An earlier article published in issue 16 of Plurielles on Abraham Cahan allowed me to evoke his trajectory as an emigrant who came from Russia in the wake of the pogroms and the political repression of the 1880s, his adaptation to the American context, to the plurality of languages, to acculturation, but also to the new conditions of a freer and more enterprising life within the Yiddish-speaking population that had just settled in New York. His stature as a journalist and writer — he was among the first to take part in the creation of the Yiddish press and of a bilingual literature (Yiddish-English) in the United States — will hold my attention within the framework of this article devoted to Jewish intellectuals, of whom he is a major representative in the American context. Cahan embodies the contradictions, the richness, the tensions of the intellectual’s situation in the principal historical occurrences brought about by modernity in a Jewish context: the struggle for revolution, for socialism, militant grassroots work in the immigrant context, defense of the group of origin and attraction to the outside worlds, engagement in the press and in literary creation, which challenged him to write in both languages, within a multicultural and perpetually transforming environment. A characteristic fecundity and mobility, which are in large part at the origin of the success and dynamism of Jewish culture in the United States.
The bond with the Yiddish language, little invested in Russia outside of family relations, was revivified by emigration and by social work in the Jewish quarter, gradually supplanting Russian, which had been the language of the militant intellectual in the “old country,” and coexisting with English, quickly mastered by the newcomer and used in the context of the professional journalism to which he devoted himself to earn his living.
The same mobility, at once linguistic and pragmatic, applies to the literary struggle and to the demands implemented at the helm of the Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward, which would become the most important Yiddish daily in the world), whose direction he took over from 1902 onward: a position of compromise between, on the one hand, the formation of the Russified (and initially revolutionary) intellectual, steeped in elitist cultural standards, and, on the other hand, the necessity of culturally accompanying the emigrant masses who crowded into the tenements of the East Side and into the New York sweatshops and tobacco factories.
It is first of all on the linguistic plane, beyond the didactic will to educate the masses, that Cahan situates the stakes of his project to create a quality press in Yiddish that would stand in continuity with the pioneering efforts of the Yiddish classics, of the American proletarian poets, or of the representatives of a realism freed from the sanctimonious style of the religious sphere — authors whom he published in the columns of the newspapers to which he contributed or which he directed. The Yiddish language, in the United States but also in the context of the cultural normalization tied to the Enlightenment, is riddled with Germanisms reflecting the intellectuals’ will to adopt the standards of European culture. The influence of German is, moreover, linked to the local weight of the socialist movement, which had been driven by the first arrivals of German-Jewish origin. The need to shape a Yiddish nourished by the sources of Ashkenazi life is combined, in Cahan, with his concern for a cultural assimilation to American life that is expressed directly through the linguistic medium: a “natural” language, stripped of the heaviness of abstraction and of the intellectual constructions inspired by the Berlin haskalah.
Creating a Yiddish press
Alongside his attempt to create a Yiddish daily that met his personal criteria — which would culminate in the creation of the Arbeter Tsaytung in 1890 and then of the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) in 1897 — the growing number of immigrants made crucial the struggle for better living conditions and its relay within the press and the literary institution. The failures of the preceding period made the lack of a genuine organ of opinion, of progressive inspiration, felt all the more acutely — an organ in accord with the development of the labor movement on American soil and with the preponderant place occupied within it by militants of Jewish origin. Cahan had first tried to become a reporter or writer in English for American newspapers, and it was this double competence (familiarity with the spirit and techniques of the modern American press and intimate knowledge of the immigrant milieu acquired during his reporting in the “ethnic” neighborhoods of Manhattan) that propelled him to the forefront of the titanic struggle to found a transitional Jewish press and literature in which Yiddish became the privileged instrument of adaptation to American life.
For the creation of the Arbeter Tsaytung, which derived directly from the struggles between socialists and anarchists and whose English model was Philip Krantz’s newspaper, the Arbeter Fraynt, Cahan rejected the style of the London paper, which he found too dogmatic, and won the support of collaborators such as Louis Miller or Morris Winchevsky, a proletarian poet and socialist agitator, as well as that of Morris Hillquit, future leader of the American Socialist Party. The Arbeter Tsaytung, at first a weekly, gave rise in parallel to a monthly, Di Tsukunft, directed by Cahan, a proponent of a reformist socialist tendency opposed to the radical wing of the party promoted by Daniel De Leon. This political split was made concrete by the creation of the Forverts in April 1897 and by the birth of the Social Democratic Party of Eugene Victor Debs, to which the Forverts rallied, causing along the way the disappearance of the Arbeter Tsaytung.
