SOURCE: "Abraham Cahan: Realism and the Early Stories," in MJS: Annual VII, edited by Joseph C. Landis, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1990, pp. 5-18.

[In the following essay, Walden discusses Cahan's influence on Jewish-American culture in the early twentieth century and its reflection in his early stories.]

Almost from his first days in America, Abraham Cahan was determined to be a man of letters. He had been influenced by pre-Marxian socialists, by Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and by Nekrassov's Who Lives Well in Russia?, so it's not surprising that he was concerned at first solely with the social component of literature. Literature had to be didactic, it had to point a lesson, it had to instruct. Thus when he discovered Herbert Spencer, and when he translated Marx, Darwin, and Spencer for Di Zukunft, he felt he had stumbled on a key to the philosophical materialism that gripped him.

Gradually, turning from politics and social behavior to literature, Cahan had to move from a literary understanding of sciences toward an aesthetics theory and then work out a philosophical synthesis of Marxism and Darwinism. The values of socialism for Cahan were becoming ethical and philosophical-spiritual, rather than programmatic. As part of the Yiddish-language radical press corps, Cahan had become an integral part of the cultural, social, and moral leadership of the East-European Jewish community. Ideologically, in Russia he had been committed to so-called universals, to mankind; in the United States he came to see himself as an American Jew, not a Vilna or Galician or Litvak Jew, and a Jew committed to the American Jewish culture. Deeply held elements in the work of all Yiddish, radical, cosmopolitan writers now came to the fore in an unparalleled way.

Yet there was a paradox in that the result of the work of the Jewish press—of which Cahan was the leading spirit—was to increase and deepen the group consciousness of East-European Jews in America at the same time that it Americanized them. In this context, as Irving Howe concluded, "Cahan stands out overwhelmingly" as the "most lucid intelligence in the early Jewish labor movement." He was, according to French Strother in 1913, "the one who taught hundreds and thousands of immigrants what America means, what their duties to it are, and how they can become worthy citizens of this country."

In an essay titled "Realism" in the March 15, 1889, issue of the Workmen's Advocate, the socialist Labor Party's English language weekly, Cahan defined man as "an inquiring, social, imitating creature." Showing the influence of Social Darwinism (which was to figure prominently in The Rise of David Levinsky), he wrote that "the inquiring impulse springs from thought" while "sociality" [sic] is due to the instinct of self-preservation, which causes us to unite with our fellow men in joint war upon the rest of creation and which grows, according to Herbert Spencer, into hereditary habit, increasing through the survival of the fittest. As to the sources of art, "The imitating activity seems to me to be stimulated by the reflective or imitative character of our sensations.… For sensation is nothing else than the mental counterpart of our nature." That is, if one extends his argument, Cahan was arguing for the severance of literary and artistic realism from what was commonly understood as photographic realism. The sole end of art was not to afford pleasure, nor should it be limited to the province of the beautiful. His arguments proceeded from the proposition that the word was not as important as the content. This is why he preferred William Dean Howells' social consciousness to Henry James' verbiage, and the Russian scenes of battles, of gibbets and hospitals, to the beautiful, fashionable landscapes so dear to the New York bourgeoisie. That Cahan was ultimately predisposed to some form of photographic realism in the arts will be developed later. The "thrill of truth" was what he was after.

The term "Realism" was first used in France in the 1820s to describe the literary process of imitating originals from nature as opposed to imitating art, the older method. Though "Reality" differed from writer to writer, what remained constant was that it would be found in commonplace things, in average lives and events, in the great undergirding truths of humankind, and in the recognition that Romance and Ideality had been giving way to the new world of science, technology, and fact, Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert were the earliest French Realists; Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thackeray, and Trollope were among the earliest English Realists, while Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorki were considered the leading Russian Realists (Cahan thought Tolstoy the greatest of the Realists). In the United States after the Civil War, Twain, DeForest, James, and Howells were the major proponents of Realism; they proposed honesty to life as the standard against which all literary output was to be measured.

