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Abraham Cahan [April 6, 1918] 1 W. Feigenbaum: Abraham Cahan [April 6, 1918] 1 Abraham Cahan by William M. Feigenbaum Published in the New York Call, National Edition, v. 11, no. 84 (April 7, 1918), The Call Magazine section, dated April 6, 1918, pp. 20, 8. It is not everybody who can achieve fame in more It was in the summer of 1893 — a long time than one line of activity. It is not everybody who can ago — that Cahan, then a young man of 33, took a be a successful editor, a Socialist agitator, a recognized young fellow of 6 on his lap, and outlined to him the novelist, and several other things, all at one time. rudiments of baseball. I have since learned that his Abraham Cahan has done these things. Twenty- knowledge of the national game was rather — shall five years ago, he was at we say? — a priori; it was it, and already a veteran. scientific, rather than em- Twenty years ago, he had pirical. But his idea in try- written his first English ing to teach me the rudi- book, a novel which was ments of the game, that hailed as a landmark in played a great role in the American literature. And life of the country, was last fall, he was found exactly the idea that he night after night, on the had in writing Yekl; just street corners, in the halls, the idea that he had in in committee meetings, writing David Levinsky. fighting for the success of Here were hundreds the Socialist Party with of thousands of people the vim, the fire, and the who had come to this enthusiasm of a new con- country with a life, with vert. traditions, with a kultur The author of the — if you please — so dif- successful novel The Rise ferent from the American of David Levinsky would mode of life that it seemed be an important figure in as if they touched at no the literary world if he point. The hordes of Jew- had done nothing else. ish immigrants, streaming The editor of The Jewish over to America from Rus- Daily Forward would of necessity be a man of impor- sia and Germany and Romania came to this country. tance. And as a worker in the Socialist ranks, and in They settled in ghettos. They did not diffuse them- his day, a worker in the grinding tasks of organization, selves over great areas. They made Jewries for them- Cahan has long ago won his spurs as a leading Ameri- selves in New York and Philadelphia and Boston and can Socialist. Chicago. Many of them were revolutionists. They believed • • • • • in Socialism; many of them in Anarchism. They tried 1 2 W. Feigenbaum: Abraham Cahan [April 6, 1918] to make the Americans believe in Socialism. They or- that there would be of printing all the proclamations ganized unions, and tried to work with Socialists of he wanted. native stock. They found that their lives touched in When Cahan came to New York, the East Side very few points. And so many of them began to feel was hardly what it is today. East Broadway was still a that they were altogether self-sufficient, and did not boulevard, and the swarming ghetto had not yet de- need to get along with the non-Jews. veloped. There were colonies of Jews here; most of them But there were many who felt that there must be were of the earlier German immigration, and the old some way of getting into touch with the American Portuguese Jew was still prominent. The Russians were people. Cahan was one of them, and this feeling has just coming in; when Cahan writes of that influx, in colored his whole life work. David Levinsky, he writes of what he knows at first hand. • • • • • • • • • • And so he has worked all his life to make the Americans understand the Jews, to make them see that At that time, Cahan was 22 years old; he was they are brothers under their skins. And he has labored very slender, beardless, very youthful looking; he has to make the Jews see that the Americans are regular told me that he looked no more than 16. Also, he was people, too, to break down a particularism that some- a violent anarchist. He very soon came to his first meet- times cannot help but grow up when a vast popula- ing. There was a speech by some leader of the radicals tion with one life is precipitated into a set of circum- of the city. He spoke in Russian. The idea of the lead- stances, dominated by another. ers of the anarchists was to organize the Jews, but the Cahan saw that the children of immigrants were Jews were mostly ignorant of Russian, and these Jews, apt to have a feeling of aloofness towards American Russians of the intelligentsia type, who did not know institutions, because of these things; so he tried to make Jewish [Yiddish], sought to appeal to them in a lan- them adopt the customs of the Americans. Baseball is guage that they did not understand. neither better nor worse than any other game. But it Cahan listened to the speaker. It seemed as if happens to be the American game, and those who live something was lacking. The theory was all right, but in this country should know it. So he reasoned, and so the means of applying it was at fault. The boyish look- he taught. ing fellow stood up, and said in a very quavering voice, He saw the ignorance of the American people “Mr. Chairman!” The audience looked, and laughed regarding the Russian Jewish immigrants, and of their at him. How dare a kid talk at them. And chagrined at great, teeming East Side life. So he told them about their merriment, he strode to the platform, determined that life. He wrote Yekl in 1895, to tell them about the to make good. And he did. He was swept away by the life on the East Side, and show them that the Jews, passion of his own eloquence. He spoke as no youth with all their different ways, were brother and sisters had ever spoken. He was carried away by his own fer- under their skins to those who had lived here before. vor. And the audience returned to the seats that they Abraham Cahan was born in Vilna in August were about quitting, and mad him the hero of the 1860. He was educated in the schools that trained movement. At least, this is Cahan’s 35 year old memory teachers; but he never became a Russian pedagogue. of the event. He came to America in June 1882, a slim, youthful- There were few enough men of education at that looking, fiery-spirited boy, full of revolt at the land of time willing to surrender their energies and time to “proclamatia.” That is, in the revolutionary movement the cause; and Cahan became a leader. But within a of Russia, it was necessary to issue “proclamations” to year, he had become a Socialist, a change that made the people through underground channels, because of the anarchists condemn him as a traitor. the strict watch that the government kept upon them, making regular periodicals impossible, and his first • • • • • feeling at the political freedom of America was the case W. Feigenbaum: Abraham Cahan [April 6, 1918] 3 In 1890, Cahan was editing the Arbeiter Zeitung, crat and came out a Socialist. He had organized the a weekly Socialist paper in Jewish [Yiddish]. He had Social Democracy of America. There were zeal and been a night school teacher, but he had been fired. A propaganda fire and a crusading spirit in that move- year or two later, that paper became the Abend Blatt, a ment that appealed to many. It came from the soil. It daily, the Arbeiter Zeitung remaining the weekly maga- was American. It may have been a bit unsound scientifi- zine. There was growing up a group of brilliant Social- cally, but it was spontaneous and fresh and clean, and ist writers among the Jewish colony in the city. They American. organized unions; the powerful garment unions of to- And a large section of the Socialists of New York day largely date from that period. Incessantly work- broke away from the SLP and joined the SDA. Among ing, writing, lecturing, organizing, the great Socialist the men who joined were Cahan, Zametkin, A. victories of last fall are largely due to the leaven that Schonberg, M. Gillis, Miller, Barondess, I.A. Hour- was planted at that time. wich, and many others. They joined hands with the Among the men who did this work, many of Debs group, and in Massachusetts, the party won a them still active in the movement, were Cahan, Louis series of notable electoral victories. Although not a part Miller, M. Zametkin, B. Feigenbaum, Joseph Baron- of this sketch, it is interesting to note that within 2 dess, Philip Krantz, and a man about 10 years younger years, there was another split, and that then all of the than the rest, Morris Hillquit. Socialist factions united, with the exception of a small It was about 1896 that there was published in fragment that followed DeLeon, and formed the the Arbeiter Zeitung, in serial form, a story entitled present Socialist Party. “Yekl der Yankee.” This attracted such wide attention Cahan was active in the first realignment, and that Cahan translated his own work into English and he founded the Jewish Forward in 1897, which he ed- it was published as a book under the title Yekl.
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