The Rise of Abraham Cahan

by Seth Lipsky

  In September 1950, a banquet was held at the Hotel Commodore to mark Cahan’s ninetieth birthday (which was actually on July 7). Cahan had been hospitalized beforehand and was unable to read, but he was determined to go to the last great event in his honor. Seated on the platform alongside him were William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor; David Dubinsky, president of the ILGWU; Jacob Potofsky, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America; and other labor leaders. Cahan beamed, even though near total deafness prevented him from hearing their speeches and the messages from President Truman, Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Senator Herbert Lehman, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. When the toastmaster invited him to say a few words, Cahan proclaimed, “This is the happiest day of my life.”

  His health continued to decline. He was hospitalized for the last time in August 1951, and Shub rushed over to see him on Friday afternoon, August 24. He found Cahan lying in bed, very pale, with his mouth open and his eyes closed. Shub thought he had died. But when the nurse awakened him, Cahan recognized his aide, declared him to be “my everlasting friend,” and burst into tears. He died a week later, on August 31, 1951.

  Cahan’s funeral was held on September 5, 1951, at the Forward Building on East Broadway. When the crowd in the auditorium reached five hundred, the Fire Department refused to allow anyone else inside. The New York Times estimated that 10,000 people had gathered outside the building, in Strauss Square and in Seward Park; others were seen leaning out of tenement windows and standing on fire escapes so they could hear the service, which was broadcast on loudspeakers. Music by Chopin and Grieg was played. The Forward’s business manager, Alexander Kahn, who led the gathering, specifically mentioned Cahan’s fight against Communism. “He was one of the first to fight Communists. He was one of the first to relegate party tradition and support Roosevelt. His idealism was always guided by a sense of the real, and when the interests of the people and his country came into conflict with any tradition or dogma, he resolved it in favor of the interests of the people.”

  Representing President Truman, Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin spoke of the importance of the free trade union movement and declared, “We should as Americans say ‘Thank God’ for the day Abe Cahan arrived in the United States.” It was one of the few mentions of God in the entire ceremony. David Dubinsky spoke of Cahan’s courage in fighting the Communists for control of the United Garment Workers Union. Absent Cahan, he asked, “How many unions would have been captured and how many workers would have been enslaved?”

  Representing the Jewish state, Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, brought what the Times called a “tribute from the Government and the people of Israel,” though he seems to have been a bit careful, given Cahan’s mixed record on Zionism and his continued advocacy of Yiddish, which at the time was anathema to the Hebrew-speaking Israelis. The diplomat who became world famous for his impassioned and soaring rhetoric focused his remarks on Cahan’s contributions to what the Times called “furthering social progress and Yiddish journalism.” Eban lauded Cahan for preserving Jewish consciousness and culture against a tide of assimilation. A message in Hebrew from President Chaim Weizmann and one in Yiddish from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were read as well.

  Remarks were also made by New York City mayor Vincent Impellitteri, by representatives of the Workmen’s Circle and the United Hebrew Trades, by Forward editor Harry Rogoff, and by Adolph Held, president of the Forward Association. At the conclusion of the event, five cars banked with flowers led a motorcade of fifty vehicles to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, where Cahan was laid to rest.

  For all their mournful and noble grandeur, the eulogies missed the essence of Cahan. Those who were closest to him had long since come to understand that the union work and the political struggles were not the heart of Cahan’s story. David Shub summed up Cahan’s lasting achievement as being “a great scholar of literature.” He had, in his long life, read widely in American, English, French, German, and Scandinavian literature. But his real love was Russian literature, which he believed surpassed all others. His favorites were Chekhov and Tolstoy, and he had read Anna Karenina—the novel Anna had urged on him early in their romance—four or five times.

  What Abraham Cahan really longed for was to create literature that immortalized his own culture in the way that his literary heroes had immortalized theirs. David Levinsky was so unquestionably a step in that direction that one is left to wonder why he stopped writing fiction after its publication. Cahan’s many friends and admirers wondered about it as well, most notably H. L. Mencken, who expressed his admiration for Cahan in his memoir, My Life as Author and Editor. They had enjoyed a lively correspondence about the Yiddish language and a long, if intermittent, acquaintanceship. Back in 1930 the publication of Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods had provoked public controversy because of its anti-Semitic comments about the Jews,* but according to Mencken, at least, he and Cahan had later agreed over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, that the offensive remarks were “only a small part of a discussion that was generally favorable to them.”