Cahan nonetheless insists on underscoring the continuity between the two newspapers: same typography, same principles, same men (Miller, Zametkin, Feigenbaum, Winchevsky). Yet this continuity perhaps results above all from Cahan’s personality and from his desire to bind the two newspapers to the pages of his own personal life. The Forverts Association, made up of elected members, would often be a mere transmission belt in the service of its editor-in-chief’s views. After temporarily leaving the editorial board, at a moment when he could not yet impose his conceptions, he returned to head the new paper with increased powers in 1902 — and this time definitively.
A new style of journalism
The guiding principles on which Cahan founded a new style of journalism closely unite linguistic policy with the vision of a double commitment in the service of socialism and of the immigrant community. Cahan declares himself in favor of broadening an inspiration that was too narrowly political or union-oriented, claiming both coverage of the news of the workers’ struggles and pages bearing more closely on daily life and on the concrete problems of the immigrants. To the imperatives of popularization and education is added, consequently, that of Americanization and of adaptation to the new country. The language of the articles must be purified, simplified, naturalized, creating its audience even as it educates it, in continuity with the social evolution of the collectivity — an approach whose rather paternalistic ideological ambiguity is combined with the authoritarian tendencies of Cahan’s personality.
Another principle, called somewhat antiphrastically the “principle of tolerance,” in fact designates a sustained ideological struggle against the freethinkers and what he calls their “anti-religious fanaticism.” The Forverts welcomed a great number of articles written directly by him, advocating “tolerance,” respect for individual liberty, the consideration of religion as a private choice — in which he reveals himself in complete opposition to the anticlerical intransigence of the greater part of the Jewish socialist and anarchist world of the time. One can see in this an attempt at cohesion around scraps of cultural values salvaged from the upheavals of uprooting, an effort at openness toward a whole portion of the immigrants still very attached to traditional values.
A double commitment
Nevertheless, the Forverts remained an engaged newspaper, marked on the left, lending ideological and financial support to the unions during the great textile strikes of 1909 to 1913. It supported the Bund, the Jewish workers’ party of Russia, and its cultural bodies within the Arbeter Ring, after the failure of the 1905 Revolution and the growing American implantation of the Russian Jewish party — likewise, but to a lesser extent, the Socialist-Revolutionary party, the S.R.
The newspaper’s political sphere extended well beyond the American framework and echoed the events in Europe, to which so many ties still bound the immigrants: Russian pogroms and revolution, the difficulties and successes of European socialism, alongside very Americanized pages, but also very broadly turned toward world news. Yet the newspaper’s ties to yiddishkeyt remained, in the end, influenced by European history: the Dreyfus Affair in France, the Beilis affair1 in Russia provoked a painful coming-to-consciousness, prolonged by the anxious attention to the very real signs of antisemitism in America, such as the Leo Frank case, for example, on which Cahan resolutely took a stand, committing his paper to the active defense of the accused Jew2. In his autobiography, Cahan evokes the strength of his ties to yiddishkeyt, when being Jewish dictated his most affective reactions, as upon the announcement of the verdict condemning Dreyfus, when he left the editorial room of the American paper where he was a reporter to go join his Jewish comrades in a café on East Broadway. The same reaction, even more violent, when, isolated in a holiday resort, he learned the news of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903: unable to bear the solitude, he took the first train to New York.
From one world to another
From then on, the Forverts in its early days appears essentially as a symbol of transition, of the passage from one world to another, while synthesizing the essential characteristics of the collective evolution. Thus the oldest feature (the sedre), built on a religious model, illustrates well the use Cahan makes of traditional paradigms to facilitate transfers and to compensate for the difficulties of acculturation: the sedre (the “chapter,” the weekly reading of the Bible), like the proletarisher maguid (the “proletarian preacher”) and the parodic use of the moshl (the parable), subvert but also preserve the frameworks of traditional life while stripping them of their religious content. To transfer the ancient ordering of the week into a new rhythm of life is at once to create an advertising need, to build reader loyalty, but also to recreate a framework, a regularity that come to compensate for the chaos of acculturation.
