The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  Cahan said that he tried to deal with Asch respectfully and complained that Asch, in his eight-column response to his critics, “barely touched on the real question,” devoting barely a third of a column “to anything which had any connection at all to the main topic.” The rest, Cahan said, “was devoted to complaints about his critics.” What Cahan called the “actual subject” was:

  The fact that Jews do not recognize Jesus as a holy and godly man and Sholem Asch does recognize him as such; that Jews do not recognize the Holy Book of the Christian Religion (the New Testament) and Sholem Asch does. Not only does he recognize he who is considered to be the founder of the Christian religion but he exhibits great enthusiasm for him and places him above Moses and the Jewish Prophets.…

  During the almost two thousand years of the existence of the Christian religion millions of Jews sacrificed their lives because they refused to accept it. He, Sholem Asch, propagandizes in favor of this belief in The Nazarene, in American newspapers and in a French weekly publication, as well as in his book, What I Believe. In many places in his two books and articles, he sharply exhibits his Christianity more clearly than even a bishop could express.

  To read these words in the cold light of history is to sense a kind of primal scream. Then Cahan turned on the critics in the secular press who gave the book positive reviews; they were, he said, obviously unfamiliar with the centuries of Christian persecution of Jews who refused to accept Christ as the Messiah. The critics in the Jewish newspapers, he said, “unanimously tore this book apart,” and “more than one article” appeared in “every Jewish newspaper in New York … each of them with negative comment.”

  “Most American Christians” he said dismissively, “considered this book to be a belletristic work, nothing more” or as that of “a literary dreamer, free from any other direction, bent on ambition.” It may also have rankled Cahan that many of those who gave the book a literary imprimatur in the secular press were members of the Jewish literary elite who did not see fit to review his own novels with the same enthusiasm. The remainder of the book is Cahan’s evisceration, sentence by sentence, of Asch’s work. Cahan accused him of relying solely on the New Testament and of being disingenuous about his belief that Jesus is the Messiah.

  Cahan ridicules Asch’s and Putnam’s use, in publicity materials for The Nazarene, of a blurb in support of the book from Albert Einstein. Cahan concluded that Einstein had never read the book but was merely praising Asch’s writing in general, and in any event, he mocked the suggestion that Einstein’s opinion amounted to much because “Professor Albert Einstein is an absolutely outspoken atheist. He believes in neither any god nor godliness as the words are commonly understood.… That a heretic should endorse a book that is full of enthusiasm for a godly man and the miracles he performed makes about as much sense as saying two times two is thirteen.” Cahan was particularly galled by Asch’s suggestion that, as Cahan characterizes it, “every religious Jew … is awaiting Jesus’ arrival as the Messiah.” Wrote Cahan, “One’s blood boils when reading these words!”

  Asch was hurt by Cahan’s campaign against him, not only personally but professionally. Thereafter the pages at all the Yiddish papers were closed to him—except for the mouthpiece of Stalinist Communism, the Freiheit. One Forward writer, Melech Epstein, recalled encountering Asch at the Garden Cafeteria while all of this was going on. “Asch,” Epstein would later write, “spoke like a deeply wounded man, and could not conceal his apprehension that Cahan was succeeding in isolating him. ‘Cahan will not drive me away from Jewish life and literature,’ he kept repeating.”

  Over the next half dozen years, Asch continued to publish both fiction and nonfiction that supported his ideas about the commonality of Christianity and Judaism, books that continued to enrage his critics but received acclaim in certain literary quarters. Then he apparently had a change of heart and returned to writing about traditionally Jewish subjects. Asch eventually moved to Israel, and after his death in 1957, his home in a suburb of Tel Aviv was turned into a museum.

