The publication of Bleter fun mayn lebn (Pages of My Life), Abe Cahan’s autobiography, was spread out over the years 1926 to 1931. The five volumes of the memoirs of the Forverts editor were published in Yiddish by the Forverts Association in New York and would not appear in English until much later (1969), reworked and abridged, under the title The Education of Abraham Cahan1.
At the time he published his memoirs, Abraham Cahan was the all-powerful director of the Forverts, the Jewish Daily Forward, the most influential Yiddish daily in the American context (and far beyond it), whose readership at that period reached some 250,000 readers and whose letters column, the Bintel Brief, had become a veritable institution, a mirror of immigration and of adaptation to the New World2. But he was also one of the pioneers of American Jewish social democracy, a political agitator and a community leader influential through the press, an intellectual between two worlds, and a writer recognized both in the immigrant literature in Yiddish and in the context of the American realist school, partly linked to the muckrakers — those journalists hungry for the sensational who crisscrossed the immigrant neighborhoods to offer another vision of the “American dream.”
A major figure of the East Side from the earliest years of the Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, Abraham Cahan was born in a shtetl near Vilna (Vilnius) in 1860. His father ran a small religious school (heder), but material difficulties forced the family to settle in Vilna, to shift into petty commerce, and, for the young Cahan, to adapt to the emancipating currents of the big city. The learning of Russian, a secularized education, and soon his frequenting of revolutionary circles would mark this evolution. Problems of personal safety (trouble over conscription, clandestine propaganda activities at the moment when the police were investigating the assassination of Tsar Alexander II), as well as a militant commitment within the orbit of Am Olam (a revolutionary group organizing a collective emigration to the United States with the aim of founding communist agricultural communities there), pushed him to emigrate. He arrived in New York in June 1882, in the very midst of the first waves of mass emigration of the Eastern Jews fleeing the threat of pogroms and economic hardship.
After a first volume devoted to Russia, the second, titled “My First Eight Years in America,” is given over to the problems of immediate adaptation to the new forms of existence, the struggle for better material conditions, the passage from anarchism to socialism, the discovery of American political life. The third volume (“Seven Years of Activity in the Community”) covers the period that separates the founding of the Arbeter Tseitung (1890) from that of the Forverts, the Jewish Daily Forward (1897). In it one finds a detailed account of his travels in Europe, when he attended the socialist congresses of Brussels (1891) and Zurich (1893) as the representative of the Jewish section of the American Socialist Party. The emphasis is placed in particular on the problems posed by the creation of a popular, socialist press in Yiddish. The fourth volume (“The Years of Maturity”) evokes the beginnings of his literary career in English, as well as a five-year period he spent “discovering the world” — that is, working as an English-language reporter for various American newspapers. It is a new life, far from the Jewish world and far from the Forverts, which he had helped to create but whose editorship he had abandoned a few months later, failing at that point to impose his views. When, in 1902, he was recalled to the paper’s directorship by his former collaborators, who were incapable of ensuring its success, it was with full powers and free to introduce the reforms he judged necessary. His personal life would henceforth merge with the life of the paper he would direct practically until his death, in 1951.
The fifth volume retraces this evolution up to the eve of the First World War, the growing success of the Forverts, the opposition encountered, the long parenthesis of a new journey to Europe. The second part is sharply set apart from the whole, breaking the thread of the chronological narration, and constitutes the meticulous exposition of a case of antisemitism in which Cahan took part in a wholly direct and emotional manner — the Frank Affair seeming very much to be his “Dreyfus Affair.” Falsely accused of murder, Leo Frank was finally lynched in Atlanta in 1915, and Cahan, beyond his personal conviction and his ties to the accused, whom he had met and interviewed, seems to use this story — already old by the time he writes — for a polemical purpose directly tied to the climate of growing antisemitism at the start of the 1930s.
