The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  All this, however, lay in the future. In the 1930s Cahan had come to recognize that the Yiddish-speaking labor unionists who read the Forward needed to start moving away from the Socialist Party, and to give them a way out the Forward helped establish the American Labor Party. By 1934 a rift had developed within the Socialist Party: a radical and pacifist faction had developed, led by Norman Thomas, that unlike the Forward was prepared to work with various affiliates and fronts for the Communist Party. The American Labor Party endorsed Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 election, enabling the Forward’s socialist readers to vote to reelect the president without also voting for the corrupt, Tammany Hall–backed Democratic Party machine. Eventually, however, the American Labor Party was also infiltrated by Communists, and by the 1950s its membership had migrated over to the newly established Liberal Party of New York. It ceased functioning in 1956.

  Such a short summary skims over a story that is worth a book of its own,* one chapter of which would no doubt cover the growing distance between Cahan and Vladeck. In addition to being the general manager of the Forward for twenty years, Vladeck was also a public figure in his own right and a particularly compelling orator. Far more engaged politically than Cahan, Vladeck was a member of the New York City Council and played a leading role in building low-cost housing for workers in the city. He was well to Cahan’s left.

  Vladeck doubtless aspired to succeed Cahan as editor of the paper, and it was widely assumed that he would. But Vladeck was, at bottom, a politician; Cahan was, at bottom, a newspaper editor. Their private correspondence offers glimpses of the disdain with which Cahan dealt with Vladeck, assigning him chores while he was off on one grand trip or another. According to David Shub, Cahan thought Vladeck “absent minded and too busy with other things, and not really capable of managing the Forward.”

  In October 1938, Vladeck died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two. By then things had grown so distant between the two men that Cahan fled New York to avoid attending his colleague’s funeral. “The minute Cahan learned of Vladeck’s death,” Shub wrote, “he ran off to Lakewood because he didn’t know how else he could not be at Vladeck’s funeral and not speak, and he did not want to do that.” The funeral, held in front of the Forward Building, attracted a half-million mourners, including New York governor Herbert Lehman.

  This story illuminates not only an aloofness but a certain caginess, even cowardice, in Cahan that conflicts with his popular reputation. We get another glimpse of this side of the man in Shub’s account of another story, from sometime in late 1937 or early 1938. Shub was writing a column in the Forward called “The Most Interesting and Important Events in the Socialist World” and regularly read the European socialist press as well as Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. He began to notice intimations that Stalin was, as Shub put it, “getting ready to join Hitler against the West.” Shub found the possibility unthinkable, so shocking as barely to be uttered.

  One day, however, while they were sitting in the Garden Cafeteria, an eatery on the corner of Rutgers and East Broadway that was the regular haunt of the Forward crowd and other Yiddish journalists of the Lower East Side, Shub mentioned the story to Cahan.

  “Are you going to write about that?” Cahan snapped.

  Shub said he had just finished writing the column.

  “But then you must write just the opposite,” Cahan responded, “that the Moscow leaders were never so hostile to Nazi Germany as now.” He added that “Duranty is in Moscow, and he knows what’s going on in the Kremlin circles.” Walter Duranty was the New York Times leg in Moscow and notoriously sympathetic to Stalin. The Forward had long since abandoned hope that Stalin might emerge as a more democratic figure than Lenin.

  “Duranty writes what Stalin wants him to write,” Shub replied.

  Cahan referred to one of Duranty’s recent dispatches to show Shub that he was wrong. He “used to sit against the wall with his face toward the door, and I would sit opposite him,” Shub wrote, and so Shub failed to notice that at a table nearby were a few colleagues from Der Tag, a Yiddish daily less to the left and higher-brow than the Forward.

  This may, or may not, explain why Cahan was so cagey. Was he trying to protect a scoop? Shub, in any event, was unable to hold back, and replied, “You’re reading only what Duranty says in the Times, but I read the European Socialist press and the Soviet papers and magazines.”

