The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  For several years, Cahan had heard stories of the existence of a secret revolutionary movement. He recalled that on one Passover there was excitement over the arrest of a group of Jewish revolutionaries. One was the “hunchbacked son of a cantor,” and he remembered his mother telling him, “In the hunchback’s trunk they found a loaf of bread—an outrage during Passover—and a book. And in the book it was written, ‘There is no God and we don’t need a czar.’ ” Cahan’s comment: “I was already well on my way to atheism so that the declaration about God did not disturb me. But how could the world exist without a czar?”

  Down by the railroad tracks, he had noticed that a group of young men and women gathered regularly near a refreshment table that a watchman’s wife had set out beside a railroad track. “Even though they dressed and chatted like the others, they had a certain manner that set them apart.” Curious, Cahan approached a friend who attended the same school as one of the members of the group. The boy eventually confessed to Cahan that he had been reading underground literature. He “drew from his pocket a forbidden pamphlet and handed it to me,” Cahan recalled. Cahan realized that it was published by the group that had tried to blow up Alexander II’s train, and he held it with reverence. “The pamphlet came to me from people who lived as brothers, who were willing to face the gallows for freedom.”

  Cahan joined the revolutionary underground, and “life took on new meaning.… All could be equal. All could be brothers.” A reading program was organized for him. He became an impassioned believer in socialism, hungering to convert others. “I walked in a daze as one newly in love.”

  As Cahan fell in deeper with his new friends, his relations with his family suffered. His father worried about his abandonment of religion, and for many weeks father and son sat in silence at the Sabbath table. One evening a relative, seeing a bulge in Cahan’s jacket pocket, sought to reach in and pull out what he thought were underground pamphlets. Cahan struck his hand and pushed it away, shouting at his relative. When the relative left, Cahan’s mother remonstrated him. “You will bring misfortune on your own head,” she said sadly.

  On Sunday morning, March 1, 1881, Alexander II was traveling from the Winter Palace to the riding academy to watch a military parade, following a well-known route along the Catherine Canal. The czar sat in a closed, bulletproof carriage, protected by Cossacks. The head of his guards and the chief of police followed closely behind in separate sleighs.

  A member of Narodnaya Volya named Nikolai Rysakov approached and threw a small package wrapped in a white handkerchief at the carriage. It landed near the horses’ hooves. The bomb exploded, killing one of the Cossacks, but the czar emerged from the carriage, relatively unscathed. Rysakov was quickly apprehended. Just as the guards were urging the czar to leave the scene, another member of Narodnaya Volya, Ignaty Grinevitsky, threw another bomb at him. This one killed him.

  Cahan was in a classroom studying botany when a student burst in with the news. The school’s director requested that they close their books immediately and assemble in the corridor. The director announced that there would be no classes the following day, saying, “Our czar is dead.” Two of Cahan’s cronies pinched him, and Cahan sneaked out of the institute at night to make contact with his underground comrades. On March 15 he and his classmates and teachers were taken to a Russian church where they all swore loyalty to the new czar, Alexander III. But Cahan no longer had trouble envisioning a world without a czar. When one of his comrades from his underground group made the sign of a fig instead of saluting their new leader, Cahan had difficulty controlling his laughter.

  The plotters were rounded up. In the post-assassination chaos, censorship fell by the wayside, and newspaper headlines trumpeted the newest revelations. Decades later Cahan thrilled at the memory of hurrying to read the daily papers. “Every day the press blazoned a new sensation,” he recalled. He and his socialist friends eagerly awaited the next revolutionary step. Even outside Russia, it was expected that great upheavals would follow the assassination. The New York Herald rushed a special correspondent to St. Petersburg to cover the stirrings of revolution.