In the 1890s, as Larzar Ziff has pointed out, the continuity of the Realists' careers was interrupted. With the onset of Naturalism (an excessive form of realism in which the forces of nature and the city encroached on individuals, deterministically and pessimistically), there was an unsettling pause, a temporary state of confusion. At the same time, Romance and Ideality appeared to be making a comeback. It is in this context that Howells, as an editor and critic, looked to the young Realists who he felt would continue the struggle. Cahan, along with Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Charles Chesnutt, was one of the young, promising Realists.

After reading Chekhov, Cahan had recently rediscovered Tolstoy, mainly through his wife Anna Bronstein's efforts. Tolstoy, he believed, understood the Russians; Chekhov, Cahan wrote (Bookman, December 1902), was the Tolstoy of the Russian short story, as realistic in character portrayal as in detail and motive, and with a mature humor. Now, Cahan believed, he was beginning to know his people, in America. Tolstoy was a realist whose pedantic truthfulness he appreciated. In Tolstoy, "the power of realistic art arises from the pleasure which derives from recognizing the truth as it is mirrored by art." In his eyes, these writers led inevitably to social protest or socialism, in large part because their work was in a tradition parallel to that of Howells, the great American Realist, "whose pen makes a more dangerous assault on the present system than the most rabid 'foreign socialist.'" Cahan, without saying so, had come to appreciate the American brand of socialism. He decided to compromise his own formerly rigid ideological Marxist positions in order to accommodate socialism to the dynamic character of American society.

As early as 1883 Cahan had achieved some recognition with an English article in the New York World critical of the coronation of Alexander III. Soon he was able to make his living by teaching English to Russians on the East Side. Every moment he could spare from working he devoted to learning about America. One day he heard that the political leaders Evarts and Blaine were to speak at the Grand Opera House in New York. He badly wanted to hear them. Realizing that he could not understand even a little of what they said unless he heard every word distinctly (he was still unsure of his command of the language), he went to the stage entrance, mingled with the guests of honor, and was invited to sit on the platform. Not sure that he had understood their speeches, he looked at the morning paper and found that Evarts had made a dull speech. Now he was satisfied, because he had concluded that Evarts had been a poor speaker.

Within the next few years the New York Sun published a series of Cahan's sketches on life on the Lower East Side. Through such work, along with articles on American politics that he wrote in Russian for Russian magazines, Cahan made enough money to give up his evening school teaching. He had acquired this mastery of English in an incredibly short time. When he arrived in New York in 1882, he had known almost no English. With Appleton's Grammar, some amateur tutelage, and dedication, he began to learn the language. Deciding that he must really learn English, he bought a copy of Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, in the old Seaside edition for twenty cents. At night in his room on Clinton Street he read the book, underscoring every word he did not understand and copying it into a pocket notebook along with the definition. The first page of the novel was black with scorings. The last page was clean except for one underlining.

In those days Cahan breakfasted on stale bread at two loaves for five cents, both because it was cheap and because by putting it in his pockets he was able to study and eat at the same time. Gradually he was being introduced to what Louis Wirth called "urbanism as a way of life." Through the use of his mind, the use and command of Russian, Yiddish, and then English, and the intensity of his motivation, Cahan moved into his proper place in society. His work tested modernity in terms of an urban vision of human freedom, taking its place among the efforts of the liberating imagination in reminding us that tradition is recursive, a dominant presence within and despite the overwhelming power of the modern. "Even here in this rich country," wrote Louis Simpson, "scripture enters." The fact is that in America only those things are real whose strength is not impaired but confirmed by thinking. "Neither the freedom of the schlemiel and poet nor the innocence of the suspect nor the escape into nature and art, but thinking," says Hannah Arendt "is the new weapon—the only one with which … the pariah is endowed … in his vital struggle."

Cahan had entered the United States as a pariah from Russia. He learned to adapt, not to become subservient, but to allow his own personality, talent, and individualism to emerge. As Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man learned, gradually, and then all in a rush, the world was full of possibility if one knew how to use the past to move into the future. As the protagonist in Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home, defines the problem,

as a Jew I was acquainted as perhaps a Negro might be, with the alien and the divided aspect of life.… I had come to know a certain homelessness in the world, and took it for granted as a part of nature; had seen in the family, and myself acquired, a sense of sadness from which both assurance and violence had forever vanished.

