by Seth Lipsky
After disembarking in Kiev, he boarded a train that would take him west to Dubno, a Ukrainian town near the Austrian border and near Brody. The train was full of Jews seeking to leave Russia—and he realized that he was part of a historic moment. “On that Saturday night there began the broad stream of Jewish migration that was to continue for almost two generations,” he wrote in his memoir. “It was to make America the major center of Jewish population. The course of Jewish history would be changed by it.”
As new emigrants boarded at each stop, Cahan’s excitement grew. He cut a deal with a smuggler to get a group of them over the Russian border, then took charge of the bribe money. They left the train at Dubno and approached the border by horse-drawn wagon. “We made a strange group, going across the fields and meadows in the night,” Cahan recalled. One of their peasant escorts halted them every few minutes, “holding up his finger and pausing to listen for God-knows-what disaster.… We went on and on. In the dark, our red-headed smuggler disappeared. Further on, we were joined by a husky, red-haired, clean-shaven Jew who spoke with a strange new accent.” Cahan clutched his false passport tightly in his hand, figuring that if they were apprehended, it would be safer simply to throw it away. “We stumbled on endlessly. It seemed as if the border was miles away. Then the peasant straightened up and announced we were already well inside Austria.”
During the spring of 1882, thousands of Jewish refugees from Ukraine were arriving in Brody, more than doubling its population of 15,000. Many slept in the streets. During the three weeks Cahan spent there, he got a haircut, bought a hat, and wrote to his family. He was struck by the affection with which Austrian Jews spoke of the emperor, Franz Josef, and by the Austrian government’s friendliness to the Jews. Austrian Jews, he marveled, feared neither the military nor the gendarmes, “with their feminine black feathered hats, with swords.” At one point at a parade ground he and some other Russian Jews listened as taps was played. “The sad tones touched the sorrowing ears of our people, standing in the lengthening shadows, overcome by longing for their forsaken home and by fear of a homeless future.”
He sought to link up with a group of socialists bound for America, about whom Belkind had told him. To do so, he felt he had to demarcate himself from the vast majority of refugees. “I was not just running away like an ordinary immigrant,” he wrote. “I was from the underground … I had evaded arrest.” According to one eyewitness who knew Cahan during this period, he wore “a long coat that was a cross between an overcoat and a Jewish kapoteh.… He had a beard of five long hairs and at times looked like a damned one.” Cahan, this source said, “was trying to get in with the intellectuals.… He stood apart and talked to no one.” His detachment belied his observational powers. “[He] looked everywhere and listened to all.”
Although Cahan would later write that he was “bitterly disappointed” at not finding more socialists during his layover in Brody, he actually did make many socialist friends there. He joined a group of Balta Am Olam, socialists who sought to establish agricultural settlements in the United States. He declared tactlessly (by his own account) that he would teach them socialist principles. (“Who needs you?” was the reply). He smoothed over his relations with his comrades by contributing some of the money his family had sent him for his journey.
Cahan set out for Germany with the Balta Am Olam by train, traveling third class, to the cheers of “Long live freedom in the American republic!” They stopped the next day at Lemberg, arrived in Cracow the following morning, and continued westward on to Breslau, where, Cahan remarked in his memoir, “for the first time I could see the marks of a highly civilized nation.” In Germany, it seemed to him that “everyone dressed like a nobleman.”
They traveled to Berlin and then arrived in Hamburg, where they boarded a ship going to England. In Liverpool, Cahan purchased a dictionary and began learning English, but the new language was as foreign to him as England’s “bicycles, bootblacks, and hansom cabs.” Cahan wondered if the mouths of those who spoke English were somehow formed differently than his own. In any case, in May 1882, the committed socialist set sail for America aboard the SS British Queen.
Cahan made his emblematic passage at the beginning of the vast wave of eastern European Jewish immigrants to America. Like them, Cahan spent much of the crossing standing at the rail, gazing at the seemingly limitless ocean. He wrote that he had imagined “that all Americans were tall and slender and that all the men wore yellow trousers and high hats.” The journey took about two weeks, but the days felt long, and Cahan began to feel as if “the place called America was only a figment of the imagination.”