A Mediator Among Several Worlds
Among the many facets of a figure and of a body of testimonial work, one may choose to bring to light the immigrant’s problems of adaptation to the host society and the cultural dimensions of a multiform activity within the Jewish community of the Lower East Side, underscoring what this indomitable activism contributed to shaping, in continuity with or in rupture from the collective3. A cultural intermediary between two worlds, Abe Cahan was able to take the measure of the evolution of American Jewish society, perhaps embodied it with all its contradictions and its richness. He chose to gauge its destiny by the yardstick of adaptability to the surrounding world, and no doubt, in the last analysis, to assimilation. His inner ambitions drove him to seek confrontation with a form of universality (literature, revolution, materialism) that seems to be embodied in his participation in the American realist literary school or in the campaign for Henry George’s election to Congress in 1886. From a stance of tension toward the Other, one would tend, however, to retain rather what is the creation of an autonomous culture within the limits of the ethnic group’s creativity, striking for its capacities of collective elaboration. Yet one must still assess the role of the intellectual in his complex relations with the American Jewish working class, considering the period running roughly from 1882 to 1910. To what extent is Abe Cahan representative of those Jewish intellectuals whose education and revolutionary ideal had distanced them from traditional Jewish society and whom emigration, the blurring of social conditions that occurred at that point (in the early years at least), and radical ideology would plunge back into the midst of the masses whose language of daily communication was Yiddish? How is one to gauge the more or less homogeneous whole of their desire for emancipation? How is one to detect its contradictions? How is one to assess the outside-inside dialectic that, in Cahan’s case, ends up producing the Forverts — a mirror of the community, a collection of collective voices partly filtered through the intellectual authority, an instrument of adaptation, even of assimilation (but in Yiddish)?
This overarching set of questions is bound up, moreover, with Cahan’s status as a (bilingual) writer and journalist. In 1889 he published in English an article titled “Realism” in the Workmen’s Advocate, immediately followed by another, “Social Remedies,” which clearly defines the order of his ideological predilections. Nothing very new in the theoretical elaboration of the young emigrant steeped in Marxist materialism, Darwinism, and political economy. His models in literature came from the Russian school, from Tolstoy above all. He nonetheless met, in this respect, a whole current of the American literature of his time, which would define itself around W. D. Howells, Stephen Crane, and Hamlin Garland. It is a state of mind he would never relinquish but which, at the moment he formulated it, appeared innovative. These preoccupations recur in his other domains of activity, in journalism in particular, where, as with literature, he shared certain of the contemporary ideas and frequented the men who embodied them: men such as Jacob Riis, a journalist he met in the police precincts where he reported, himself the author of reportages on the East Side, published under the highly polemical title How the Other Half Lives; Hutchins Hapgood, whom he would introduce into Jewish circles, the author for his part of a book on the Lower East Side, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902); and finally Lincoln Steffens, an editor at the Commercial Advertiser, under whose direction he would work for several years, the author of the same kind of investigations denouncing the living conditions of immigrant and tenement America. Social preoccupations, which were far from reflecting the state of mind of the majority of American journalists, but which have their counterpart in the University Settlement movement advocating the installation of American intellectuals in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of New York and the creation of cultural islands where the children of immigrants might be educated (Lillian Wald and Charles B. Stover became well-known figures of the East Side and spent long years there)4.
Among these various currents, not always free of paternalism, Abe Cahan spoke in the name of doctrinal realism, but also — and this is connected — of the East Side, and often served as a hyphen between the American reformers and the population of the ghetto.
Can one infer from this that the imperative of scientific popularization he put into practice throughout his life is also an avatar of his identity at the crossroads of cultures? Cahan always thought of himself as an educator, an heir of the Russian populists who, in the same period, advocated the return to the people and the assumption by the intellectuals of responsibility for the people’s “moral uplift.” The numerous lectures on the work of Marx, the translation of Book I of Das Kapital into Yiddish and its publication in the Forverts, the projected theoretical study on the relations between Darwinism and socialism, the researches in anthropology — these participate more in the educational labor of the militant intellectual than in any ambition to formulate a personal body of thought.
Now, for Cahan, the masses were practically embodied in the Jewish population of the Lower East Side. Having taken part in the creation of the first Jewish union in 1884, a member of the socialist party, a political agitator, the director of a paper in which the great textile strikes reverberated (and were sometimes financed), he was directly plunged into the political and social demands of his group of origin. Was his growing political reformism the reflection of an overall curve of the Jewish community’s social ascent? It is possible, but within the temporal limits of the autobiography it is inaccurate; in 1910 the Jewish population of the East Side was still very largely proletarianized. It must be added that this imperative of maintaining the bond with the people is not, in Cahan, merely a characteristic tied to the ethnic group. As a reporter, he crisscrossed all the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and seems above all impassioned by the intense sense of life that emanates from the various communities:
I spent a great deal of time in the Jewish quarter and in the Italian quarter, as well as in the Greek quarter that was beginning to develop; likewise in the Armenian, Swedish, Syrian, and Czech quarters. And sometimes in the Polish quarter of Brooklyn. I would stroll about there, I frequented the cafés and the shops, I struck up conversations with all sorts of people. I had no special purpose; it was interest in the colorful and manifold life of New York that drove me there.5 (IV, 240).