A zwischenmensch (a between person), he understood that, just as a black person pondered his skin and body, asking himself why it differed so much from others when inside he felt his common humanity, "so I would consider my skin, my eyes, my hair, and wonder why I should feel an inner difference when outwardly I was the same as other men." Rosenfeld's hero learned as did Cahan, that if our lives contain a secret, the recognition of our failing, then to discover that failing and to speak of it is "the whole truth."

When he wrote for the Arbeiter Tzeitung, in "Two Worlds in One World," Cahan used a Yiddish deliberately geared to the general reader. In the first issue he wrote, "alts geyt vi geshmirt," that is, "Everything goes smoothly," or, literally, "Everything goes as if it were greased," a prelude to contrasting wealth and poverty in the salons and parlors of New York's Fifth Avenue, that he would use so often. In January 1891 "Sidra" (Bible Portion of the Week), as the Proletarian Traveling Preacher, Der Proletarisher Maggid, he began "I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold unto Egypt," but the meat of his article dealt with the fact that rich and poor, masters and slaves, all existed at the same time in the same place, as is true still. Cahan was telling a story, though didactically. Already, he was evoking plot and character, as a realist would do.

There is no doubt that Cahan's years as a Yiddish journalist were all-important to his career. As editor of the Arbeiter Tzeitung he created a weekly column called the "Sidra," because he had to turn out a class-conscious, proletarian interpretation of a biblical story, precisely because, though he was a socialist, he was also convinced that tradition and religion could not be ignored. Week after week he used a biblical episode, such as Moses protecting a Jewish worker from a cruel Egyptian overseer, or Joseph and his brothers, to accomplish his purpose. In this column he began his first proper story in Yiddish, "Motke Arbl and His Romance," and it was here that Rafoyel Naarizokh was serialized a few years later. It was also here, as "The Hester Street Reporter," that he wrote a column titled "Fun a Vort a Kvort" (From a Word a Quart), a column that forced him into imaginative and literary directions, that gave him the opportunity (Bleter, III, 409) to invent "half-belletristic thoughts and expressions" and pile them on people's lives or include them in his stories.

"Motke Arbl and His Romance" appeared in Yiddish in 1891. Displaying a fairly sure grasp of the Jewish immigrant experience and a good feel for character, dialogue, and situation, the story related Motke's attempts to contract a marriage to Hannah, the daughter of his former employer in the old country. Unfortunately for him, on the boat his intended falls in love with another young man on his way to America. Motke, a cartdriver-peddler, who had just begun to succeed in America, had made his arrangements through a matchmaker. After learning that Hannah had fallen in love "under the moon," all he could do was lament the money spent and demand his money back. Motke, who used his sleeve (Arbl) for a handker-chief, is to be pitied. Meanwhile, in spite of the bathos, one has to admire Cahan's early sensitivity to the early Lower East Side; his scenes are memorable.

Cahan had been learning rapidly and well. His objective reporting for the New York Sun as early as 1888, despite a penchant for sentimentality, made a solid base for his later work as a writer of realistic fiction. "Hebrews in Summer Hotels—How They are Treated—A Strange But Strictly True Illustration" (September 2, 1888) is an illuminating description of discrimination against Jews in summer hotels and the ruses used to deal with the problem. The use of Anglo-Saxon sounding names to get reservations, for example, was one way Jews tried to get around anti-Semitism. "Mothers of Immigrants—Unofficial Function of the Barge Office Matron" (July 9, 1898) was another piece of realistic fiction as journalism, the story of a young mail-order bride's problems upon arriving at the barge office and the help she received. In "Imagined America—How a Young Russian Pictured It" (also 1898) the sub-headings almost tell the story: "A many-colored meadow with tall, young beardless men in Grey Overcoats—Women Had Been Forgotten—The Language—The Twittering of Birds Trying to Speak French—The Immigrant's Discovery—A Live Cat, A Blue-Coated Customs Official and a Frog-Like Preacher with a Bandaged Hand." It was on the basis of sketches like these and dozens more than Cahan wrote his stories, novellas, and novels. It was already clear certain themes would appear: Cahan's recognition that friends (especially Landslayt, countrymen) were always around, that men had to contend with disappointments with women, that women were often abandoned, that many people would yearn for the Old Country, that success was a complex and perhaps costly quest.