Finally, the British Queen entered Delaware Bay, on its way to the port in Philadelphia. As he stood at the rail in the bright June sunshine, looking to spot his first American, he noted that “the water and the sky were blue with the blueness of paradise and all around us the sea gulls hailed us with their cries.”
In his novel The Rise of David Levinsky, Cahan gives a similarly florid account of Levinsky’s arrival in America, albeit intertwined with references to prayer and to God. When Levinsky’s vessel reaches Sandy Hook, New Jersey, he is “literally overcome with the beauty of the landscape” and observes that “the immigrant’s arrival in his new home is like a second birth to him.” The immigrant is like a “new born babe in possession of a fully developed intellect.” As Levinsky’s ship nears the shore, he recites verses from Psalm 104: “Thou openest thine hand and they are filled with good. Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; thou takest away their breath, they die.” And as he stands at the rail, Levinsky prays that God will not hide His face from him in the new land.
* * *
* An editor’s footnote to the English-language edition of Cahan’s memoir remarks that “the sole Jewish member of the Party’s executive committee … rushed back to Moscow” to try to get the committee to disavow the proclamation. But it was apparently too late. “The damage was done.”
† Belkind was a Zionist pioneer (1861–1929) who was part of the First Aliyah and a founder of BILU, an organization of Russian Zionists who established agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine.
4
Abraham Cahan arrived in America on June 6, 1882, disembarking at Philadelphia, where the U.S. Constitution had been crafted only ninety-five years earlier. Some individuals who had been infants at the time when the political giants were creating America might still have been alive. Before long, however, they would be gone, and in a sense, America was at a historical tipping point. The Civil War had been over for only seventeen years, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution had been adopted shortly thereafter, to ensure that the southern states, furious over Reconstruction, would not deny the newly freed slaves their basic civil rights. Industrialization was well under way in cities throughout America, and the machines that were mass-producing men’s and women’s clothing created factory jobs for the thousands of immigrants arriving at America’s shores. Chester A. Arthur, who had become president in 1881 upon the assassination of James A. Garfield, would confound his corrupt political cronies two years later by establishing the landmark Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Change was clearly in the air.
With astonishing speed, the ideas of socialism, Marxism, and social democracy—brought to America by European immigrants such as Cahan—would become part of the American political conversation and would revolutionize the relationship between laboring men and women and their employers. With equally surprising speed, Cahan, “greenhorn” though he was, became a part of the emerging reform movement and, through his journalism, rose to a position of unparalleled power and influence within it.
From Philadelphia, Cahan made a beeline for New York, arriving by train and ferry on the morning of June 7, 1882. He was twenty-two years old. At the time, no Statue of Liberty stood guard over the harbor, Ellis Island was a military post, and the Brooklyn Bridge wouldn’t be completed for another year. Horse-drawn streetcars and elevated st
eam railroads served as the primary mode of public transportation, and the tallest building in Manhattan had but ten stories. Immigration officials directed Cahan to the offices of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, where the German-speaking Jew who interviewed him seemed a “heartless bourgeois.… He probably suspected that I was a wild Russian.” Cahan would later realize that other “Yahudim [German-American Jews] … fervently wished to help us stand on our own two feet in the new homeland.”
Cahan immediately set out to catch up with his socialist friends from Vilna. They were living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. His comrades were overjoyed to see him, he wrote later; he considered them “the first Russian-Jewish intellectuals in the United States.”