The dialogue with the immigrants is set in motion thanks to procedures of direct communication between the team and the paper’s public, through questions from the editorial board to which an influx of letters responded, bearing witness to the problems of adaptation encountered by the community of readers: a debate launched from a general question: “What does it mean to adapt (oisgrinen zikh)?” Solicitation of readers’ accounts in order to retrace their experiences, joyful or painful, provided they were “authentic”; advice to parents to avoid instilling in their children a contempt for socialism or for yiddishkeyt, but also to urge them to give up their outmoded or coarse table manners, which shame their offspring; or again, not to overburden them with piano or violin lessons! Injunctions to sons to sit down at a seder or to recite the kaddish if it might comfort their mother: in the name of socialism, Cahan himself grants them absolution! Warnings dispensed to husbands: if they had abandoned their wives in Europe, they must send a notice of divorce, so that the agune, the deserted wife, could remarry. Little by little, institutions were created to facilitate these exchanges between the two continents, such as the famous “gallery of missing husbands,” which went so far as to publish photographs of the runaway husbands, at the risk of provoking misunderstandings and mix-ups. The bintl brif, the letters column of the Forverts, became, from 1906 onward, the mirror and the daily chronicle of immigrant life — landmark and memory of a society in mutation.
More humorous features also denounced the most widespread failings or caricatured the social types most available to satire, such as those allrightniks for whom everything seems to succeed at the price of the most drastic renunciations, or, at the opposite pole, the “simple folk,” straight out of the shtetl, like the proverbial family of Yente, her husband Mendl Telebende, and their son Pinye, who appears regularly in the columns devoted to the readers’ humor and entertainment.
A filtered collective image? Literature as relay
There arises, consequently, the problem of intellectual mediations which, by dint of filtering and conveying oriented images of collective life, run the risk of becoming pure and simple instances of moralization. Cahan too often seems to preach a rather mediocre path of social harmonization, attenuating from the outset the anomalies that might give an unfavorable image of the group to the surrounding world (prostitution and crime are thus among the most frequent campaign themes of the Forverts), and the appeal to raise the public’s awareness of the necessities of assimilation does not go without the establishment of a certain condescending distance, at the risk of losing contact with living reality, always more chaotic and complex than what the press editorial filters out of it.
Nevertheless, the Forverts cannot be reduced to a mere instrument of acculturation. The collaboration of writers of value never flagged, even if the most avant-garde currents in Yiddish, European and American, are rarely represented. Here again, Cahan’s newspaper operates rich mediations between the two continents. Z. Reyzen, I. L. Peretz, H. D. Nomberg3 published from Warsaw in the columns of the Forverts, as did Israel Joshua Singer, who became its permanent correspondent in Poland before emigrating to the United States and bringing over his younger brother, Bashevis, who would carry out his entire journalistic career and publish the major part of his literary work in the columns of the New York newspaper. Certain authors would never adapt to Cahan’s intransigent criteria and dictatorial character: Lamed Shapiro, for example, in his story Doc, in the collection New Yorkaises (New York Women)4, gives a caustic account of this journalistic “Holy of Holies” endowed with its “high priest” that the institution of the Forverts had become; likewise Sholem Aleykhem, at the time the most beloved of Yiddish authors, seems to have rather little appreciated Cahan during his American tour. Conversely, the proletarian poets such as Morris Rosenfeld are permanent collaborators, as are the short-story writers of the ghetto, realists and humorists, specialized in “feuilletons,” the brief vignettes captured from life. Sholem Asch, one of the pillars of the historical novel and of sentimental realism, figures among the newspaper’s favorite authors. Yet, while the dissemination of a Yiddish literature of value is undeniable, the hostility of a part of the writers toward the Forverts, for linguistic reasons even more than ideological ones, is patent, and the development of avant-garde currents, in particular poetic ones, as early as 1907 (the constitution of the group of the Yunge — The Young Ones), but above all in the 1920s, drew a large part of the intelligentsia away from the editorial enterprise embodied by Cahan. One can of course imagine that the Forverts was in a position to wield considerable powers of pressure and influence, not only on the intellectual plane but also on the material one, through the financial aid and the possibilities of publication it dispensed to authors.
Jewish stages
The example of the Yiddish theater, and of its most important author of that era, Jacob Gordin, can be summoned. With his plays — performed as far away as Prague, at the Café Savoy, before Franz Kafka — there erupt onto the Yiddish stage social demands which, while reinforcing the basic values of Jewish society (the family in particular), tend to make of the theater a means of expression in the service of the progressive moralization of the public. Thus the actors serve as a medium for influential voices among the enlightened and politicized intelligentsia, and plays that seem to us today traditionalist and attached to the maintenance of social stability were in fact vehemently supported by the Jewish socialist world. The polemics often took place on the stage itself, and the author would sometimes interrupt his play to launch into fiery diatribes against his adversaries. The principal newspapers thus opposed one another through plays and authors as proxies — the traditionalist Tageblat of Kasriel Sarahson (of orthodox leanings), for example, against Abe Cahan at the Forverts. Even if the Forverts is the central site of these debates through the intermediary of Cahan’s prescriptive tastes in literary matters, it possesses no less an intellectual bearing that far surpasses the level of polemic or propaganda: its literary supplement, the Tsayt Gayst, which appeared from 1905 to 1908, was appreciated even by its adversaries. Moreover, Cahan’s constant preoccupations in matters of translation develop a practice that brings the most diverse cultural influences into the mental universe of the “ghetto.”