From this interest in human beings seems to flow the interest in language, which constitutes the living expression of a group, the consciousness of its collective identity. To keep in contact with the language of the people was, for Cahan, to renew a deep and complex relationship to Yiddish, the language of the majority of the East Side’s workers. It was therefore to follow it through its transformations on contact with the new language, English, to espouse its internal evolution and return it to the men from whom it emanated by way of the language of the Forverts. It is from then on difficult to gauge the factors of interaction; thus the detractors of the Forverts would be able to accuse the paper of corrupting the language, when it had perhaps only recorded its transformations. The preface to the Bleter is almost entirely devoted to this problem of language within autobiographical writing, and it is interesting to note that Cahan justifies the difference in language used in the first volume and in the others by emphasizing the difference in context. No doubt the possibilities of control are limited to the use or non-use of Americanisms. But the example is striking enough in that language is conceived as directly in touch with a sociological and even geographical reality. In the end, Yiddish is seen above all as a class language, which can serve as an instrument of adaptation to the outside society, a medium of education and perhaps inevitably of assimilation.
The awareness of this transitional and perishable character of the language does not appear altogether explicitly in the autobiography. One may suppose that Cahan had too many fierce opponents on this terrain to have felt the need to formulate clearly what, after all, designates the consciousness an ethnic group may have of its own disappearance. But we know from other sources that the 1930s saw precisely the opposing currents of assimilation and of a cultural autonomy maintained through the promotion of Yiddish clash within the Yiddish-speaking community — in particular through the learning of that language by the second-generation children in the Jewish schools of the (Bundist) Arbeter Ring, of the socialist-territorialists, or of the Poale Zion (left-wing Zionists). The debate, naturally, took place in the columns of the Forverts, where Cahan posed the question explicitly: “Can one promote a language by artificial means?” A fierce adversary of what he denounced as a “sectarian fanaticism” aimed at making Jewish children into misfits, he then took up, quite clearly, a position in favor of assimilation — “honorable in America,” whereas it was not so in Russia because it was coerced and forced.
From the autobiography we can clearly discern the movement of tension toward the outside world, the other pole of that dialectic which carries him simultaneously toward the proletarianized masses and away from them, toward literature in English, the act of personal creation which moreover (is it really a paradox?) seeks to give to America and to its literature an image of the ghetto. In parallel he attempts to bring the world into the cultural horizon of the immigrants, through the Forverts, and borne along by the constant concern to evaluate Jewish cultural productions according to the criteria of universal literature. Thus does he proceed with the “classics” of Yiddish literature, with the Yiddish theater…
To write in English, on the other hand, clearly participated for him in an old dream, which he traces back to the very first days of his stay in America and which would first be made concrete in the projects of American journalism: “I dreamed of being a writer in English, and the Sun was at the very forefront of my hopes.” This remark is situated in 1887 (vol. II, p. 326). Thereafter, the writing of fiction in English is associated with the realization of the limitations internal to any minority literature, when a discussion with the Bulgarian and Romanian delegates at the Zurich Congress convinced him of the commonality of the problems of the Yiddish writer and those of the writers of Central Europe. The words he attributes to the Bulgarian delegate are perhaps then only the reflection of his own thinking: “For us Bulgarians, Russian literature is almost our own literature. We too have men of talent. But the Bulgarian language has no reach in the world, our writers are not known in the rest of the world, and so we attach ourselves to the literatures of the great countries…” (IV, 20). At the close of his account of the conversation, Cahan concludes: “When I speak, then, of my ambitions in literature, I mean the desire to write stories in English.”
But he adds: “so we thought at the time,” seeming to let other potentialities in gestation be glimpsed — that is, the later development of a literature in Yiddish. He thus seems to suggest that at the moment he chose English as his literary language, nothing yet foretold the richness and the possibilities of the Yiddish literature to come, he himself not then possessing a language that could serve as an instrument for artistic creation. He chose therefore to change terrain, but presents this choice to us as necessitated by circumstances and the times. There is something of the traitor in Cahan (and perhaps he was seen that way in his own time), and the choice of literary language, like that of realism, situates him at the opposite pole from the figure of the rebel, so frequent in Yiddish literature — the writer who obstinately opts for Yiddish, working and contesting from within the powers of expression of his own language.
Through this sketch of a portrait we can see emerging the tendencies that connect Cahan to his time. One can also see what is specifically brought by his membership in the Jewish community of the East Side, which constitutes his most natural milieu, within which he lives, thinks, and fights.
New York Scenes
An important part of the autobiography is devoted to the New York environment, beginning with the evocation of his first walk, dictionary in hand to decipher the signs. A precious temporal landmark for the reader: the elevated railway to Brooklyn had not yet been built.