The group had been met with hostility by German Jews, who had begun to arrive in America in the 1840s and had gradually displaced the long-established, assimilated Sephardic Jews as the country’s largest and most influential Jewish ethnic group. The Germans “considered us to be atheists and lunatics; we intellectuals thought of them as ignorant, primitive people,” Cahan wrote. As socialists, Cahan and his comrades were only a tiny minority even among the recent eastern European immigrants. “The Jewish masses in the old country knew little about socialism,” Cahan wrote. “A mere handful of Jewish workers in Vilna had grasped the meaning of socialism—and almost all of this handful had come to America.” The new immigrants were a great deal more sophisticated than the Marxist factions who wanted to set up Communist-type farm colonies in the new world. It took all of three days in America for Cahan to realize that starting a communal agricultural colony “was not really my dream.” He was drawn to life in the city.
In 1882, when Cahan arrived in New York, the Jewish community was at the beginning of an enormous transformation. The Lower East Side was largely populated by Irish and German immigrants. There were small Jewish-owned shops, but no cafés or restaurants. The arrival of the great numbers of eastern European immigrants in the 1880s swelled the number of Yiddish-speaking residents in the neighborhood. By 1890 the Lower East Side was one of the most densely populated areas in the United States. Irving Howe notes in World of Our Fathers that the small neighborhood contained “two dozen Christian churches, a dozen synagogues (most Jewish congregations were storefronts or in tenements), about fifty factories and shops (exclusive of garment establishments, most of which were west of the Bowery or hidden away in cellars and flats), ten large public buildings, twenty public and parochial schools—and one tiny park.”
Cahan boarded at the home of a widow on Monroe Street, between Catherine and Market Streets; from his window he could hear the clip-clop of horsecars on the Bowery and the iceman’s cries of “Ice! Ice!” on unbearably hot summer days. He paid for his board by teaching his landlady’s son to write Yiddish and read Hebrew, even though “I learned more English from him than he learned Hebrew from me.” His fellow boarders, who spoke a poor Yiddish that was sprinkled with American words and expressions, furthered his education, however much he may have looked down on them for their bastardization of their mother tongue—“non-Yiddish Yiddish,” he called it. Displaying a determination similar to the one he would cultivate years later within the immigrant readership of his newspaper, Cahan diligently studied English at night, relying upon Appleton’s English Grammar, a textbook specifically for German-speakers who wished to learn English.
He worked in factories by day—first making cigars, then tin. This monotonous work did not come easily to him. “Every hour of work seemed like a year,” Cahan wrote. He was not alone in feeling this way. The factories were filled with young, educated Russian Jewish immigrants, like Bernard Weinstein, who was to become secretary of the United Hebrew Trades, a federation of predominantly Jewish trade unions; Cahan converted him to socialism over long hours laboring together in a cigar factory. The same cigar factory employed Samuel Gompers, the future president of the American Federation of Labor, but on a different floor.
In The Downtown Jews, Ronald Sanders points out that the presence of so many educated workers in factories made for a situation that was unique in labor history: factories now “contained a large class of proletarian intellectuals, who brought an articulate class consciousness right into the shops.” Cahan described how it felt in his memoir: “The worker was being reduced to a dead tool. These things I had previously read in books on political economy, and now I would say to myself, ‘Here I am, a dead tool like the rest.’ It fascinated me that the facts were just like the books said they were.”
In June 1882, the same month Cahan came to New York, a strike broke out on the waterfront among the longshoremen. Many were immigrants from Ireland and Germany, and they agitated for a raise in pay. The foremen went down to Castle Garden* on the hunt for able-bodied men right off the boats to replace the strikers. They offered jobs to the mostly Polish and Russian Jews—without telling them that they would be crossing a picket line. Isidore Kopeloff, who would later be active in the anarchist movement, was one of the strikebreakers. Several longshoremen came to the newly hired workers, saying “we were scabs who were taking the bread out of the mouths of the strikers’ families,” Kopeloff recalled. “… I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong or what my sin was. Why should I not be permitted to earn my piece of bread? And what was this union, and why were those for it kosher and those against it treyf?’ ”
A group of Jewish intellectuals formed what they called a Jewish socialist propaganda society and handed out leaflets in Yiddish advertising a town hall meeting on Rivington Street. Its goal was to convince fellow immigrants not to cross the picket lines.