Translating “the spirit of the ghetto” in two languages
Cahan’s activity as press director and socialist militant must not, however, make us forget his role as a bilingual Yiddish-English writer at the hinge between two worlds, which he strives to make communicate within transitional literary forms — between the internal gaze upon the immigrant community, which he evokes in both languages, but whose Yiddish version constitutes a message in itself, destined solely for the group of origin, and the horizon of expectation of the assimilated or “native” public, whom he tries to capture by the use of English to translate the life of the Jewish “ghetto,” that essential component of American multiculturality.
Whereas Cahan sees his literary activity as an accomplishment, an essential link with the outside world and with his Jewish roots, one is perhaps more sensitive to the permanent mobility that it seems to transpose fictionally. First of all because his literary activity takes on importance at the moment when he has temporarily left the direction of the Forverts and when he thinks of devoting himself to a career as a journalist and writer in the English language. Next because Cahan deploys all his individual complexity in his relations with this new sphere of his creativity.
It is true that fictional writing as he conceives it stands in continuity with certain aspects of his journalistic activity. It is in the course of his long walks through New York, of his daily frequenting of the police stations as a reporter for the Commercial Advertiser, of his visits to Ellis Island to document the arrival of the emigrants, that he gathers the material for his literary work. The realism and the psychological truth derive from an experience lived within the Jewish quarter, and it is this experience, enriched by contact with the outside world, that Cahan wants above all to translate. In English, for the American public, but also no doubt destined for the generations of assimilated Jews who do not, or will no longer, have access to Yiddish. Through English, it is also to a certain social category of the American world that he addresses himself — to the writer W. D. Howells, who knows and appreciates him, to the intellectuals, to the American literary world. At the outset, however, the two languages of writing are not truly separate and serve him indifferently as languages of creation.
The first attempts at fictional writing appear in Yiddish in the Arbeter Tsaytung because, he tells us in his autobiography (written much later in Yiddish), his spontaneous desire for creation and for an audience is stronger than the tension that draws him conjointly toward the outside world. The encouragements of the American writer Howells5 then prompt him to translate himself into English, with significant changes of title that indicate the difference of horizons of expectation in relation to distinct readerships: Motke Arbel, which appeared as a serial in the Arbeter Tsaytung, thus becomes A Providential Match in English and is published in an American magazine of short stories. Then Di Tsvey Shidakhim is published in Yiddish in 1895, and then directly in English A Sweatshop Romance.
Self-translation in one’s own language
But his first important attempt to win the American readership is Yekl, whose theme is once again linked to the life of the Jewish ghetto. The autobiography dwells little on the psychological data linked to writing in English, which seems, in the end, to go without saying and to attest to the mastery Cahan had acquired in the language of the host country. By contrast, he insists retrospectively on his difficulties in getting published, which motivates his decision to turn once more toward the immigrant public. He translates his story (a fairly long narrative) into Yiddish and publishes it again as a serial in the Arbeter Tsaytung. It is only a year later that the story will finally appear in English.
This pendulum movement is characteristic of a fundamental situation of indecision as to the true addressees of the writing. If he wants to speak to the immigrants about their own situation, he modifies the title of the work and adopts sonorities that mimic the distance between the two worlds: Yankl der Yankee is thus the title in Yiddish of the story (which would inspire, much later, the film Hester Street).
The critical horizon as an illumination of complexity
The critical reactions bring to light, even accentuate, the polarities and the multiple allegiances of the literary act in two languages, addressed to several worlds and giving an account of the passages between different cultural universes: Howells, his literary mentor, praises the representative of a new vital force in American literature. The readers of the Yiddish serial send enthusiastic letters in which they declare having recognized themselves in the characters. American criticism is divided: some appreciate the “local color,” the fresh vision of an “other” America, the discreetly mimetic qualities of the language, the “human document” of near-ethnographic value. His style is found simple and natural, his “objectivity” and his “apoliticism” are commented upon — even though he is known to be a virulent socialist agitator.
