ABRAHAM CAHAN, THE FATHER OF THE
WORLD OF OUR FATHERS
FROM THE GHETTO: THE FICTION OF ABRAHAM CAHAN. By Jules
Chametzky.
University of Massachusetts Press. $10.00.
Philip Rahv once argued against the customary notion that
American- Jewish writers comprised "some kind of literary faction or
school" and deplored the resulting homogenization of diverse styles,
sensibilities and cultural manifestations. Henry Roth and Mike Gold,
Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis
Singer cannot be easily thought of as sharing a common literary stance
based on "Jewishness"-which is, according to Rahv, an elusive
quality and rather difficult to define. Curiously, however, the achieve–
ment of one single writer-whose works are half-forgotten and whose
occasional stylistic weaknesses have prompted apologetic remarks by
more than one critic-does illuminate and, perhaps, constitute the
common ground upon which Jewish-American fiction has developed.
The monumental figure who is so central to Jewi h writing in America
is Abraham Cahan (1860-1951); and Jules Chametzky's
From the
Ghetto
is the first book-length study of Cahan 's literary works in
Yiddish and English.
Chametzky's excellent, fascinating and fully researched study
traces Cahan's literary career from his Russian-Jewish background to
his longtime editorial work at the
Jewish Daily Forward,
and focuses
on the period from 1882 (the year in which Cahan came to America) to
1917 (when his most famous novel,
The Rise of David Levinsky,
appeared in print). A youthful radical at the Vilna Teachers' Institute,
Cahan broke with traditional Judaism and became converted to
socialism in the Old World.
In
America, the land in which "a shister
(shoemaker) became a mister," Cahan soon developed his skills as a
socialist journalist who proposed that Jewish workers should be
addressed in Yiddish, whereas the " Propaganda Society for the Dissem–
ination of Socialist Ideas among Immigrant Jews" (of which Cahan
was a member) somewhat arrogantly favored Russian and regardeq
Cahan's proposal as "faintly comic." Cahan's Yiddish journalism,
from the founding of the short-lived
Di Neie Tseit
to his socialist
version of a "Dear Abby" column in the
Forward
("A Bintel Brief"),
reflected his messianic longing to reach and lead the immigrant