Cahan's conception of art was being worked out in those first decades. After attending an exhibit in 1888 of the Russian artist Vereschagin's paintings Cahan was enraged that the critics praised Vereschagin's talent but decried his subject, the Russian-Turkish War of 1877. According to Cahan in his essay on "Realism," art flows from man's imitative nature; the "end of imitative activity," he wrote, "is not so much to copy the outside nature as to stimulate the sensation which it evokes in us." Concerned with the "thrill of truth," he praised Tolstoy's "pedantic truthfulness," even as he complimented Howells for his vision as a Realist. In Cahan's mind, literary Realism and Socialism led to the same end. Interestingly, when he reread the essay many years later he quoted the words he still thought of as central: that "the power of realistic art arises from the pleasure which derives from recognizing the truth as it is mirrored by art." He added, in 1926, that he realized the propagandiste bent of his essay but that he still retained a "degree of satisfaction from the thought."

Of course, what he believed down deep, as he put it in The Education, was that "It is truth that we admire and that is the source of our artistic delight. The heart experiences a thrill in recognizing a friend in a faithful portrait. Yet capitalist critics don't want the truth. It disturbs the class they serve." That is to say, as he put it in "The Yiddish Theatre & American Novels" (Arbeiter Tzeitung, April 29, 1892).

True literature mirrors life—including relations between men and women.… The French are proceeding to reveal the truth of things [about sexual relations and close relationships]. American literature and Yiddish could both improve in the direction of Realism.

When Cahan referred to the "Thrill of Truth," when he referred to realism, he referred to the relationship between literature and ethnic problems that he took for granted in the first decades of his years in America. Chekhov, for example, reminded him of Tolstoy, he wrote in the Forum in 1899, because his characters were "irresistibly real," and because of his grasp of the "evanescent detail of life and his incisive sense of motive." Art for art's sake he rejected, of course; and propaganda held little attraction for him. Rather, what he looked for was that a story must be artistic and through illusion provide a faithful transcript of life. For the same reasons he admired the English-Jewish novelist and playwright, Israel Zangwill, because Zangwill's work exuded sadness and tragedy colored by a sense of fun and the ludicrous. In the same way he wrote glowingly of the new Yiddish writers in America. Although uneducated in the ways of the world, they were religiously, traditionally educated, and able somehow to sense human motive and character. Whether they wrote of the issue that separated the immigrant from Americanness or depicted scenes of the pathetic and extraordinary, they proved capable of handling everything. His admiration stemmed from his sympathy for the writer's love for "the little man," the figure immortalized by the great Yiddish writers Mendele, Perets, and Sholem Aleikhem. Far from being alienated by these Russian and Yiddish characteristics, Cahan thought them central to his definition of literature, and they account for his approval of William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. His search for and love of "the thrill of truth" motivated him in almost everything he wrote and explains whom he was drawn to and why.

His next story in Yiddish, Rafoyel Naarizokh Iz Gevoren a Sotsialist (Rafael Naarizokh Becomes a Socialist), published also in die Arbeiter Tzeitung, was about an immigrant who slowly becomes aware of class differences and turns to socialism. Rafoyel, a carpenter from a small town in Russia, is a talented worker but is so honest that he's considered almost a wimp His last name, Naarizokh, actually a nickname, comes from a part of the Sabbath service that he constantly hums. Induced to go to America by his brother's promise of $10 a week without a Czar or tax assessor, he and his wife soon learn that America's "machines" lead to greater productivity for the employers and owners, nothing for the workers. A green-horn, having learned that America is not necessarily a golden land, Rafoyel cannot forget the contrast between the rich and the poor, and the emphasis on machines, not people. True, he recognizes that the fault doesn't lie with the machines but with those who own them. At the same time he learns of the problems of ownership, of the nature of predatory capitalism, of the need for a more beautiful world. His vision is his "song of songs"; given the state of technology, it should be possible. Then suddenly it occurs to him that the answer is in community-owned factories, corporations, everything. When he discovers at a meeting that his idea is called "socialism," his "song of songs," he realizes that he is a socialist—not richer, not more pious, but more of a mentsch." In the American vernacular, he has become a new man. As Cahan recalled in 1911, "If as a socialist you want to influence real live men, you must first be a real live man yourself."