The first impressions of the “ghetto” are associated with a feeling of familiarity that shows clearly the limits of the newcomer’s immersion in the American “melting pot.” East Broadway in the afternoon, as Cahan sees it, is peopled with old Jews wearing skullcaps and white beards, seated on the stoops of the houses: “I felt as though I were home,” he confides (II, 72).
The boundaries of the Jewish quarter of 1882 are much narrower than those of the Lower East Side in 19266. The reckoning of passing time, of the transformations of the city and of the Jewish community, is signaled by the geography of the quarter, which records the various waves of emigration and keeps the trace of the various ethnic groups that settle there.
The streets have a relative specialization: Hester Street is the place of the “sweatshops,” the sewing workshops where the new arrivals are hired. The peddlers sell their odds and ends on Canal Street and East Broadway; the “khazer mark” (the Pig Market) is the square where unskilled workers can find “contracts.” The Bowery and the surrounding streets (Forsyth, Christie, Allen Street) are known as the slums, a boulevard of crime, a place of prostitution, a zone of cabarets and theaters all at once.
What strikes the observer is the still-heterogeneous aspect of the quarter, the relative mixing of the various ethnic groups. The Eastern Jews are clustered over a very restricted area, a few blocks around East Broadway, Grand Street, Suffolk, and Allen Street on one side, and Bayard, Mott, and Elizabeth Street on the other. Cahan enumerates the surrounding streets that would later become part of the Jewish quarter and which, at the time of his arrival, are still peopled with Germans, Irish, or Americans.
The Germans share Second Avenue and Houston Street, but they also have a café on Canal Street; the Irish cluster near the East River, but are also very numerous around the Bowery. The Italians have not yet arrived, and the Yahudim (German Jews) can still be found in the Jewish quarter, small shopkeepers or small employers for the most part, although a large number of them have already moved toward wealthier neighborhoods (uptown).
Cahan also underscores the aspects of an era still little modernized, and notes that American capitalism is only at its beginnings. The buildings are hardly more than eight stories high, the city is a third of the size it is at the time he writes. There is neither subway, nor cinema, nor automobiles. The Brooklyn Bridge is not yet open, and there is no other bridge over the East River. Yet the city appears enormous and stifling to the “Grine” — to those who have just arrived from a shtetl or even from a large Polish city.
The culture shock is inevitable in a space so withdrawn into its various groups. Even within the Eastern Jewish population, the social and cultural differences are patent.
The great mass of immigrants is made up of “proste yidn,” ordinary Jews. Among them is also a stratum of scholars, specialists of the Talmud, endowed with prestige in Europe but confronted in America with new and harsh economic conditions.
Finally, clashes are numerous when the young Russified intellectuals arrive, eager to spread socialism and “progress,” against the religious “obscurantism” of the Orthodox Jews.
In any case, adaptation to the new life would provoke incalculable upheavals in the realm of traditional values, and one may say that, after a few years, the Lower East Side community would be a secularized community.
Generational conflicts also become more visible; the cultural distance between parents and children would widen as the children receive a more modern education. The problems are not yet those of the second generation; the children generally receive a rather rudimentary education in English, stopping at the end of public school. Very few of them have access to City College, which would later be attended almost exclusively by the children of Jewish immigrants. Work, or “business,” Cahan tells us, is the path that awaits them on leaving school. There is not yet, he notes, that thirst for knowledge and that will to social ascent that would later characterize Jewish youth.
But for the new immigrant who, like Cahan and like the great majority of the East Side’s workers, is bound to a certain number of political ideals, the discovery of America is inseparable from wholly overwhelming experiences: the discovery of freedom of the press and of assembly, a subject of infinite astonishment for this generation steeped in revolutionary romanticism and habits of clandestinity. Alexander Jonas’s German socialist daily, the Volkszeitung, is one of these instruments of adaptation to the new world. In addition to the learning of German, Cahan tells us, the paper “gave us each day practical lessons in socialism.”
Thus one may say that the radical atmosphere of the East Side and the manifold structures of European immigrant socialism created a kind of secularized intermediary milieu, largely facilitating adaptation to America.
