The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  There were darker memories too, inevitable enough for a Jewish child growing up in nineteenth-century Russia. One day his mother took him to visit her father in Vilna, and en route they passed the bodies of Polish landowners hanging from several gallows that had been set up in a field of cabbage. The bodies were wrapped in white gowns that fluttered in the wind. “I remember,” Cahan wrote, “a boot falling from one of the dead ones. I remember soldiers with their white trousers neatly tucked into their shiny black boots, marching past the gallows to the sound of blaring trumpets.” He remembered his mother calling out for her sister (“Fayge! Fayge!”), from whom they had become separated in the milling crowd.

  He was, at the time, all of three years old. He remembered the package of grits and a small pan for cooking it that his aunt Fayge gave his mother on the visit. He remembered standing at a window and looking out at a snow-covered market. “Somewhere, in one of the other houses, my father and several other Jews are in hiding,” he wrote. “A town elder has been ordered to select Jews for service in the czar’s army.” That a three-year-old could know, let alone remember, about service in the czar’s army, is hard to imagine. But Cahan claimed to remember being carried on his mother’s hip: she held on to him with one hand and with the other offered food to a Jewish recruit who was in chains, on his way to serve in the army.

  The danger of conscription was a constant presence in Cahan’s youth. In 1827 Czar Nicholas I included Jews in Russia’s conscription laws, requiring Jewish communities to produce candidates, from ages twelve to twenty-five, for Russia’s military cantons, or training schools. The purpose of compulsory military service was less to defend Russia than to break the conscripts’ ties to the Jewish community and to convert them to Christianity. Conditions were harsh, particularly for those who refused conversion, and suicide was not uncommon. The policy enforced strict quotas on Jewish communities, and leaders had to grapple with the task of implementing them. Some hired kidnappers (khappers, in Yiddish) to capture potential conscripts, many of whom ran away or disfigured themselves to avoid service. When quotas went unmet, boys as young as eight would be snatched in their stead.

  Alexander II took the throne in 1855, upon his father’s death, five years before Cahan’s birth, and began to scale back some of Nicholas I’s worst policies. He abolished the cantonist policy and decreased the period of military service to five years. He eased some restrictions on Jews, allowing Jewish businessmen to travel to parts of the empire from which they had been previously prohibited, and he opened the doors of some universities to a small percentage of Jews. Alexander II’s reign was by no means a golden period of freedom for Jews, but the czar whom Benjamin Disraeli called the “kindliest prince who has ever ruled Russia” allowed Jews to hope, however modestly, that they might be witnessing the beginning of a new era in which they would be granted equal rights as Russian citizens.

  Cahan’s paternal grandfather, Reb Yankele, was a rabbi and was much revered by his family and the inhabitants of Podberez’ye. Cahan was admonished to persevere in his studies and to conduct himself in a manner befitting the grandson of a rabbi.

  “The most intense of my first memories is of Friday, the eve of the Sabbath, when, as the twilight deepened, my father took me on his lap, telling me old legends and crooning ancient Hebrew songs,” Cahan told Ernest Poole, who interviewed him for the magazine Outlook in 1911. When Cahan was four years old, his father wrapped him in his prayer shawl, as was the custom, and brought him to the cheder (a religious elementary school for boys). There his father broke down and sobbed. As far as he was concerned, his son had now “entered the service of God.”

  When Cahan was not quite six, his family moved from Podberez’ye to his mother’s birthplace, Vilna. Only fourteen miles from Podberez’ye, it was, however, worlds away. “The Jerusalem of Lithuania,” as Napoleon was said to have dubbed it, Vilna was a storied center of Jewish learning, best known as the home of the Vilna Gaon, the influential eighteenth-century rabbi. A great Talmudic scholar who was also well versed in secular subjects like mathematics and astronomy, the Vilna Gaon was considered a rationalist compared to the mystically inclined Hasidim, whom he battled.