  Cahan did not answer. But several days later Shub discovered that Cahan had come into the office early and “with his own hands” had removed key text and “destroyed the type and torn up the proofs.” Knowing that Shub might try to publish the piece in another paper, the Bundist Der Veker, he had also taken the manuscript.

  Whether Cahan did this because he was angry at Shub for setting into type such an explosive story without first consulting with him, or because he just did not want to believe that the Soviet government, however much he hated it, was about to join forces with the Nazis, we may never know. We can only speculate about Cahan’s motives. My own conclusion is that the first possibility is correct; he was, at bottom, a careful and controlling editor who wanted to play the scoop on his own terms. It was not one of Cahan’s finer moments, but he would no doubt keep it in mind as the Forward covered World War II using the methods that had made his paper great: gathering the news, however dark, at its sources in Russia and throughout Europe and interpreting it in light of Jewish history.

  The roots of Cahan’s next great battle extended back a few decades. On May 17, 1911, Cahan had published in the Forward a piece attacking Jewish apikorsim, or learned Jewish apostates. He likened apikorsim to the character in Turgenev’s novel Rudin who hates all women because his wife betrayed him. “So it is with the ‘apikores’—when it comes to his former religion,” Cahan wrote. “His ability to think no longer functions. He can only deny and mock in anger.… Various peoples celebrate their holidays with dance, song, and special folk theater. Would the Jewish heretic consider it an insult if a Jew went to hear these songs, see these dances? It would not even enter his mind to question that. Yet when it comes to Jewish holiday scenes like the Passover Seder, the ‘apikores’ becomes enraged. The free-thinking Jew, naturally, won’t wear a kittel, read a Hagaddah, observe all the religious ceremonies; yet on that night, he might long for the scenes of his childhood, the scenes of the nest in which he was born.”

  The pogroms that swept through Russia during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth were at least partially responsible for Cahan’s change of heart about the value of Jewish traditions. “The place of the ‘free-thinker’ has become occupied by the ‘freer’ thinker, and the pogroms have awakened a feeling of self-respect in the enlightened Russian Jew,” he wrote.

  When the pogroms began, enlightenment began to spread among Russian Jews. The number of enlightened, progressive Jews grew quickly. The learned person took the place of the type who nourished himself with a few Hebrew pamphlets; circumstances led well-read, developed thinkers and the thinking modern Jew to the conviction and feeling that a Jew was also a person, and that for a Jew to be ashamed of Jews was not only inappropriate, but also unproductive. In the first years of the revolutionary struggle in Russia, the Jewish revolutionaries put their lives in danger working for the spiritual development of the Russian peasantry. They “went to the people,” as they say in Russian. That Jews were also a people never occurred to anyone.

  Eventually, Cahan noted, “people got around to realizing this,” but the apikorsim “continue to advocate the older brand of heresy” and “usually also stick to the old position about the association of the Jewish socialist with the Jewish people.…

  It often turns out that this same type believes that German socialism can concern itself with the German people and Russian socialists with Russian peasants and workers, but a Jewish socialist who interests himself in Jewish problems is, according to them, a traitor to his ideals. Too often this question about the feelings of Jews toward J
ews becomes mixed up with the question of religion. That is, as soon as a Jewish melody interests someone, they are abandoning themselves to superstition. You can sing a Russian tune, but a Jewish song has no “right of residence” in your aesthetic heart.

  Cahan acknowledged that there was a time, “in the first days of Russian nihilism,” when it might have been reasonable for a thinking person to conclude that “it was senseless to display any feelings—no matter what feelings.… Then, a Jew didn’t dare reveal a special affinity for Jews, but that was not a contradiction. Then, a person’s own mother was no better than a stranger.” But those “infantile times” had passed, Cahan declared.