One can see the importance of this milieu as a receiving structure by examining what Cahan describes of his personal itinerary. Having come to the United States to take part in the founding of the agricultural colonies, he very quickly turned away from this project, drawn as he was to the big city and to activity within the nascent labor movement. The fever of the public meetings, the debates in which he could hear, in Russian or German, Sergei Schevitch and Alexander Jonas, the meetings where the anarchists tried to explain to the new arrivals that they must not serve as strikebreakers by getting themselves recruited at the port for starvation wages — this almost palpable excitement, this anxious and hope-laden climate, all of it seized the young man and pushed him to remain in the Jewish quarter: “I did not completely understand the speeches in German. But I grasped their general sense. And I cannot find words to convey the impression they made on me. I sat there listening to them, in a state of feverish enthusiasm” (II, 89).
The autobiography helps one to understand the specificity of this era that saw the great currents of American socialism come into being, and it strikes us by its teeming and idealistic character. The boundaries among the various movements are still undecided, the anarchist and socialist circles still very close, having in common organizational weakness, the refusal of reformism and of the model of the American unions. Cahan, when he writes these pages, does not deny himself the chance to underscore the romantic character of this generation, its lack of practical sense, its revolutionary illusions. He describes the failure of the movement of communist colonies, analyzes its causes: a lack of experience and chimerical projects that came up against the appalling material difficulties. Only the community of New Odessa would manage to maintain itself for a certain time, and then its members would gradually disperse.
He also gives us his impressions as a young man, beside himself with admiration before personalities whom in retrospect he judges more severely. He then describes an eclectic intellectual atmosphere in which all sorts of still ill-defined tendencies come to merge, issuing from the European nineteenth century and borne along by the charismatic energy of illuminated, materialist high priests: men such as William Frey, a vegetarian, a Tolstoyan, a positivist and a communist in the manner of the early utopians but opposed to all union demands and to the use of revolutionary violence; or Felix Adler, preaching a mixture of religiosity and atheism, delivering secular sermons that Cahan attended in order to take language lessons… The religious references are explicitly introduced by Cahan, and he compares the personalities of the early days of socialism to those of the Hasidic rebbes surrounded by the veneration of their followers.
The autobiography also constitutes a testimony to the material conditions of the immigrants’ existence.
The almost exclusive preoccupation of the new arrivals, Cahan tells us, was to find means of subsistence: the proof of this is the neologism that immediately passed into everyday language, “makhn a lebn” (to make a living), directly modeled on the English, which one hears everywhere in the Jewish quarter.
We can see how the hiring system worked and how the manufacturers, often members of mutual-aid committees, employed the new arrivals for a few weeks. Thus Cahan found himself in a cigar factory owned by a Jew from Poland, raised in Poznań and speaking German: “He was always turned out to the nines like a dandy, and I remember him with the low, light-colored ‘derby’ that was the fashionable hat that summer.” All the ambiguity of this system, a mixture of community mutual aid and exploitation, is thus retraced through this rapidly sketched figure.
Cahan also describes the harshness of physical labor, which goes hand in hand, for intellectuals, with an acute feeling of impotence, even of degradation, tied to the abrupt change of social status. Yet among the “politicized” immigrants, manual labor is considered the only acceptable kind, commerce and itinerant peddling being from the outset rejected and devalued.
He is himself rebellious against the automatism of the gestures, the system of surveillance, the length of the workdays. When he changes jobs and finds himself harnessed to a machine meant to produce the lids of tin cans, he learns the hard law of mechanization that he had hitherto apprehended only through books, and feels himself too like a “lifeless tool” that is used and abused. It is nonetheless in this milieu that he makes the acquaintance of the future leaders of the Jewish unions and of the A.F.L.: Bernard Weinstein and Samuel Gompers, both employed at the cigar factory at the same time as he.
The housing conditions are not necessarily any better. His first room, near Castle Garden, is only one of those temporary shelters that the immigrant aid bureau provides to the new arrivals; four of them would live there for a week. Next he lodges as a tenant (“boarder”) with a family of Americanized Jews, paying his rent in Hebrew lessons to the children. His first real dwelling would be located on Clinton Street, when his salary as an English teacher in an evening school would allow him to have a room of his own.
Homesickness and the first difficulties of adaptation are, for Cahan, bound up in memory with certain places, certain gestures, certain street layouts. He keeps in his memory the great heat of the New York summer that accompanies his first American months. The route traveled to get to work, the succession of streets, the territory that delimits the still-restricted field of action of the “greenhorn” (the new immigrant) — these are for him the landmarks associated with this new life: “The sign of a bakery on Canal Street next to Mott Street, the omnibuses of Broadway and the carriages of the Bowery — all that is what I see again when I recall the nostalgia and the hopes that then filled my being” (II, 114).
The sense of displacement, if it is brutal, is measured by tenuous signs: habits of life, behaviors, urban melodies. To butter slices of bread, to drink coffee, to stand about in the street — so many gestures that differ from the Russian ways. The undeniable material comfort leaves him indifferent or makes him uneasy.
