The Narrative of Abraham Cahan's Identity

CHAPTER TWO The Narrative of Abraham Cahan’s Identity 1. Not a Lithuanian but Lithuania’s Son Upon reading American literary criticism about Cahan, my first impulse was to protest Lithuania’s erasure and to inform American scholars that Cahan was a product of Lithuanian, not Russian culture or, at least, a product of Lithuanian as well as Russian cultures. My research, however, led me to believe that, although born and raised in Lithuania, Cahan did in fact have very few contacts with Lithuanian culture. He was born in a village near Vilnius, the Eastern part of ethnic Lithuania, which held a considerable Slavic, mostly Polish and Belorussian, population. He spent his youth in Vilna, the Lithuanian metropolis, which shaped Cahan as an urbanized and a modernized Jew. The Vilna of Cahan’s time offered him three possibilities: to become a rabbinical scholar, to follow the Haskala10, or to pursue modernization through acculturation. This latter option required an adoption of a gentile language and culture. In Tsarist Russia that language and culture happened to be Russian. Lithuanian culture of the time was perceived as a regional folk culture and the Lithuanian language as a local peasant dialect. Therefore, Russian culture, shunned by Lithuanians and the majority of Lithuanian Jews, became a desirable option for Cahan. Does that mean that Lithuania gets no credit for raising this genius on its soil? Abraham Cahan is the most famous transplant from Lithuania in American letters. He is well known as an author who recorded Jewish- American immigrant experience in his two novels and a number of short stories. For almost half a century, forty-nine years to be exact, Cahan headed the Jewish Daily Forward. He ranks among the great American newspaper editors, while “in the annals of Yiddish journalism he continues to know no peer” (Encyclopedia Judaica 5: 14). The Encyclopedia Judaica calls him an incarnation of the “epic Jewish migration from Eastern Europe to America” (14). There is no doubt that Abraham Cahan can be considered one of the most famous Jewish-Americans, and deservedly so. Lithuania should take pride in raising such a talent on its soil, as it takes pride in raising Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a hero of the American Revolution, Adam Mickiewicz, a world- famous poet, or Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Prize winner in literature. The Poles claim Kosciuszko and Mickiewicz as their own on the basis of their Polish linguistic and cultural background. The Lithuanians claim them as their countrymen, since Lithuanian land fed their roots. Both Kosciuszko and Mickiewicz are known to have identified themselves as Lithuanians. The Lithuanian nobility explained their situation as gens lituanus natione polonus (Simutis 35). Although Mickiewicz considered himself a Pole (natione polonus), he emphasized his Lithuanian origin (gens lituanus) (35). No author in literary history, claims Lithuanian World Directory, “had ever so glorified Lithuania” (35). In Pan Tadeusz, 24 Aušra Paulauskienơ Mickiewicz addresses his native land with nostalgia and admiration: “Lihuania, my country, thou art like health; how much thou shouldst be praised only he can learn who has lost thee” (36). The Poles are more hesitant to call Czeslaw Milosz their own. Milosz himself admitted that “for the Poles, though I write in Polish, I am somebody who comes from outside” (Beginning with My Streets ix). “I come from the Grand Duchy,” claimed this gens lituanus natione polonus (ix). In his Nobel Lecture, Milosz found it proper to mention “gifts” he and his friends received in “[their] part of Europe” (275). “I have in mind Lithuania, a country of myths and of poetry,” said Milosz in 1980 of the land that, in the imagination of many, was then dissolved in the huge expanses of the Soviet Union (276). “My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English; so I am a Polish, not a Lithuanian, poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me” (276). Milosz, like Kosciuszko and Mickiewicz, descended from the native Lithuanian nobility. This nobility had adopted the Polish culture and language but had retained its own Lithuanian character (Simutis 35). It kept its loyalty to the political separateness of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and could be identified by their specifically Lithuanian noble culture (Aleksandraviþius, Carǐ valdžioje 237). Milosz reminisced that his family “practiced a cult of separatism—much as the Scots, the Welsh, or the Bretons did” (Native Realm 96). “Our Grand Duchy of Lithuania was ‘better’ and Poland was ‘worse,’ for what would she have accomplished without our kings, poets, and politicians?” (96). The situation with Lithuanian Jews is different: the Lithuanian nobility forsook their Lithuanian identity for the Polish one, while Lithuanian Jews never gave up their identity for the Lithuanian one. However, both these cultural groups took nourishment from Lithuanian soil, revered the political legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and more or less interacted with Lithuanians. In “Dialogue about Wilno with Tomas Venclova,” Milosz, a Polish poet, established a bond with Tomas Venclova, a Lithuanian poet: “The city that I knew belonged to Poland and was called Wilno . Your city was the capital of the Lithuanian SSR and was called Vilnius . Nonetheless, it is the same city: its architecture, the landscape of the surrounding region, and its sky shaped us both” (Milosz, Beginning with My Streets 23). Abraham Cahan knew the same city when it belonged to the Russian empire and called it in Yiddish—Vilna. He, like Milosz and Venclova, matured in Vilna/Wilno/Vilnius and he, like the other two, chose a life of exile in America. Even if Cahan did not claim his Lithuanian roots, who can deny the fact that Cahan was born, raised and educated in Lithuania? This fact has been not so much denied as ignored in American literary history and criticism. Owing to Cahan’s visibility in American literature and journalism, .

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