working men of New York. He thus became the pioneer socialist labor leader among them, and was the first in the United States to deliver socialist speeches in Yiddish. Cahan was either originator, collaborator, or editor of almost all the earlier socialist periodicals published in that dialect. He occupied various positions in labor organizations, from walking delegate to representative at the International Socialist Congress at Brussels. He was the founder-editor of the Yiddish newspaper, Forverts. By 1924 Forverts had over a quarter of a million readers, making it the most successful non-English-language newspaper in the U.S. and the leading Yiddish paper in the world.

Cahan quickly mastered the English language, and four years after his arrival in New York taught immigrants in one of the evening schools. Later he began to contribute articles to the "Sun" and other newspapers printed in English, and was for several years employed in a literary capacity by the "Commercial Advertiser," to which paper he is still a regular contributor. While his Yiddish writings are mostly confined to propaganda, his literary work in English is mainly descriptive; and he has few, if any, equals in the United States in depicting the life of the so-called "ghetto," where he lived and worked for more than twenty years. "A Providential Match" was the first of Cahan's tales to be published (in "Short Stories," 1895).

His first novel, Yekl:A Tale of the New York Ghetto, was published in 1896. (In 1975 it would be released as the film, Hester Street). The graphic story of an Americanized Russo-Jewish immigrant, it attracted much attention and was favorably commented on by the press both in America and in England. W. D. Howells compared Cahan's work to that of Stephen Crane, and prophesied for him a successful literary future ("The World," New York, July 26, 1896). Cahan's next work of fiction, "The Imported Bridegroom, and Other Stories", published in 1898, was also well received and favorably noticed by the general press. Of his shorter publications, the article on the Russian Jews in the United States, which appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," July, 1898, deserves to be specially mentioned. His other important work, The Rise of David Levinsky, was published in 1917.

Cahan also wrote a 5-volume Yiddish-language autobiography, Bleter fun mayn Leben, the first three volumes of which were translated into English as The Education of Abraham Cahan.