On July 7, Eisler’s Golden Rule Hall at 127 Rivington Street was packed with several hundred people listening to orators speaking in Russian, the language of the radical intellectuals. Using Yiddish to lure people to an event was acceptable, but to fire them up politically, only Russian would do. At the meeting’s end, when the floor was thrown open to members of the audience, a man who looked younger than his twenty-two years approached the podium with a “thumping heart.” Abraham Cahan had been in America for only a month, yet he was speaking in public for the first time.
When Cahan rose to speak, some people, apparently without time for a newcomer, “started for the door.” Speaking in Russian, he declared: “We have come to seek a home in a land that is relatively free. But we must not forget the great struggle for freedom that continues in our old homeland. While we are concerned with our problems, our comrades, our heroes, our martyrs are carrying on the struggle, languishing in Russian prisons, suffering at hard labor in Siberia. There is little we can do at this distance. We can raise money to aid the sacred cause. And we must keep the memory of that struggle fresh in our minds.”
His words made him, as he himself put it, the “hero of the day.” And he had established a pattern that would pervade all his later writings. For all the posturing of the socialists about being the wave of the future, in practice Cahan was also obsessed with an obligation not to forget the past.
Later in the evening, a friend named Mirovitch told Cahan about the propaganda society, explaining that its aim was to spread socialism among the Jewish immigrants.
“If it is for Jewish immigrants, why are the speeches in Russian and German?” Cahan asked.
“What language do you suggest? What Jew doesn’t know Russian?” his friend replied derisively.
“My father,” Cahan replied sharply.
Mirovitch, who hailed from cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, didn’t speak Yiddish and couldn’t fathom the world from which Cahan had come. “Why don’t you deliver a speech in Yiddish?” he suggested, laughing.
“Why not?” Cahan replied.
And so was born a career in which the medium of Yiddish became part of the message.
The following Friday night, the propaganda society rented a hall in the back of a German saloon on East Sixth Street. Some four hundred people crammed into it and heard what Cahan called “the first socialist speech in Yiddish to be delivered
in America.” His topic was Marx’s theory of surplus value and “the inevitability of the coming of socialism.”
In advance of his next Yiddish speech, on Suffolk Street, he and his friend Bernard Weinstein handed out hundreds of Yiddish leaflets on the streets of the Lower East Side, which Cahan had printed at his own expense. This new hall was much larger, but Cahan still packed them in; some of the audience members were forced to stand. Others stood on tables. One was a dark-haired young woman wearing a pince-nez. Cahan kept glancing at her. His talk “kindled a wave of excitement … as if the dumb had begun to speak,” Weinstein later recounted. Cahan spoke for three hours, cursing the millionaires “with elaborate Vilna curses” and shouting for workers “to march on Fifth Avenue with their tools and their axes and to seize the palaces and the riches which their labor had produced.”
Did Cahan truly envision that the Jewish shirtmakers of Canal Street with their metaphorical axes would storm the upper avenues of Manhattan? Not likely. As Irving Howe explains, such speeches were “typical of the moment, with its mixture of Marxist approximations and anarchist bravado, its verbal radicalism at once innocent and empty.… Not everyone was certain as to which he really was, or what the differences amounted to, and some, like Cahan, shifted back and forth between anarchism and socialism before coming to a halt.” Cahan himself seemed aware of his ambivalence, even if he didn’t publicly acknowledge it. “It is a joke,” he wrote to an old Russian friend in 1883. “I debate, I argue, I get excited, I shriek, and in the middle of all this, I remind myself that I am a vacant vessel, an empty man without a shred of knowledge, and I begin to blush. I am ashamed of myself.”
Even as he was calling for violent marches, Cahan was being seduced by America. “The anarchists and even the socialists argued that there was no more freedom in American than in Russia,” he wrote in his memoir. “But that was just talk, I concluded.” There was no czar, “no gendarmes, no political spies.” One could say and write whatever one wanted.