Finally, "Di Tsvey Shidukhim" ("The Two Matches"), which appeared in the Arbeiter Tzeitung, describes the marriage of Harris and his friend Jake. After Harris kisses Becky, whom he likes, she rejects him, mistakenly feeling that she's been too forward. A few weeks later, on the rebound, Harris marries Becky's aunt, Mrs. Zager. Meanwhile, a distraught Becky marries Jake. Both marriages, needless to say, are failures. The point of the story, going beyond the bare outline, lies in Becky's awakening sexuality and in the conflict-laden social situation. Probably because of the daring nature of the theme for the 1890s, this story was never translated.

Cahan's first story in English, a translation and variant of "Motke Arbl," was published in The Imported Bride-groom and Other Stories in 1898. "A Providential Match" begins with an explanation of the nickname of the hero, Rouvke Arbl, now Robert Freedman (Freed—man). In Russia, Rouvke used the sleeve of his coat as a handkerchief. Rouvke—thought to be a more familiar, understandable name than Motke to an American audience—drove carts and was a man-Friday for Peretz the distiller. In America, with four years of experience, he's a different young man with an imposing business card: "Robert Freedman; Dealer in Furniture, Carpets, Jewelry, Clothing, Ladies Dress Goods, etc. Weekly Payment Taken." A modest success, Americanized to the extent that he is called Robert instead of Rouvke, he dresses appropriately and watches his manners (as far as he can); he is free but the Old World clings to him. Rouvke is convinced by Reb Fay ve, a melamed who was a shadkhen (marriage broker), that a match could be arranged with Hanele, the refined daughter of his former employer Peretz. Peretz's initial revulsion changes when he realizes that Hanele, at twenty-five, is unlikely to marry in the near future. Fayve's letters stress that "America makes a new man of every young fellow." On the trip across, Hanele falls in love with a young man with spectacles wearing the seedy gray uniform overcoat of a young Russian collegian.

On his arrival at Castle Garden, where Rouvke has gone to meet Hanele, she introduces him to "Gospodin Levinsky, my chosen," and told that, "it is my Providential Match." Rouvke can only sputter, in Yiddish, "I want my hundred and fifty dollars back." Although Levinsky promises to pay him back, as Hanele and Levinsky sweep past him and as the marriage broker stands wringing his hands, Rouvke is left staring, at a loss to explain the situation; too late, ruefully, he realizes that in America he doesn't need a marriage broker, a shadkhen, and that "the soothing smiles of the moon—that skillfulest of shadkhens," had proved most potent of all.

"A Providential Match" foreshadows later stories as well as The Rise of David Levinsky, where we learn of the fabric of the immigrants' life and experiences, the clash of values, and the nature of the interaction of the immigrant and the factory and business world. What makes the story appealing is Cahan's ability to show us full-dimensioned characters, especially Rouvke-Robert and Reb Fayve, as they struggle with the confusing mores of America and are unable to define and express their feelings, their disappointment, and their sense of loss at the end.

What Robert learned immediately was that a matchmaker cannot guarantee the results of his work. The more important lesson was that he now had to recognize that he was still a kind of greenhorn. Though his four years in America had earned him a measure of success, he had to take account of the intangible and irrational. A balegole, a drayman, in Russia, nicknamed "Arbl," he hadn't really changed; although he had convinced himself that he had, "the face was precisely the same." Understandably he had deluded himself. Mixed with his feeling that he had succeeded was his yearning for his native Kropovetz. Simultaneously attracted to and repelled by American-born girls, he couldn't quite grasp the fact that he couldn't fulfill their expectations. Even if they were Jewish they appeared "Christian," and they would expect to be on a level with him, perhaps to dominate him. No wonder he decided to try to contract for Hande.

