476
PARTISAN REVIEW
masses. At the same time, Cahan saw his role as that of a mediator
between cultures; as Chametzky points out, Cahan wrote both a
polemical article in
The New York World
about the coronation of Czar
Alexander
III
as well as a campaign report on the making of the
American president in 1884 for a leading literary journal in Petersburg.
To the circle around Lincoln Steffens and Hutchins Hapgood of the
Commercial Advertiser,
Cahan represented "the spirit of the East Side"
ghetto. And he translated Marx, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, as well
as Tolstoy, Hugo, Howells, and Hardy, into Yiddish. As Chametzky
says, "Cahan's was a complex sensibility, that of an intellectual and
writer nurtured by Russian and American culture as well as a Jewish
life." His cultural versatility made Cahan acutely sensitive to the
tensions experienced by the participants of the New Immigration as
well as to the political problems of the Old World and the New. By
transcending the boundaries of one single culture he could become the
representative man "to stand for East European Jews in America"
(Nathan Glazer),
the
father of the world Irving Howe portrayed.
Chametzky's
From the Ghetto
provides us with a valuable system–
atic survey and subtle interpretations of Cahan's literary oeuvre against
the background of cultural conflict. Chametzky shows how Cahan's
sense of tension and self-division-he planned, but never finished, a
major novel entitled
The Chasm-entered
and shaped his fiction, so
that Cahan 's creative responses to these tensions became a significant
contribution to American realism as well as a pioneering achievement
in Jewish-American writing. Cahan's short stories told the immigrants
about America and America about the immigrants; they attracted
William Dean Howells's attention, and their formal achievements were
echoed by writers from Gold to Roth. Chametzky's comparisons
between Cahan's Yiddish and English stories, and in two instances
between differing Yiddish and English versions of the same story, are
fascinating as they seem
to
provide a model approach to the study of
cultural dualism: "In matters of social theory and sex (Cahan) seems
less restrained with his Jewish" than his American audience; yet, his
Yiddish writing is also more heavily didactic and tendentious than his
English work. When Cahan reworked the draft of a long story, " Fanny
and Her Suitors," into Yiddish, he introduced a socialist editor whose
long speeches present the socialist line on love, marriage, and the
family. In his English fiction, he developed the persona of a superior
narrator "explaining to a reader, whose values he presumably shares,
some inside information about the Jewish immigrant culture in
America, " a narrative mode which has become dominant in much