  Whatever else one can say about Mencken, he knew a great novel when he read one, and twenty-five years after the publication of The Rise of David Levinsky, on the occasion of Cahan’s eightieth birthday, the editors of the Forward invited him to write about Cahan the novelist. His essay appeared, in Yiddish and in English, in a special edition of the paper published on June 7, 1942. The Rise of David Levinsky, Mencken wrote, “sticks in my mind to this day as one of the best American novels ever written.” There had been, Mencken noted, “high hopes” that the novel’s “distinguished success would draw Mr. Cahan away from the razzle-dazzle of daily journalism, and set him up as what might be called a career novelist.” But Mencken said he understood Cahan’s choice, even if he regretted it. “The merits of The Rise of David Levinsky do not dim as the years pass,” he wrote. He called it

  the mature and painstaking work of an artist with long experience behind him, and an extraordinary talent.… No better novel about the immigrant has ever been written, or is likely to be written. The proletarian authors of our own day have devoted themselves heavily to the subject, and brought out a great many indignant and shocking books, but none of them has ever come within miles of the philosophical insight of Mr. Cahan. His David Levinsky is not a mere bugaboo in a political pamphlet; he is an authentic human being, shrewdly observed and very adroitly carved and painted.

  Levinsky, he added, “takes on, in the end, a kind of representative character, and becomes the archetype of a civilization now greatly changed, and in most ways not for the better.” He doubted whether “any more vivid presentation of the immigrant’s hopes and disappointments, thoughts and feelings, virtues and vices has ever been got upon paper,” adding, “All other novels upon the same theme fall short, in one way or another, of this one.”

  David Shub gave us, in his memoir, the most insightful summing-up of Cahan’s life and legacy.

  Abe Cahan was never a sworn Jewish nationalist. He was nevertheless a warm Jew. His socialism never interfered with his Yiddishkeit—he was a nonbeliever but never made fun of the Jewish traditions, as some of the radicals of his generation would do. Even eighty years earlier Cahan had preached tolerance for religious Jews. In his later years he was an ardent enthusiast and supporter of Israel. Cahan until his last breath remained a convinced Social Democrat. But in the last few decades he would put the accent on the last word—democrat. He put political and spiritual freedom of the person in first place. Just like in his youth, Cahan thought that poverty, exploitation, and injustice should be outlawed. All men should be equal, all should be brothers and all should be free. But after the terrible events of the Communist Revolution in Russia he, like all the other thinking and righteous socialists, came to the conclusion that this can be achieved in the free countries not through a revolution, but through the step by step, gradual further development of democracy in all aspects of life in society.


  After Cahan died, his legacy and his beliefs carried the Forward through another half century. The Forward opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, but in later years its editor collaborated with the FBI in the effort to expose and defeat Communists. The Forward continued expressing its virulent hostility to Communism during the rise of Solidarity and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Cahan was still alive in 1950 when the Communists attacked the Korean peninsula; the newspaper mocked the sham of the peace movement that fronted for the Kremlin and said that if Moscow failed to retreat, there would be a world war.

  Regarding Vietnam, Cahan’s successors gave full-throated support to America’s entry into the fighting, and when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, the Forward warned that only then would the killing begin in earnest. The Forward never forgot that during the Holocaust, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had collaborated with Hitler while the Jews of Palestine fought with the Allies. After the war, the Forward would often remind its readers that Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries were harboring Nazis. With the liberation of East Jerusalem from Arab occupation in 1967, the Forward vowed that the city would never be divided again.

  How Cahan would have come out on all of this, had he lived another fifty years, is a matter of conjecture. One doesn’t have to accept the suggestion that crops up from time to time that Cahan was the first neoconservative.† But strikingly, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the issues Cahan championed in his later years at the Forward were picked up not by partisans of the left but by factions that had moved to the right, by those who had departed from a Democratic Party that had no place for George Meany, the labor leader who presided over the merger of the AFL-CIO and was shut out of the New York delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1972. When America’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, was bestowed on Irving Brown, the labor organizer whom Jay Lovestone sent to Europe, it was done by President Reagan.

  It would be a mistake to carry all that too far—Cahan was no Republican. But it would also be a mistake not to understand it. Cahan certainly deserves a place in the pantheon of America’s greatest newspaper editors—William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Dana, Henry Luce, and Robert L. Bartley, to name but a few. But above all, the words Cahan wrote in the closing paragraphs of The Rise of David Levinsky keep coming back to any student of his life:

  I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher’s Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak-manufacturer.

  Or newspaper editor.

  * * *

  * Wrote Mencken: “The Bible is unquestionably the most beautiful book in the world. Nearly all of it comes from the Jews, and their making of it constitutes one of the most astounding phenomena in human history. Save for a small minority of superior individuals, nearly unanimously agnostic, there is not much in their character, as the modern world knows them, to suggest a genius for exalted thinking. As commonly encountered, they strike other peoples as predominantly unpleasant, and everywhere on earth they seem to be disliked. This dislike, despite their own belief to the contrary, has nothing to do with their religion: it is founded, rather, on their bad manners, their curious lack of tact.… Yet these same rude, unpopular and often unintelligent folk, from time almost immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the Western world, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets.” Terry Teachout’s biography cites an earlier version of this passage, in which Mencken describes the Jews as “the most unpleasant race ever heard of” and adds: “As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects and their charity is mainly only a form of display. Yet these same Jews, from time immemorial, have been the chief dreamers of the human race, and beyond all comparison its greatest poets.”