Yet adaptation takes shape behind these complaints. The powerful attraction of a “new” world, where the very air seems to him freer, the energy, the potentialities, the tempo proper to American life seize him and intoxicate him. An intense desire for knowledge, for experience, and finally for adaptation takes hold of the young man, seeming to announce and to justify the future success.
At the close of this first narrative, which retraces the experiences of the newcomer, one may of course wonder what is the share of clichés common to every emigration story.
Cahan himself sees in his first eight American years a period of formation, but he hardly envisages the transformations from the angle of inner upheavals, revelations, or conversion. Although this period saw him renounce the anarchizing ideals of his early years, the writing conveys to us a rather flat image of the inner debates or crises that mark this evolution. In this sense, one also escapes the conventions of the autobiographical genre and the stagings of identity to which the European tradition of the genre has accustomed us.
Between Languages
It is interesting to take an inventory of the various languages Cahan is confronted with and to see what meaning he grants to each of them.
English is at this moment of his life the language to be learned, the one in which one must steep oneself as rapidly as possible. All the structures of daily life are useful to him in adapting to it. He learns it in contact with the family of Americanized Jews who lodge him, in the shops, in the street, in a primary school for American children where, for three months, he spends his days listening to and retaining the words and sentences of the schoolchildren. At night he works methodically through the lessons of a schoolbook designed for Germans wishing to learn English. His desire for adaptation distinguishes him from his slower, more nostalgic companions in their learning of the language: he makes particular efforts to pronounce correctly, in the American way, and works relentlessly. It takes him three months to read the newspapers fluently, and gradually he is in a position to teach the other immigrants in the evening what he himself learns during the day.
During this very first period, he earns his living by giving English lessons, until the moment when, in 1887, he is dismissed from the yeshiva where he teaches. It is only from that date that he turns toward the newspapers and freelance work.
Russian is for him essentially the language of culture, the language of thought, of the “intellectual” self. It is also the language of an intellectual elite enjoying, within the community of Eastern Europe, a superior social status. It is the language he carried with him, the one he spoke most often at the moment he emigrated. The language of the revolutionaries, it marks the young Jew as a partisan of the Enlightenment against the “obscurantism” of traditional society, as a partisan of social emancipation against the Jewish nationalist agitators, as an intellectual enamored of European culture among his American journalist colleagues.
But for the majority of immigrants of the common people, Russian is above all the language of the persecutors of the old world, and the young Russified intellectual is violently taken to task by old folk of the quarter when he persists in speaking Russian in the New York ghetto.
Cahan says himself that in Russia he had gradually replaced Yiddish with Russian. The reverse process seems to begin in America.
Yiddish would increasingly become the bearer of the new potentialities of American life.
It is at first tied to exile, but Russian is so too, with its nostalgic songs evoking the native land. Yiddish is tied to the parents; it is the language one speaks “at home,” and when he thinks of his father, scraps of old melodies come to his lips to people his immigrant solitude. He declares that he is, for the first time in his life, writing such long letters in Yiddish — letters in which he describes for his parents his first American impressions, embellishing the rather painful reality of the early months.
He recovers something of that Yiddish in talking with his lantslayt, his countrymen, the people of the Vilna region who pronounce the words with the same accent as he.
He frequents, alongside the Russian circles, circles of Yiddish-speaking “maskilim,” people endowed with that state of mind of emancipation, of secularization, of modernization of Jewish society, but who in the United States find themselves workers in the textile trade or homeworkers, artisans possessing a single room that they use at once as workshop, apartment, and meeting place. In the social hierarchy they stand far lower than the Russian intelligentsia discussed earlier.
Is it in the course of these interminable conversations that Cahan gradually recovers a sentimental and affective attachment to his mother tongue?
I always spoke Yiddish, like all Jews, and I always loved the language as “our mothers” speak it, often doing battle on its behalf. Some among my Russian friends regarded it with contempt, and I argued ardently with them, invoking the savor and the strength of our mother tongue, its power to express the finest and most beautiful nuances of a thought (II, 194).
Now the Yiddish that is spoken on the East Side tends more and more to move away from this “mother” tongue. On contact with English, the popular Yiddish becomes Americanized, takes in a great number of words or expressions drawn from the immigrants’ immediate experience: “potatoes,” “window,” “room,” “all right” become words commonly heard in Yiddish. The young Cahan is shocked by these crude intrusions, which seem to him to symbolize the chaotic and brutal character of his first immigrant experiences. The new words seem to him “foreign,” “ridiculous,” they grate on his ears and often make him wince with impatience. A purism that for his part he would not maintain for very long, as we were able to observe in reading the preface.