  Cahan’s earliest impression of the city, which had a population of about 80,000, was not of its intellectual character but of something decidedly more earthbound. “The stench in the courtyards seemed to issue from the bricks of the buildings,” he wrote in his memoir. Unlike Podberez’ye, which boasted gardens and fresh air, Vilna had only “streets and more streets.” And no plumbing. Cahan’s family had moved to Vilna because his mother’s two uncles ran a thriving liquor business there. They owned distilleries several miles outside town and, in town, a wholesale liquor store and a tavern, behind which Cahan lived with his family between the ages of six and fourteen.

  For all the stench, there was a good bit of warmth in the Cahan household. His mother kept her Sabbath candles on the chest of drawers in her bedroom, and on Fridays she moved them into the tavern, which became an extension of their home, and ushered in the Sabbath by saying the blessing over them. If a customer came in for a drink afterward, he could get it either on credit or against collateral. His parents would unpack the Passover dishes, and Cahan wrote of the fondness with which his mother handed him his own blue Passover goblet. He sensed tension between his parents, who worried about money. He was “pointed out” as a country cousin, he said, “a lower order of human being.” But foreshadowing his greater assimilation in years to come, Cahan wrote that he picked up the new Vilna accent and idioms quickly. Soon he was “pointing out others as country cousins.”

  During the first half of the nineteenth century, Vilna had undergone sweeping changes. While the city still deeply felt the influence of rabbinical scholarship, it had also become a thriving center of the Haskala, as the Jewish enlightenment movement was called, which encouraged Jews to widen their scope of learning to include secular studies of all kinds. Even the Russian government recognized the importance of Vilna; during this time it opened several schools geared toward the Russification of the Jews. The result was that, at precisely the period during which Cahan arrived, a culture war was brewing, although its pattern was not always well defined. Cahan would become caught up in it and move into the secular camp—up to a point.

  In his memoir, Cahan gave the impression that he sensed all this from the moment of his arrival in Vilna, even though he was not quite six years old. He wrote that it was common to see “two Jews stop in the street, begin to chatter like two turkeys about a passage in the Talmud, gather about them in short order a small crowd, and engage in heated debate, to the delight of the listeners.” He reckoned that “a Vilna youth [is] as skillful in the techniques of intellectual hairsplitting as an American boy is with a baseball.”

  Vilna boasted, in the Rabiner Institute, one of the two schools in Russia for training teachers to work with Jewish children in public schools. “Vilna, the city of the Gaon,” Cahan wrote, “was now the city of Berka Michailishker (Adam Hacohen Lebensohn),* the great atheist.” His father Scharkne would “often curse him with an intensity that reflected his respect for the atheist’s excellence as a sage, grammarian, and Hebraist.” Cahan’s father told how “once a Jew visiting Berka Michailishker found on one of the tables a commentary on the Bible bound in red morocco leather. ‘Why is it bound in red?’ the pious Jew asked. To which the atheist replied, ‘Originally it was white. But it was caught with so many lies that it turned red for shame.’ ”

  Cahan’s family home was situated in a lively part of town, on a square where several streets intersected. The air was filled with the noise and chatter of a busy marketplace, with peddlers, peasants, and salesmen hawking their wares—herring and salt and tobacco and soda and oats and hay. The Cahans’ dark apartment was connected to the back of the tavern, which was a large room where brandy was on tap and platters of honey cake and roast goose and jellied calves’ feet were displayed at the bar. Their customers were mostly workers from
the marketplace, peddlers with long thick ropes around their waists who pushed two-wheeled carts. The tavern’s patrons were proud that their barkeep was a son of a rabbi, but Cahan’s father wished his customers were more educated and “respectable.”

  Scharkne Cahan was devoted to Jewish sacred music. He “treasured the singing and the rehearsals at which he spent many evenings with me on his lap,” while his son was mesmerized, “transported,” as he put it, “by music and brandy fumes to a fantasy world.” Cahan’s recollections of this period are filled with references to the intensity of his religious feelings, but during this time he was also hearing the siren call of secularism.

  Scharkne was no stranger to the conflict between the secular and religious. Cahan described him as a great learner, a yeshiva student who was never educated in secular topics but nonetheless thirsted for knowledge of the modern world. He read more philosophy than Talmud and was “irresistibly drawn to secular books printed in Hebrew, and he dreamed of helping me become an ‘educated man.’ ” When his son Abraham was ten, the boy enrolled in a public school without his parents’ permission. It was one of several government-operated schools in Vilna established for Jews, funded by taxes levied against the Jewish community.