  † Or, as one wag put it, neo-Cahan.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book grew out of my years at the Forward. It is neither an authorized nor an official biography of Abraham Cahan and does not reflect the newspaper’s institutional view. But I benefited from many friends and colleagues who were connected to the Forward and who shared with me their personal knowledge of the newspaper Cahan created and, in some cases, of Cahan himself. These include Dr. Barnett Zumoff, who has several times been president of the Forward Association and is a translator of the Yiddish poets, and Elie Wiesel, who, among other things, covered the liberation of Jerusalem for the Forward. I was helped by others who are now, sadly, gone, including I. B. Singer; Judith Vladeck, the Forward Association’s counsel; Harold Ostroff, its general manager; William Stern, its president for several of the years that I was there; Motl Zelmanovicz, a member of the Association of the Jewish Labor Bund; and Gus Tyler, who joined the paper in 1934 as assistant labor editor and continued writing for it into the twenty-first century. I found great inspiration in Mordechai Strigler, a towering figure who edited the Yiddish Forward during the years that I edited the English one and whose own literary output was so great that it is measured in cycles.

  On the Forward, I learned from many brilliant colleagues and particularly from two intellectual partners who played outsize roles at the paper. Jonathan Rosen was cultural editor of the Forward during the years that I edited it, and he built its widely admired cultural section. He went on to become editorial director of Nextbook and general editor of the Jewish Encounters series of which this volume is a part. David Twersky was associate editor of the Forward during those years and built its Washington bureau. Once, at the age of ten or so, Twersky was sent by his father to the newsstand to fetch a copy of the Forward only to bring home, by accident, a copy of the Communist Freiheit. The lad was thrown out a window, the Freiheit fluttering after him. That story may—or may not—be apocryphal, but until the day in 2010 when Twersky died, he never stopped searching for the right newspaper.

  Help in navigating the paper’s Yiddish-language morgue—and much else in twentieth-century Jewish history—was provided, in the years before her death, by Lucy Dawidowicz, in whose apartment the newspaper installed a microfilm reader. Jeremy Dauber of Columbia University also provided translations. Ruth Wisse, a professor at Harvard University, provided many insights into the history and ideological struggles of the Forward and into Yiddish literature, of which she has an unparalleled knowledge. Gennady Estraikh, a professor at New York University and Oxford University, shared his time and knowledge. I am grateful to Samuel Norich, publisher and chief executive of the Forward newspapers, not only for his insights into the Yiddish world but also for permission to include photographs from the Forward’s archive, whose Chana Pollack was of great assistance. Gene and Gloria Sosin were exceptionally helpful in sharing, in addition to their own sage advice, excerpts from Gloria’s translation from the Yiddish of extensive parts of a two-volume memoir by David Shub, who had been one of Cahan’s deputies and who produced the most intimate account of Cahan’s modus operandi as an editor and of his views on politics, literature, and various personalities. I am grateful as well to Neal Kozodoy, who on the double jubilee of the Forward in 1997 commissioned me to write for Commentary the article that began my thinking of a biography of Cahan; some of its language is echoed herein.

  This book is the work of a journalist but is at least partly derivative of academic studies and specialized biographies of Cahan. Authors of those works include Moses Rischin, Sanford Marovitz, and Yaacov Goldstein, as well as four who are now deceased: Irving Howe, Theodore Marvin Pollock, Ronald Sanders, and Melech Epstein. They are, in contradistinction to myself, scholars; collectively they have produced a far more detailed history of the period than I have assembled here. I recommend each of their books warmly to those
who wish to know more about Abraham Cahan.

  I am grateful to the staff at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, the Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library, and Adrienne Fischier, James Harney, and their colleagues at the Harvard Club Library in New York. Ellen Umansky, formerly of the Forward and The New York Sun, led the research and fact-checking. Gary Shapiro, formerly of the Forward and The New York Sun, and Gabrielle Birkner, formerly of the Sun and now of the Forward, provided research help, as did John Bennett, who also read the manuscript for proof and style. All errors herein are my own.

  Financial support for the research for this book was provided by the Alice and Thomas Tisch Foundation via the American Jewish Historical Society and by the Robert and Ardis James Foundation via the Hudson Institute, and is gratefully acknowledged. I am grateful, as well, to Michael Steinhardt, Joseph Steinberg, and Robert Rubin, who were my partners in Lipsky-Steinhardt LLC, which owned an interest in the Forward.

  I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Simon Weber, who in the decades before he died was the editor of the Yiddish Forward. He was the person I first approached about the future of the paper when, in 1983, it announced its retreat to weekly publication. Not only did he welcome me into its world, but it was with Weber and his wife, Sylvia, that I went to dinner on the first date with the woman who would become my wife, Amity Shlaes. She has, in the years since, given me, among many other gifts, our four children—Eli, Theo, Flora, and Helen—and shared with all five of us her own profound understanding of Russia, the Pale of Settlement, and the Europe from which so much of this story springs.