  It has long been acknowledged that even the greatest revolutionaries’ souls are not made of iron, and that his mother is dearer to him than your mother. Today, if you demand of a Jewish socialist that a pogrom in Kishinev should not interest him more than a pogrom against the Armenians, it would sound like one of those exclusionary laws from which Jews are used to suffering. Yes, we can confess that our mother is closer to us than a stranger. We can (or we ought to be able to, at least) confess that Jews are, naturally, closer to us than other people.

  The essay must rank as one of the most remarkable of Cahan’s career, though it would not be considered so were he himself not such an avowed freethinker, the phrase Cahan long favored for describing his religious views—or rather his lack of them. He had started describing himself in this way long before he left Russia, probably at the same time as he stopped laying tefillin, the phylacteries (leather boxes containing scriptural passages) that are strapped on the head and left arm during weekday morning prayer. Yet the tug of Sinai that he felt so strongly as a youngster clearly began to reassert itself as the years passed. Late in Cahan’s career it triggered his bitter and dramatic showdown with the Forward’s most famous writer over the laws of Sinai and the issue of apostasy.

  Sholem Asch was not just any apostate. Born in 1880 at Kutno, Poland, into a Hasidic family and traditionally educated, he became attracted by secularism at a young age and left home to make his way as a writer in Warsaw. In 1900 he began publishing short stories, plays, and novels about Jewish life in Europe, Palestine, and America; they brought him international acclaim and an honored place in the pantheon of noted Yiddish writers. Settling in New York in 1914, he became a regular contributor to the Forward and by 1920 had become so famous that a twelve-volume edition of his collected works was published on the occasion of his fortieth birthday. In 1932 he was elected honorary president of the Yiddish PEN, an international writers’ organization, and in 1933 he appeared on the short list for the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1936 the critic Ludwig Lewisohn named him one of the ten greatest living Jews—the only writer on a list that included Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, and Louis Brandeis.

  In the spring of 1938, as conditions for Europe’s Jews deteriorated and war loomed, Asch, then in France, began sending to the Forward chapters from his novel-in-progress, which he had entitled Der Man Fun Natseres (The Nazarene). The novel was a retelling of the story of Jesus, depicting him as an observant Jew. Asch, who was best known for what the journalist Ellen Umansky calls “sepia-tinged portrayals of shtetl life” as well as for sweeping family sagas, had been toying with the idea of a novel about Jesus since 1908, when he made his first trip to Palestine. “Since that time I have never thought of Judaism or Christianity separately,” Asch told a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. “For me it is one culture and one civilization, on which all our peace, our security, and our freedom are dependent.”

  Umansky speculates that there were “other, perhaps less conscious factors at play.” After his Three Cities (1929–31), a sprawling, multigenerational novel that earned him his greatest acclaim (“One of the most richly creative works of fiction that have appeared in our day,” trumpeted The New York Times), Asch “yearned for another success, one that would broaden his readership beyond its traditional base.” His biographer Ben Siegel maintains that Asch had long coveted literary accolades and calculated that the subject of Jesus might be attractive to the Nobel committee.

  The Nazarene is a complex work in which figures in twentieth-century Warsaw turn out to have lived previous lives in the time of Jesus. One of the characters is an anti-Semitic history professor, Pan Viadomsky, who had a past life as the right-hand man to Pontius Pilate, the prefect who presided at Jesus’s trial. Viadomsky’s Jewish assistant turns out also to have had a past life, as a rabbi who witnessed Jesus’s last days. Bizarre though the plot is, it is a testament to Asch’s storytelling powers that he could write a compelling narrative that re-creates the sounds, smells, and other sensory features of Jerusalem in the time of the Second Temple. His goal, as Umansky characterizes it, was “to reclaim Jesus” with an “earth-bound Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph” who is “unquestionably grounded in his Jewish faith.” Umansky puts it this way:

  Asch introduces us to a “lean and hungry-looking” Jesus preaching to the poor fishermen by the harbor, with his dark beard and traditional sidelocks, clad in a tallis with the “ritualistic fringes hanging down almost to the ground.” This is a rabbi who followed Hillel’s teachings, who was well-liked and respected by his fellow clergymen, who declared while speaking from a tiny synagogue pulpit (with his mother, Miriam, proudly watching with the other women in the balcony) that he had come “not to destroy the Law and prophets, but to fulfill them.”