The opponents make use of two series of criteria, “aesthetic and moral,” proper to any criticism opposed to realism: the writer, in wanting to give the feeling of life, shows a reality that is “ugly,” even immoral. The language is slangy; it is a “dialect” reconstituted for the use of the American reader. The aesthetic criteria quickly transform into xenophobic arguments, concealed behind literary criticism: this is not the “true” America, such a narrative cannot interest the public of “real Americans.”
Defensive strategies and identity “bricolage”
Faced with these criticisms, Cahan is constrained to adopt a contradictory defense: he must at once plead for realism, but also for artistic coherence and for the artist’s rights to attain a universal human truth that would not be a mere plea for a particular ethnic group.
He must also defend himself before the Jewish public, respond to the accusation leveled by the orthodox and by the German Jews of having given a negative image of the immigrant community. But also of having engaged in socialist propaganda, or, on the contrary, of not having done enough of it in the eyes of the most politically radical elements.
His image as a writer is susceptible to diverse appreciations: he is compared to Israel Zangwill, who published Children of the Ghetto. An image not belied by the titles of his later stories: A Marriage in the Ghetto (1898), or of his collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories. In certain stories, the properly informative content sometimes seems to harm the human truth of the fiction — this is in any case the point of view formulated by Hutchins Hapgood in The Spirit of the Ghetto.
On the other hand, he is feted in the literary establishment as a proponent of the realist school, alongside Howells and Stephen Crane, who has just published The Red Badge of Courage. He is thus caught up in the internal polemics of the American cultural world, the lectures and the literary evenings, the snobbery of the New York bohemia, which he judges, moreover, rather severely, by the yardstick of his socialist principles. This very closed world, sometimes xenophobic, seems to him, besides, much inferior, in talent and culture, to the intellectual circles still tied to Russian Jewry and to the European writers whom he continues to extol.
In the end, on reading the autobiography, one is at once seduced and irritated by the multiple facets of the intellectual, by that complex journey which the autobiographer’s retrospective gaze wants to present as the itinerary of a fidelity to self, of an identitarian continuity, and whose fault lines and ruptures — indeed whose renunciations and failures — only rarely appear. The autobiographical project places the accent on the accumulation of the successive strata of the personality, in phase with the collective currents that animate the processes of transculturation, but today’s reader will be more tempted to read in it the contradictions of a historical situation of transition, in which the intellectual embodies a common becoming while attempting to model it through his own spheres of intervention and creativity. Abraham Cahan dominates this movement of time with all his combative stature — he who practically identified himself with every stage of the Ashkenazi migration, as he also retraced it symbolically in his English-language novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). He was attuned to the multiple voices of a culture in the process of transformation, but perhaps also of disappearance. The success of linguistic assimilation, the conjoint use of the two languages, thus appear in negative as significant of the dilemmas of Yiddish culture and of the complex fragility of its creative processes.
Notes
Menachem Beilis, a Jew of Kiev, was accused in 1911 of having murdered a child whose mutilated body was found near the brickworks where he was employed as a steward; the affair, instrumentalized by the tsarist power and the antisemitic press, was transformed into an accusation of ritual murder, even though the police clearly knew the identity of the real murderer. The trial, which took place in 1913, mobilized Jewish opinion in Russia and abroad. Beilis would finally be acquitted at the end of his trial. Bernard Malamud wrote a novel inspired by the affair: The Fixer (published in French as L’Homme de Kiev).↩︎
Leo Frank, a young Jewish man of about thirty, manager of a factory in the American South, was accused in 1913 of the rape and murder of one of his workers, a fourteen-year-old girl. His death sentence, in the absence of decisive proof of his guilt, was commuted to life imprisonment, but he would be kidnapped from his prison and lynched by the mob in August 1915. Cahan devotes to this resounding affair an important part of volume 5 of his memoirs in Yiddish (Bleter fun mayn Lebn, 1931). He visited Frank in his Atlanta cell in March 1914, spoke with him at length, and used the Forverts as a platform for the ideological struggle against antisemitism, whose virulence within American culture, and Southern culture in particular, he denounced.↩︎
Polish Yiddish writers among the best known of the generation of the “classics.”↩︎
Lamed Shapiro, New Yorkaises (New York Women), trans. from the Yiddish by D. Bechtel, C. Ksiazenicer-Matheron and J. Mandelbaum, Paris, Julliard, 1993.↩︎
W. D. Howells, with Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane, is the principal representative of the realist current in the United States at the turn of the century.↩︎