From then on, Yiddish takes on importance for Cahan in its function as a class language, a medium of propaganda, of communication with the masses, the cement of a still-formless Jewish working class.
It was Cahan, it seems, who delivered the first propaganda speech in Yiddish in America (so, at least, the autobiography tells it). Attending a meeting in Russian about a month after his arrival, he takes the floor in an almost instinctive manner (he tells us), still seething with impatience at the memory of his Russian comrades left behind in prison. His ardor communicates itself to the crowd, and, emboldened, he poses to the organizers the problem of language: why speak in Russian or German when everyone speaks and understands Yiddish? Faced with the incredulity of all, he proposes a second meeting in Yiddish where, indeed, he would expound in that language, and for more than two hours, the Marxian theory of surplus value! A meeting followed by a third one… the beginning of a long career as a lecturer and political agitator.
Was it really the first time that a meeting was held in Yiddish? Perhaps, after all — the important thing being above all the framing of the problem. For the members of the political organizations, Yiddish is the language of the heder, of the market, or of the home, the language of traditional or private life, whereas Cahan immediately understands that Yiddish is in the process of becoming, quite simply, the language spoken by the majority of Jewish workers in America.
One finds this position again in his attempt to create a radical newspaper in Yiddish. As early as 1886, he tries to give an echo in that language to the workers’ struggles and to the first attempts at organizing the Jewish unions.
Cahan would moreover be personally connected to the “proletarian poets” who make of Yiddish the language most apt to express the uncertainties of daily life, the inhuman rhythms of the machines, the sufferings of men at work. Is one to believe him when he says he was the first to have encouraged Morris Rosenfeld to write? He himself makes a few poetic attempts, partaking, he admits himself, more of propaganda than of the work of art, but whose words and tunes adapted from Eliakum Zunser (a “badkhn,” a popular poet and songster) are hummed everywhere in the streets and the workshops.
The temporal perspective is lacking to give a dynamic picture of this problem of languages. In the rest of the autobiography, one notes a few indications that allow one to understand the evolution of the various positions. It appears, for example, in passing in a much later remark, that Cahan spoke English in the company of his wife, herself of Russian origin. But does this not seem natural after some thirty years of life in America? Russian seems gradually to lose importance for him, except when he is led to meet new arrivals from Russia, often militants come to collect funds and to carry out propaganda for the revolutionary movements.
Cultural Transfers
It is Yiddish again that makes the link with the theater, whose heroic (or execrable, depending on one’s point of view) beginnings the autobiography retraces.
The discovery of the Yiddish theater is connected, for Cahan, to the widening of his centers of interest in America. His sensitization to the Yiddish theater — generally an object of the contempt and the sarcasm of most Jewish intellectuals — also comes from his already old love for the melodies drawn from the plays of Goldfaden (the founder of the Yiddish theater in Europe a few years earlier). Moreover, a wholly fortuitous circumstance leads him, during the winter of 1882, to be a tenant at the home of the mother of Boris Tomashevsky, the future well-known actor of the Yiddish stage who, aged sixteen at the time, played the female roles at the Bowery theater. In 1884, Cahan witnesses the arrival in New York of a more professional troupe of actors come from Russia and Romania, under the direction of Karp. They stage a play by Goldfaden, Di Kishefmakherin (The Sorceress), which is a great success. From 1886 on, a process of maturation takes place, which Cahan nonetheless recounts in a very negative manner, judging that era to be the darkest in the history of the Jewish theater in the United States. He acknowledges the essential contribution of actors of great talent who begin at that time to leave Russia, where the Yiddish theater is forbidden: Mogulesco, who would become the greatest comic actor; David Kessler, who enjoyed an immense popular success, embodying to perfection the Jews of the common people. At that time there also arrives from London Jacob Adler (“the Eagle”), a baroque figure in life as on the stage, a specialist of Shakespearean roles. He is accompanied by Madame Liptzin, who would long hold the monopoly of the role of Mirele Efros (the heroine of a play by Gordin). Other actresses would follow, the beautiful Bertha Kalisch, and Adler’s future wife, Sarah. Tomashevsky is then at the height of his glory as a leading man; he is twenty-two and passes for the great rival of Kessler.