  Alexander II’s death was a catastrophe for Russian Jews, and pogroms erupted throughout the Pale, as Russians obsessed on the idea that Jews were responsible for the country’s troubles. Many Jews felt that nothing good would come from the czar’s assassination, but Cahan, at the height of his socialist fervor, took a more positive tone. “Even though the pogrom brought dread into the heart of every Jew,” he wrote years later, “I must admit that the members of my group were not disturbed by it. We regarded ourselves as human beings, not as Jews. There was only one remedy to the world’s ills, and that was socialism.” The phrase “I must admit” suggests that Cahan, looking back decades after the event, had long since come to comprehend the degree to which participation in a “universal” program often required, as the price of admission, the abandonment of concerns about Jewish suffering.

  Upon his graduation from the Vilna Teachers Training Institute, Cahan’s education, so to speak, accelerated rapidly. He plunged immediately into helping organize an underground press and then traveled, on his summer vacation, to visit a rich uncle in St. Petersburg. His heartbroken father refused to accompany him to the train station. Cahan was thrilled to be in the big city, where Jews had only recently been allowed to settle following Alexander II’s easing of residence restrictions. Upon arriving, he asked the driver of his droshky to call out names of streets as they passed—Cahan recognized many from newspapers and literature.

  His uncle received him warmly, whisking him out by train to his country home and buying him a proper teacher’s black frock. At a bookstall, he bought a copy of John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy, with notes by the translator N. G. Chernyshevsky, the prerevolutionary philosopher who was at the time in prison in Siberia. During that period, books, pamphlets, and ideas could be as dangerous as chemical explosives. Cahan spent three weeks in St. Petersburg, but when he returned to Vilna, he felt as if he had been away for many years.

  Cahan’s teaching assignment was in the province of Vitebsk (where Marc Chagall would be born in 1887) in Velizh, near Lubavitch, a center of Hasidism and the seat of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Cahan said good-bye to his revolutionary comrades as his family fussed over him. He made peace with his father, who agreed to accompany him and the rest of the family on the first fifteen miles of the train ride. The family got off at Vileika, and the parting lasted a minute. “We kissed and embraced, and my mother cried and my aunt cried and the children kept jumping,” Cahan recalled. “Finally, I disengaged myself. Then the train began to move. Through the window I could see my mother standing rigid, her face pale. I was in a daze. I pulled myself together. I put on a brave front. I waved my kerchief and managed the pretense of a smile.”

  3

  In Velizh, the tension between Cahan’s universalist, radical self and his Jewish self only increased. His entire life, in fact, would be a series of inner battles between these two aspects of his identity. Pious but rationalist Vilna had not prepared him for the lifestyle of the community of Hasidic Jews in Velizh. Here, a man walking in the street followed at a distance behind his wife; walking together would have been considered a sign of moral looseness. Cahan found himself homesick, repelled by the Hasidim but drawn to them at the same time. Soon after his arrival, he decided to attend synagogue, which he justified in his memoir as applying “the principle of the revolutionaries … to mingle with the people.” He and a friend went to shul “fully aware of the fact that in view of the old-fashioned piety of the city our education branded us as Gentiles.”

  It turned out, however, that when they entered the synagogue, the congregation welcomed them as important guests and offered them seats of honor. They invited Cahan to chant the haftorah, a short reading from one of the biblical books of the prophets that follows the weekly Torah reading. It had been eight years since Cahan’s bar mitzvah and he was out of practice; he managed the Hebrew well e
nough, but the tune confused him, and soon he was stumbling over the words as well. “I began to burn with blushing,” he wrote, still smarting from the embarrassment decades later. “When it was done I couldn’t look anyone in the face.”

  The synagogue did not reject him; instead, Cahan turned away from it and looked for other ways of meeting people. He struck up friendships with the socialist underground in Velizh and found living quarters with a family that was also involved in prerevolutionary stirrings. He published his first article and encountered, for the first time, a Russian translation of volume one of Marx’s Das Kapital. But he never felt at home in Velizh and wondered, as he wrote in his memoir, “How can I get out of here?”