  There his clean-shaven Jewish teacher wore a blue frock coat with brass buttons and spoke in Russian; none of the students wore head coverings. Despite his yearning to learn Russian and other secular subjects, Cahan soon found himself homesick and fearful of his teacher’s brass buttons, his Russian, and his seemingly foreign ways. After about a year, Cahan left the school, and his father hired two tutors—one to teach him Russian, and the other Hebrew grammar.

  Cahan’s education, and to some degree his life, remained divided between these two poles. His father toyed with the idea of sending him to the Rabiner school—where the teachers were also clean-shaven Jews who ignored the Sabbath—but lost his nerve. For someone of Cahan’s generation, the world of his father was not simple: that older generation was also torn between religion and modernity. Cahan yearned to study at a secular institution but felt a great pull toward his religious upbringing. He called the period leading up to his bar mitzvah “the time of my greatest religious fervor.” He was not the only one who felt this way. During the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jewish Vilna became “a preachers’ market,” and Cahan didn’t miss a talk by any of them.

  Cahan’s brother, Isaac, was born in 1873. That winter a new law was introduced, imposing a general draft and abolishing the old practice of leaving to the community the selection of young men to fill the quota of military recruits. Also ended was the practice of allowing the wealthy to buy substitutes for military service. Eligible young Jewish men were now expected to serve the czar’s army for five years and could not become officers. But a special dispensation could be granted to those with a secondary Russian education. So the new law fueled Jewish student enrollment in the Rabiner schools.

  Meanwhile, Cahan’s uncle’s business spiraled downward, and he closed his wholesale brandy store. His parents took over the tavern, but they too struggled, and finally they gave up the business. Scharkne took a job as a bookkeeper at a small company that imported fruit from Crimea and southern Europe. Cahan liked to visit his father’s office and breathe in the scent of oranges and apples and grapes from foreign lands. But the new employer was difficult, and Cahan witnessed him insulting and belittling his father, who soon lost the job. With money tight, his parents tried to apprentice Cahan to a cabinetmaker, but he rebelled in a demonstrative showdown with his mother. At fourteen, he entered the largest yeshiva in Vilna.

  Cahan’s reflections on his education strike a responsive chord with readers more than a century later. “If I had studied at a gymnasium or an American public school instead of at cheders and yeshivas I would have known more at eleven than I knew at fourteen,” he wrote. But he quickly added that he could not write off the Talmud study he had engaged in from the age of eight. Not only did it make “the most rigorous reasoning required in arithmetic easy,” but it clearly left an imprint on his soul. Years later, presiding over a newspaper that ushered generations of immigrants into modern American life, that core of Jewish learning would serve as a touchstone and orient him in an uprooted world.

  In his youth, however, Cahan, like many young Jews, turned to speaking and reading Russian. As for piety, Hershka Levinson, a childhood friend, was an atheist and ridiculed the idea of God. But that approach left Cahan unmoved. “I was no longer pious. I had long ago stopped saying the daily prayers; nor did I fear to desecrate the Sabbath,” Cahan wrote. “But I had not stopped believing in God.”

  * * *

  * Abraham Lebensohn, also known as Adam Hacohen Lebensohn, described by the Jewish Encyclopedia as a “Russian Hebraist, poet, and grammarian.” He was “popularly known by the surname Michailishker.”

  2

  In later life, Cahan remained acutely aware of the painful transition that immigrant Jews made as they passed from youthful piety into a wider world of secular learning. He made his own journey not as an immigrant but while still an adolescent. When he was fourteen, he learned, from students at the Vilna Teachers Training Institute, about the city’s free government library. It stood opposite the governor-general’s residence, where the czar stayed when he came to Vilna. Its facade announced the building’s purpose in large, gleaming gold letters—PUBLIC LIBRARY—and inside, its shelves were well stocked with the complete works of Turgenev, with Ostrovsky’s dramas, and with Pisarev’s novels.