  None of this is necessarily a sign of apostasy, and it can even be seen as something to the contrary, as a Judaization of Jesus, of a kind that has, in recent times, become part of mainstream Jesus scholarship. What Cahan divined in the general tenor of the book, however, was that as Asch made Christianity feel Jewish, he was simultaneously negating Jewish particularity. The idea that there exists a “Judeo-Christian” religious tradition emerged in America only after World War II, as a response to the Holocaust and to prewar Christian anti-Semitism; it was an attempt to fight the religious marginalization of the Jews but at the same time maintain the validity of two distinct religious theologies. Asch, however, explicitly stated that he did not see the two religions as separate. That was what enraged Cahan. Not only did he refuse to publish the novel, he demanded that Asch destroy his manuscript, which Asch of course refused to do. Instead, he arranged for its translation and publication in English. Critical reception for The Nazarene, which was translated by Maurice Samuel and published in 1939 by G. P. Putnam, was largely positive. It was praised by Alfred Kazin in The New Republic, by Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker, and by Philip Rahv in The Nation.

  It was a remarkable situation, distinguished Jewish critics failing to comprehend Asch’s defection. That role fell to the editor of the Forward, who launched an all-out literary war against Asch and his novel. Other Yiddish literary figures joined him. The Forward also published Asch’s “My Response,” in which Asch confronted the criticism that rained down on him from within the Jewish community. He also defended his views in a 1940 article for The Atlantic Monthly. The controversy stretched into the early years of World War II, a war against the Jewish people in which Cahan and the Forward were engaged in the defense of both America and the Jews.

  Asch’s next book, What I Believe, published in 1941, was his attempt to explain to his critics that he did in fact value Judaism. It not only failed to appease Cahan but also inspired him to publish a book-length response, which he called Sholem Asch’s New Direction. He began by insisting he had “never had any unfriendly feelings of a personal nature toward Sholem Asch.” They had known each other “for more than thirty years and during this entire time nothing serious enough ever occurred to destroy our friendship.” Cahan noted that he had even recently praised Asch’s novel The Song of the Valley. The current controversy, he said, was “of an entirely spiritual and Jewish-social nature,” and he confessed that Asch’s new direction “has caused me heartache”—a heartache in which, he insisted, he was not alone.

  Cahan took pains to point out that
he himself was “absolutely not religious.” On the contrary, he described himself as “a free-thinker in the fullest sense of the word, as are most radical people.” At the same time, he wrote respectfully and even defensively of Jewish practice, noting that there are “a substantial number of religious Jews in America” and that “kashruth [Jewish dietary law] is observed by a large percentage of Jews.” He noted that “almost all Jews observe circumcision” but acknowledged that “in most cases this is considered to be more of a national custom than a religious one.” He asserted that Jews “have a well-rooted respect for our faith because it is that of our parents and forefathers. We honor the Jewish faith as a tradition of our people.” He called the feeling a “deep and intimate one.”

  As regards Christianity, Cahan maintained:

  We respect similar feelings among Christians because to them their religion is also one of the traditions of their forefathers. However, their religion has no relevance to us as Jews. In such liberal countries as America and England, Christians do not expect us to accept their religion.…

  The Christian religion is foreign to us as Jews and will remain so. It can be no other way. However, this has nothing to do with our attitude toward Christians as citizens and human beings and with their attitude toward us. A Jew remains a Jew even when he is an atheist. However, he ceases to be a Jew when he accepts another religion. One cannot believe in two religions simultaneously.