  The answer came shortly before Purim, when he received a letter from his mother: “Your darkly charming friend who teaches Rivka caught a cold. The funeral has already taken place. He was buried deep, deep, deep. The cold is great; take care of yourself, my son! Do not go outside without your muffler.” This was not his mother’s usual way of writing, and it was already spring—the cold weather had ended. Cahan understood that his mother was telling him that one of his underground friends had been arrested.

  In Cahan’s first heady days as a socialist, he had anguished over his sacred duty to love everyone equally. “If I loved my mother more than other women it meant only that I still harbored sentiments from an evil and unjust world,” he wrote in his memoir. “But in my heart I continued to feel that I loved her more than all others.” He might not yet have been “a fully developed socialist,” but his mother’s love was, in effect, saving him now.

  Soon thereafter a postcard arrived from a Vilna friend containing even more disquieting news: another friend, Stotchick, had been arrested and taken to the political prison in Vilna. (Stotchick, alone in a cell, would later take his own life by hanging himself with a sheet.) Cahan gathered his forbidden reading materials and gave them to his landlord’s servant, then returned to his room and fell into “an uneasy sleep.” Awakened by the local police, he convinced them that his copy of Das Kapital was a book about business. A few days later they showed up at the school where he was teaching. He was searched and marched out of school, held in custody while his apartment was searched again, and then told to appear for further questioning in the evening.

  “When the interrogation was ended,” Cahan wrote, “I was warned not to leave the city.” He was told that he would be kept under surveillance and taken to Vitebsk for further questioning. His landlord’s family was placed under house arrest. The surveillance of Cahan was lax, but even though some of his local acquaintances remained friendly, he sensed a change of attitude toward him. He decided to make a run for it and planned an escape by barge. When complications arose, he found a rowboat. A trusted old friend named Meyerson, who aided him, urged him to use an alias. For the time being, he would no longer be Cahan, but Lifshitz. On the appointed night, under a moonlit sky, Lifshitz-Cahan handed Meyerson his elegant, government-issued teacher’s hat and replaced it with a cheap, ordinary hat. Then he twisted two strands of hair down the sides of his face. The irony that the fugitive socialist was disguising himself as a Hasidic Jew was not lost on either man.

  Cahan made it across the Dnieper River safely. He spent three weeks in a town called Moghilev, where he was astonished to discover the existence of a local Yiddish-language theater, something that had not been permitted in Vilna. (He would become deeply involved with Yiddish theater in New York.) Through friends he made in Moghilev, he heard about a man named Israel Belkind who was looking for young people to go to Palestine. Cahan asked for an introduction immediately.

  Why was a socialist/universalist interested in meeting a Zionist emissary? The answer is complex. The pogroms ignited by the assassination of Alexander II and the accession of Alexander III brought home to Russia’s Jews the fact that they could no longer live in the Russian Empire. But where could they go? In his memoir Cahan described a student who entered a synagogue in Kiev and stunned the congregation by announcing: “We are your brothers. We are Jews, just as you are. Until now we thought of ourselves as Russians, not as Jews. Now we regret it. The events of these last weeks—the pogroms in Elisavetgrad, in Balta, here in Kiev, and in other cities have shown us how tragic has been our mistake. Yes, we are Jews.”

  Cahan called the event “the beginning of the nationalist movement among the young Jewish intellectuals in Russia,” though the Kiev student group consisted of those “who favored America as the land to which Jews should look for a new home.”

  The impact of the nationalist idea was so powerful that, Cahan said, some Jews “stopped talking in Russian and began to use only Yiddish.” Many, he wrote, “discarded their Russianized names and assumed their Jewish ones. Yakov became Yankel again and Natasha answered only when addressed as Ethel.” The new Jewish nationalists were only a small group, Cahan admitted, as were the Jewish revolutionaries who fell in with the nationalist movement. The reason more revolutionaries did not join the Jewish nationalist movement, Cahan wrote, “may seem unbelievable. Among the Jewish revolutionaries were some who considered the anti-Semitic massacres to be a good omen.”