  Not until he was fifteen, however, was Cahan able to overcome his awe and summon the courage to enter the library. He asked the librarian for the first volume of Turgenev’s complete works. As he looked for a seat, the librarian insisted he remove his overcoat. Blushing, for the garment was neither a jacket nor an overcoat but the only clothing he wore, he fled the library. Once home, he undertook to have a jacket made, and when it was finished, “I felt as if I had suddenly grown ten times more Gentile than before.” He then returned to the library to commence his reading of Turgenev and the vast literary world beyond.

  Cahan spent five hours a day in the library, reading voraciously. Decades later he could still recall the smell of the books, the stillness of the reading room, and the feel of the book bindings. “The Vilna Public Library became for me a temple of learning and inspiration,” he wrote. It was the sort of experience that, twenty years later and an ocean away, the immigrant readers of Cahan’s own paper would know well.

  As he plunged ahead in his secular studies of geography and astronomy, Cahan’s newfound knowledge shifted his perspective on religion. “Clearly, there were no mysteries!” he recalled thinking. “There was no God!”

  It was not only reading that changed him. During this period Cahan and several cronies took a room in a courtyard where geese were sold. It was called the Goosery. Friends brought girls. They danced the quadrille to their own singing. Their behavior toward the girls was, he wrote, always exemplary; “on rare occasions, however, there would be another kind of young lady.” Cahan characterized them as “not street girls” but girls from respectable families, and with them “we spent lusty hours of the sort one does not write about.”

  Not long before, Cahan had developed an eye infection and had been treated by a feldsher, a health practitioner who did not hold a medical degree. The infection lasted weeks and left him cross-eyed, a condition that though he later alleviated it with the local application of cocaine, troubled him for the rest of his life and made him ashamed of his appearance and shy, especially with women. But he was shedding his inhibitions, both social and political.

  One day while Cahan and his friends were at the Goosery, a small boy entered their hideaway and handed one of them a printed leaflet. “A Jewish man told me to give you this,” the boy said. They ran to the door to see if they could catch the sender, but “no one was in the corridor.” The leaflet was a socialist proclamation, written in Yiddish on one side and Russian or Hebrew on
the other. Cahan called the leaflet “the first underground, forbidden writing I had ever seen. We were all shaken by it.”

  This world of mysterious messengers and subversive pamphlets, combined with his intensive reading of Russian literature, constituted Cahan’s true education. Still, the Vilna Teachers Training Institute, which he attended from 1878 to 1881, was an enormous step up for him, given his lopsided learning during his early years of religious education. The school—less a university than what today we might call a junior college—consisted of five buildings and a courtyard. The Ministry of Education intended it “to insure that future Jewish teachers of Jews be mentally and physically healthy and alert.” It was also an instrument of assimilation. None of the Jewish students spoke Yiddish at the school; to do so would have been to risk severe punishment. But Cahan quickly soured on the institution, which bored him with its rote learning, and on the prospect of becoming a teacher.

  Meanwhile the world around him was changing. The relaxation of the laws regarding military service and Alexander II’s small steps toward granting Jews rights (including, in some cases, the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement) gave rise to a feeling that the government was moving—haltingly but inexorably—toward the emancipation of its Jewish population. But as Jews began to take a larger part in Russian cultural and professional life, they were accused of polluting the purity of the Russian people. Anti-Semitic attacks rose, gaining in strength after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78.

  All these pressures took their toll: revolutionaries were increasingly frustrated by the Russian government’s autocratic ways, and Jews felt their chances for inclusion in Russian society slipping away. In April 1879 a teacher named Alexander Soloviev fired five shots at Alexander II in a failed assassination attempt. Later that same year a revolutionary group called Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) placed a bomb on the railway tracks from Livadia to Moscow, but it missed the czar’s train. In February 1880 a bomb exploded in a room directly below the dining room at the Winter Palace, missing the czar by only minutes. “Each new terrorist deed,” Cahan wrote decades later, “received short shrift in the newspapers because the official censor had banned publication of details. However, even these short accounts were enough to inform the public that an effective underground movement was conducting a heroic struggle against the throne.”