Abraham Cahan

Sociologist

• Born: July 6 or 7, 1860
• Birthplace: Podberezy, near Vilna (now Vilnius), Russian Empire (now Lithuania)
• Died: August 31, 1951
• Place of death: New York, New York

Lithuanian-born journalist, activist, and writer

A labor activist and democratic socialist, Cahan was a novelist and the longtime editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward (Forvarts).

Areas of achievement: Activism; journalism; literature

Early Life

Abraham Cahan (kahn) was born in Podberezy, the only child of Shachne Cahan, a poor shopkeeper and Hebrew teacher, and Sarah Goldarbeter. When Abraham Cahan was almost six years old, the family moved to Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of rabbinic learning and the seat of a growing modernization movement. Although Cahan went to religious school and studied the tractates of the Talmud, he also read deeply in secular works. Mainly through independent study, Cahan mastered Russian, and in 1878 he gained admission to the Vilna State Teachers Training College, a center for student radicalism. Within three years Cahan became a certified schoolmaster, a socialist, and an underground revolutionary. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, Cahan, though not involved, had to flee the police, whose suspicions had been aroused by the young teacher’s radical associations. As an expedient, he joined with an Am Olam (people of the earth) group, which, in the wake of several hundred post-assassination pogroms in Ukraine, was emigrating to the United States to experiment with Jewish agricultural communalism.

After Cahan’s arrival in New York on June 6, 1882, he worked at a variety of odd jobs, mostly in factories. His greatest joy, however, came from teaching rudimentary English to his East Side neighbors at night. To learn the language better himself, the twenty-two-year-old Cahan sat among twelve- and thirteen-year-olds (mostly non-Jews) in an elementary school on New York’s lower East Side.

Life’s Work

Cahan continued to teach English to immigrants for ten years, but his main interest was in education in a broader sense. Lecturing in English as well as in Yiddish (a novelty among his socialist colleagues in the early 1880’s), Cahan in 1884 and 1885 helped organize a Jewish tailors’ union and a Jewish cloakmakers’ union. This marked the beginning of his lifelong association with the militant labor movement and socialism. Cahan’s primary intention was to bring his leftist outlook to the Jewish proletariat through journalism. In addition to joining the Socialist Labor Party of America, he wrote articles, mostly on socialism, and translated European literary works for the party’s Yiddish-language newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung. He also became a star reporter for Lincoln Steffens’s New York Commercial Advertiser in 1897 and worked there until 1902, even as he continued to play a leading role in socialist politics. At the same time he wrote for a variety of Yiddish journals, including the newly founded Forward, before taking the helm there in 1903.

Cahan turned Forward, which was a virtually unreadable, somewhat sectarian Yiddish daily into a landmark of American and progressive investigative journalism. Under his editorship, Forward deemphasized theoretical pieces and paid more attention to presenting the class struggle in the form of stories and news from the home and factory. In this way, and by featuring literary pieces and short stories, the paper remained attractive to nonsocialist as well as socialist Jews and reached a circulation of more than 300,000, with editions in other large cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

In addition to his labor militancy, Cahan was a vigorous advocate of tenement and sweatshop reform, and he supported the crusading work of Jane Addams and other progressive settlement house workers in Chicago and New York. Forward remained socialist but became increasingly anticommunist after 1917 in the face of militant Bolshevism and Soviet authoritarianism. Cahan was particularly interested in the oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Although he did not consider himself a Zionist, he paid tribute to the courage and idealism of Zionist pioneers who settled in Palestine. Throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s Cahan continued to be productive and creative. Only after suffering a stroke in 1946 did he stop appearing at the Forward office on a daily basis. He died of heart failure at the age of ninety-one.

Significance

Cahan made Forward into a creative tool for Jewish immigrants struggling to be American, and it became a critical component of the Jewish labor movement and Jewish socialism. The paper, under Cahan, was also a defender and patron of Yiddish literature and modern culture. Among the authors sustained by Forward were Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Cahan pushed Yiddish to journalistic and literary heights. At the same time, he also tried to broaden the Yiddish-speaking community with articles and stories both in the English press and in several of his English-language books, among them Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and his classic novel of the urban immigrant experience, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Cahan continues to be remembered as a great journalist, a legendary teacher to a people in the process of acculturation, and an indefatigable crusader for progressive causes.

Bibliography

Cahan, Abraham. The Education of Abraham Cahan. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969. Cahan’s autobiography.

Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Contains a beautifully written, perceptive interpretation of Cahan’s life and the immigrant world he inhabited.

Marovitz, Sanford E. Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne, 1996. A critical, interpretive biography of Cahan and his work.

Rischin, Moses, ed. Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. A collection of Cahan’s English-language journalism demonstrating his wit and sensibility.

Stein, Leon, et al., trans. The Education of Abraham Cahan. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969. Invaluable translation of the first three volumes of Cahan’s autobiography.