  Cahan was discovering a pattern that, over time, has played itself out repeatedly: leftists, in thrall to a fantasy of universal or populist liberation, have sided with their natural enemies in the hope of purging from their own group any particularistic taint. According to these revolutionaries, he wrote, the pogroms “were an instinctive outpouring of the revolutionary anger of the people, driving the Russian masses against their oppressors.… Uneducated Russian people knew that the czar, the officials, and the Jews sucked their blood … so the Ukrainian peasant attacked the Jews, the ‘percentniks.’ The revolutionary torch had been lit and would next be applied to the officials and the czar himself.” He attributed such reasoning only to some revolutionaries, “Jews and non-Jews.”

  Cahan quoted from a proclamation addressed to “the Ukrainian pogrom makers” by People’s Will that “urged the pogrom makers to continue their revolutionary work,” and he noted that one of the members of the group that composed the proclamation was a Jew.* Cahan was slowly coming to agree with those who felt that the Jews had no future in Russia. “Two groups emerged,” he wrote. “One believed that a new home for the Jews should be started in America, the land of rich resources and opportunity. The other urged a return to Palestine, the historical home of the Jewish people.”

  He made the acquaintance of Israel Belkind,† whom he would call “a pioneer of this pro-Palestine movement.” Twenty-two-year-old Abraham Cahan realized that he had to think all this through by himself. Belkind, a Zionist recruiter, “carried a book into which he wrote the names of candidates for Palestine.” Cahan called him a “doer of deeds, an idealist, almost one of ‘ours.’ ”

  But Cahan was not yet ready to throw in his lot with the Zionists. He viewed himself as “first of all a socialist.” He felt strongly that it was his duty to try to establish full rights for all citizens of Russia, and he believed that with proper education, the Russian people would abandon pogroms in favor of universal brotherhood. In any event, he was eager to get to Switzerland.

  Belkind argued that if Cahan were to go there, all he would be able to work for was to return to Russia as an “illegal,” with false papers, and once he’d returned, he would sooner or later be arrested. “And what would he be giving his life for?” Belkind asked him. “For a Russian people who made pogroms on Jews?” But if he went to Palestine, Belkind argued, Cahan “could work for the fulfillment of an ideal of happiness and security for our people and without risking my life.”

  Then Belkind, the Zionist recruiter, put to Cahan a question that found its mark. “If I was so determined to serve my socialist ideal, why must I go to Switzerland? Why not America? Many socialists were heading for America, where they planned to establish communist colonies.” As he thought about it, Cahan “imagined a wonderful communist life in that far-off country, a life without ‘mine’ and ‘thine.
’ I had thought until now that such a dream of equality could be realized only in the distant future. In America, it could become a reality now.” For many Jews, America was the “Golden Land.” For Cahan, it existed in his mind’s eye as a socialist utopia.

  He was suddenly on fire with the idea of going to America. “Pro-Palestine Belkind had made a pro-American out of me,” he recalled. Thousands of Jewish immigrants were gathering in Brody, Belkind told him, just across the border in Austria-Hungary, with the idea of getting to America. The two men had a warm parting, and Belkind wished him a successful journey.

  As he made plans to leave, Cahan wrote, “I paced my room in a fever. America! To go to America! To re-establish the Garden of Eden in that distant land. My spirit soared. All my other plans dissolved. I was for America!”

  It took a bit more doing to actually escape from Russia. Cahan acquired a forged passport, adopting a second false name. He worried a great deal about his parents and learned, eleven years later, that during this time they had in fact been visited by the gendarmes. He sent them false word that he had reached Paris safely, and then, on a cold day in 1882, he embarked on the steamer Marusia, bound southward for Kiev. En route down the Dnieper, the vessel was boarded by police. At one point, to avoid being identified by his crossed eyes, Cahan hid his face by carrying on his shoulder the trunk of another passenger.