  One gets the sense that Asch failed to appreciate what he was up against with Cahan. By the time the showdown with Asch took place, Cahan was approaching eighty. When David Levinsky, Cahan’s greatest literary creation, looks back on his life, he speaks of feeling that, despite all his worldly achievements, his inner being is the same as it was when he was a young student in the yeshiva swaying over his religious text. This was the sentiment on which Cahan would make his last stand, even while he denied it. At the conclusion of his attack on Asch, Cahan insisted, one last time, “I am not religious. I am a total free-thinker. However, I respect the traditions of our people, and the attitude of our free-thinkers towards such a new direction is the same as the attitude of religious Jews towards it.” And that is where he left it; after eighty years, the great freethinker had driven out the apostate, only to find himself back where he started, in league with the religious Jews who had given birth to him, half a world and nearly a century away.

  * * *

  * One contemporary writer, Simeon Strunsky, once summarized the complexities of labor politics at the time with the following report: “It seemed that in Philetus’ district the Republican candidate for Congress was a Communist who had carried the Republican primary and the Socialist primary but who had been defeated in the Communist primary. Against him ran a Socialist who had carried the Democratic primary and Communist primary, but had lost the Socialist.”

  13

  The Forward was one of the few American newspapers that maintained a clear-eyed view of Hitler during the 1930s. Even such a distinguished newspaper as The Wall Street Journal, which would emerge as a stalwart supporter of America’s hard line during the Cold War, greeted Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938 with an editorial advising its readers to place their hopes in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced aggressive war and was signed by America, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Britain, among other countries.

  In sharp contradistinction, the Forward reacted to the Munich Agreement on October 1, 1938, the day after it was signed, with a mixture of fury and ridicule, calling it a “shameful document” and referring to Hitler as the “Fascist devil” who had “made a fool of his terrified opponents, of the democratic countries, and of the whole civilized world.” The Forward imagined Hitler rolling around in his bunker, laughing. “I, Hitler, now appear as the defender of the Holy principle of the self-determination of peoples,” it imagined him telling his camarilla. “The truth,” the Forward said, “is that what has been achieved by the agreement is not really peace, and that we have simply postponed the danger of war for a later date, but not avoided it.”

  The Forward’s prediction came true when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, one week after the signing of the nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. Cahan wrote in the newspaper:

  Hitler has allies in his enterprise of setting the world on fire, and one of them—and probably the most important one—is Stalin. Look at what happened the night the world got incinerated. Hitler’s parliament was gathered in Berlin and Stalin’s parliament was gathered in Moscow. In Stalin’s parliament the democratic republics of England and France were made fun of. [The Jewish diplomat Maxim] Litvinov was attacked for having been preoccupied with the insane notion that fascism had to be conquered. Stalin’s friendship with Hitler was praised. Immediately thereafter, Hitler made a speech in his parliament, saying he’s signing with both hands everything that was said in Stalin’s parliament. And immediately, the next minute, Hitler took matches in hand and went off into the bitter night to set the world aflame. Was this all a coincidence? Can such dramatic occurrences happen by accident? Or do they harmonize because they are logically tied to one another, as if one conductor had designed the whole thing—one bloody conductor? Stalin is Hitler’s partner in his setting the world in flames. Let us remember that. Let us pass it down to our children’s children.

 
In March 1940, Cahan’s longtime nemesis, the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, arrived in New York to raise an alarum over the gathering catastrophe and recruit a Jewish army to fight alongside the allied countries at war with Hitler. Cahan and Jabotinsky had corresponded as early as 1926. The writer Louis Gordon has recently speculated that having written a novel about the Kishinev pogroms, Cahan was “most certainly was aware of Jabotinsky’s role as the leader of the Jewish defense in the aftermath of that anti-Semitic violence, as well as the numerous parallels between Jabotinsky’s novel The Five, a tale of assimilation in interwar Russia, and Cahan’s own masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky.”

  On March 19, 1940, Jabotinsky addressed an audience of 5,000 people at the Manhattan Opera House on West 34th Street, calling for “an exodus from Europe and the settlement of six million Jews on both sides of the Jordan,” in Gordon’s words. Cahan was not present at the event, but his friends were, and Cahan published his response in the Forward.