While Cahan admires the actors, he deplores that, in this era when playwrights such as Horowitz and Lateiner dash off plays by the day, their acting cannot give its full measure and is limited by the poor quality of the texts — “historical operas,” plagiarisms of the European repertoire, or crude comedies of manners. One would have to wait, Cahan says, for the arrival of Jacob Gordin and his staging of Sibir (Siberia) in 1891 for the actors to find roles equal to their abilities, roles whose power could give the spectators the sense of life (what he himself calls realism), rid of the crude and “implausible” emphasis of the earlier declamations.
Cahan’s attitude is characteristic, even in its ambiguity, of positions current among the Jewish intellectual elite. One may say, however, that in the United States the Yiddish theater finds an audience in which class reservations are swept away by the confusion of social positions, the need to be entertained, to come together on the occasion of collective gatherings. To express the creative vitality of the community, its cohesion, and also to give individuals something of “the joy of the Sabbath” — such is the function of this first Yiddish theater, crude as it may seem to the refined intellectual that Cahan is. His criteria in this domain remain those of realism, of which one may wonder whether they are capable of accounting for the immigrants’ own need to go beyond the narrow limits of daily life, through the illusions and the excesses of the stage.
Before broaching the account of the creation of the Forverts, Cahan takes the trouble to give a panorama of Yiddish literature as it appears to the observer of the 1890s. Cahan situates at the level of the work on the language (without counting, of course, the populist will to educate the masses) the continuity between journalistic writing and the enterprise of the first Yiddish writers. The language as he receives it from the literary tradition, as it is used in the newspapers or on the theater stage, is riddled with Germanisms, artificial and borrowed. The influence of German in the United States is reinforced by the weight of German socialism. Moreover, the old prejudice persists according to which a “Germanized” language would be nobler, closer to the European ideal of the Enlightenment. Hence the need to create a new, less connoted, more “popular” language. An attitude that has nothing to do with the purism of the grammarian, since the language he wishes to help bring into being through the pages of the Yiddish newspapers is, in his eyes, the language of the people — a rather ill-defined entity that is sometimes the “mother” Yiddish, sometimes that of the already Americanized masses.
What, finally, are the personal factors that pushed Cahan to take part with fervor, enthusiasm, and energy in these enterprises, at a moment when he had already envisaged becoming a reporter or a writer in English for American newspapers? It seems that it was precisely this double competence (a familiarity with the spirit and the techniques of the American press, a deep and intimate knowledge of the immigrant milieu) that constituted his assets, his success, and therefore his intense personal investment in the creation of an American Jewish journalism in the Yiddish language, of which the Forverts would be the most important and the most durable incarnation.
Notes
Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn, 5 vols., New York, Forverts Association, 1926–1931 [The Education of Abraham Cahan, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1969].↩︎
Examples of this letters column may be found in the work by Isaac Metzker, A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (French ed.: « Estimable rédacteur en chef ». 60 ans de lettres d’immigrés juifs en Amérique, translated from the English, annotated, and with an afterword by Henri Raczymow, Paris, Seuil, 2007). For a very negative view of Cahan and of the influence of the Forverts, one may consult New-Yorkaises (New York Scenes), by Lamed Shapiro, translated from the Yiddish by Delphine Bechtel, Carole Ksiazenicer, and Jacques Mandelbaum, Paris, Julliard, 1993, pp. 173–174, as well as numerous passages in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a permanent contributor — like his brother Israel Joshua — to the New York paper, in which their works appeared in serial form.↩︎
The scope of this article does not allow us to broach the literary career of Abe Cahan, the author, among other works in Yiddish and English, of Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (adapted for the screen under the title Hester Street), of collections of short stories tied to the life of the ghetto (The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories), and of the novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917).↩︎
For more information, the reader may turn to the classic work by Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (French ed.: Le Monde de nos pères. L’extraordinaire Odyssée des Juifs d’Europe en Amérique, translated from the American by Cécile Bloc-Rodot and Henriette Michaud, Paris, éditions Michalon, 1997); Ronald Sanders, The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation, New York, Evanston and London, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969; Milton Doroshkin, Yiddish in America: Social and Cultural Foundations, Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969; Rachel Ertel, Le Roman juif américain. Une écriture minoritaire (The American Jewish Novel: A Minority Writing), Paris, Payot, 1980.↩︎
The translations from the Yiddish are my own.↩︎
In this respect, a comparison with Lamed Shapiro’s collection New-Yorkaises (New York Scenes), which dates precisely from this period at the end of the 1920s, is illuminating, both for the differences in the extension and the urban sociology of the Jewish quarter and for the arc traced between the utopia of the beginnings and the sense of decline characteristic of American Yiddish literature. See the article by Daniel Oppenheim in this same issue.↩︎