  He had first encountered Jabotinsky’s writings, he recalled, at the office of a friend in Paris. He realized that Jabotinsky possessed a “superb” writing style, but “a certain opposite opinion” was forming within him with respect to the substance of Jabotinsky’s work. He arrived at the view that Jabotinsky’s “abilities are a lot greater than his practical sense and seriousness.” He worried “when Jabotinsky began to imitate the outward forms of Hitler and Mussolini’s forces by instituting in his organization the brown-shirt uniform, with certain Nazi-like ceremonies included.” He noted ruefully that “on inexperienced young people, such comedy sometimes works like a charm.”

  “Gigantic” is the word Cahan used to describe the meeting at the Manhattan Opera House, though he also wrote of Jabotinsky’s “laughability as a leader.” Then Cahan began temporizing. “How to take care of five million or six million homeless Jews and provide them with homes is a question that is loaded with incredible difficulties and problems,” he proclaimed. “He, Vladimir Jabotinsky, however, doesn’t know of difficulties.… One would have to be a prophet to be able to foretell the character of tomorrow’s problems.” He then mocked Jabotinsky’s call for the establishment of a Jewish army that would enter the war on all fronts. He denigrated Jabotinsky’s earlier warnings about anti-Semitism in Germany. And he disagreed with Jabotinsky’s assertion that were the Jews of Europe to be evacuated to the Middle East, a substantial nation would be created. “Six million is a pretty small state,” Cahan caviled.

  For all his verve as an editor over a great span of time and through a magnificent fight against international Communism, Cahan, in his final decade, was floundering badly. Perhaps he knew it. Certainly Jabotinsky did. After reading Cahan’s full-page attack on him in the Forward, the Revisionist Zionist wrote to Cahan saying that he had read it with great interest. “The question of whether AK or VJ does or does not believe in the possibility of a mass exodus is one that it would be useless to argue,” he wrote. Then he pleaded: “Speaking as one old Jewish journalist to another, I still expect you to warn American Jews of this situation, for it will be theirs to deal with its unprecedented burdens, and it is you who are the doyen of the Jewish press.”

  Cahan’s reply, dated April 17, 1940, dripped with condescension.

  To be sure, you and I look at things from two different points of view, but as I tried to make clear in my article about you, I sincerely admire your talent. So much so that the part you play in the Zionist movement is of secondary importance from my point of view.… Frankly speaking, I regret that you have not devoted your great gifts to journalism and literature.

  In May, Germany invaded France. In August, Jabotinsky traveled to Hunter, New York, a town in the Catskill Mountains, to visit a training camp of Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement he had founded in 1923. Its name alluded to the last Jewish fort in Palestine to fall during the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 136 C.E., and it honored as well the Zionist hero Joseph Trumpeldor. On August 4, while at the camp, Jabotinsky lay down for a nap and died in his sleep from a heart attack. He was fifty-nine years old.

  Years later Harry Lopatin, who had been a young staffer at the Forward in the summer of 1940, recalled that Cahan had tried to get one of his regular reporters or editors to cover Jabotinsky’s funeral. But they all refused, so Cahan sent Lopatin. Then Cahan sat down to write what was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable editorials in the history of the Forward.

  “The death of Vladimir Jabotinsky at this grim time for the Jewish people is, in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe,” he began, then proceeded to laud Jabotinsky as a person, a writer, and an orator. When Jabotinsky spoke, “even the deaf could hear.” But what struck with particular force was Cahan’s prediction that Jabotinsky would be missed “not only now, in the middle of the storm, but also later, when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

  The editorial has been dismissed by some as a typical obituary in which nothing ill about the deceased is mentioned. But it was so at odds with everything Cahan had been writing, not only as recently as a few weeks before but also throughout his long career, that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it came from a deeper recognition than any he had previously articulated: that for all the greatness of the movement Cahan led and the struggles into which he had thrown himself, the crisis that was about to befall the Jews, and the free world, was bigger than any one ideology.

  So it proved to be. During the war, the Forward reported on the annihilation of Europe’s Jews in greater detail than other newspapers. The paper also reported on the fate of a number of Russian Bundists, particularly Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter, who had moved east with the outbreak of the war, only to be murdered in the 1940s on orders of Stalin. According to David Shub, Cahan was “heavily embroiled in the fight against the Nazis” and said he wanted to live to see Hitler’s downfall.

  “I don’t care what happens to me after that,” Cahan said from time to time, as Shub recalled. “Today I am hale and healthy and tomorrow I could suddenly die.”

  It was Anna who faltered first. While alighting from a Fifth Avenue bus one day, she broke her foot and, after it healed, was left with a limp. She suffered a heart attack in 1946, and Cahan himself was felled by a stroke a few weeks later. He lay in a coma for more than a week, while his wife was in another hospital and did not know of his fate.

  Cahan recovered and, after several months in the hospital, was able to return to the paper, greeting Shub and others with a rousing “Hello, Socialists!” He complained that the paper was “going in all directions,” grumbling that one of the editors, Herman Lieberman, whom he liked a great deal, was writing “Orthodox religious articles,” as Shub recalled.

  “Lieberman has a window into the women’s section of the shul and he’s saying the Tseneh Reneh,” Cahan remarked, referring to the popular Yiddish commentary on the Bible that was intended for women.

  Shub pestered Cahan for permission to visit the convalescing Anna, but Cahan put him off and, in Shub’s telling, Anna eventually called Shub herself and invited him to visit her in their apartment in the Algonquin Hotel. “But God forbid, under no circumstances, don’t tell Cahan,” she said. It turns out that Anna was worried about Cahan’s growing stinginess and his complaints about expenses. “If he can’t work anymore, will the Forward Association still continue to pay his salary?” she asked, noting that her husband had a lot of enemies at the paper. Shub reassured her that they would both be properly taken care of. As her health worsened, Cahan himself encouraged Shub to visit, and he was saddened to find her failing so quickly; she died on May 1, 1947, a week after Shub last saw her. Cahan was with her when she passed away but for a week could not accept it, mumbling over and over, “How can it be, that Anyuta is dead? Anyuta is no longer here?”

  No doubt Cahan’s misery was compounded by the fact that his clout at the paper was dwindling. After the war, none other
than Kurt Schumacher, chairman of the newly formed Social Democratic Party in West Germany and a staunch anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, came to New York and made a point of calling on Cahan at the paper. Schumacher had been imprisoned by the Nazis and sent to a series of concentration camps; he had a well-deserved reputation for great integrity and devotion to the principles of democratic socialism, the latter of which brought him into conflict with the chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Cahan understood that a strong Social Democratic Party was vital to defeating Stalin’s machinations in West Germany, and he invited a number of his colleagues into his office to meet Schumacher and to be photographed with him. Afterward he wrote an account of Schumacher’s visit, but the Forward editors refused to print it. He was stung. Then board member Nathan Chanin threatened to take the matter to the full membership of the Forward Association. The article was printed, and the Forward, Shub noted, “did not lose even one single reader.”

  In 1947 the Forward celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and on May 25 more than 20,000 people crowded into Madison Square Garden to pay tribute to the paper that had paved their way to life in America. A full orchestra performed on the bunting-festooned stage, a larger-than-life flag proclaimed the jubilee in Yiddish, and congratulatory messages were read from President Harry Truman, former Governor Herbert Lehman, New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and other luminaries. While the Forward had much to celebrate, all in attendance must have understood that the best days of Yiddish newspaperdom were behind them.

  European Jewry, the wellspring of Yiddish language and culture from which the Forward had drawn its immigrant readership, was virtually destroyed by the Holocaust. The survivors who had managed to make their way to New York for the most part made their homes on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and in Brooklyn’s Borough Park and Williamsburg neighborhoods. Yiddish socialism was not of interest to them. Some of the Lower East Side newspapers remained, but the old urgencies were gone, except as memories. The Forward’s erstwhile competitor, the Tageblatt, had closed its doors in the 1920s. The Morning Journal would be taken over in the early 1950s by the Day, which had risen out of the ashes of the Warheit, which had stopped publishing in 1918. The Communist Freiheit managed to persist through the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the revolution in Hungary in 1956, and the Prague Spring in 1968, but it finally expired in 1988, a year before the Soviet Union itself became part of history.