The title "A Providential Match" is a delicious irony, even comical. Obviously the match was made by Robert and the matchmaker, and Peretz and his daughter, all human beings operating without heaven's assistance. That Robert's face is pockmarked is unfortunate, but Cahan allows the hero to overhear others speaking of his face and that he is no "catch." That Cahan's comic language goes too far, and may be seen as caricature, is also true. Comic language is a valid comic form. Unkind references to dialect or too many gross malapropisms reduce the language to bad taste, ugly dialect. Perhaps, as Louis Harap writes, Cahan had not yet achieved a tone that would carry his fiction beyond the thin line that separates the anti-Semitic from the naturalistic in fiction about Jews. Whichever interpretation one accepts, the fact is that "A Providential Match" was a successful story, the one that drew Howells to contact him and led to their longlasting relationship.

Howells first met Cahan in 1892. While doing research for the opening section of A Traveler from Altruria, in which he was to write about union organizers, Howells sought out Cahan at an East Side cafe but missed him. He left his card asking Cahan to come see him. Much to Howells' amazement, when they met, Cahan told the senior writer that he had read everything he had written, and that he admired him very much. As was to be expected, they talked about writers in general and then about Russian writers. Although Howells had invented a likable socialist, Lindau, in A Hazard of New Fortunes, he could not have imagined an Abraham Cahan. Nothing prepared him for this intelligent, intellectual, passionate socialist. They met again, in 1895, after Mrs. Howells had picked up a copy of Short Stories on a newstand and, recognizing Cahan's name, brought it home. On this occasion Howells, convinced that Cahan must continue to write, although he had some reservations about "A Providential Match," noting that the story was not "really a serious thing," encouraged him to work up something more substantial on ghetto life. This impelled Cahan to begin work on Yekl. It was Howells' interest and support that would find a publisher for Yekl. As would be evident in both Yekl and The Rise of David Levinsky, what stood out were the yearning to be someone, to be recognized as a Yankee or an American, the terrible longing to become a success, and the loneliness of "pecuniary emulation" and achievement, words soon to be popularized by Thorstein Veblen. Along the way, Cahan manipulated language, as Henry Roth and Bernard Malamud would decades later, albeit at times awkwardly. When the characters spoke in English, accents abounded; when they spoke in Yiddish, there was fluency. That the English tended to the heavy, ponderous Victorian tones of the day was expected. Drawing upon Russian, Jewish, and American sources, Cahan's English vacillated from cliches to subtitles, from obvious influences of the Old World to the nuances of the New Cahan remembered:

Between the walls of the synagogues, on the top floor of some ramshackle tenement house, they sing beautiful melodies, some of them composed in the caves and forests of Spain, and these and the sighs and sobs of the Days of Awe, the thrill that passes through the heartbroken fa/ii/i-covered congregation when the shofar blows, the mirth which fills the house of God and the tenements upon the Rejoicing of the Law.… all these pervade the atmosphere of the ghetto with a beauty and charm.

Immediately following the success of "A Providential Match," Cahan wrote "A Sweat-Shop Romance" (originally titled "In the Seventh Shop," and published in Short Stories (XIX June 1895, 129-43), the story of the courtship and marriage of Beyle, a finisher in Leyzer Lipman's shop. Leyzer Lipman was one of the contract tailors (called "cockroaches," that is, they ran small "cockroach-shops") on the third floor of a rickety tenement on Essex Street. In great detail, Cahan described the sweatshop:

Dangling against the door or scattered among the bundles, there were cooking utensils, dirty linens, Lipman's velvet skullcap, hats, shoes, shears, cotton-spools, and whatnot. A red-hot kitchen stove and a blazing grate full of glowing flatirons combined to keep up the overpowering temperature of the room, and helped to justify its nickname of sweatshop in the literal sense of the epithet.

Beyle loved her coworker Hyman even though she was aware that he was very stingy. She kept wondering when he would propose marriage. One day Zlate, Leyzer's wife, asked her in an imperious tone to get two bottles of soda to impress Old Country visitors. When Beyle refused, egged on by another hand, David (while Hyman remained silent), she and David were fired. A week later, after Hyman finally got up enough courage to visit Beyle he arrived in time to hear, through her door, the unmistakable sounds of a party celebrating the engagement of Beyle and David. While Hyman had been tied to his machine, tongue tied, David had acted. David found work for himself and Beyle, saw her home every night, and treated her to candy and to a coffee saloon.

Although Cahan regretted the pat ending, the romantic finish, explaining lamely that it appeared right for an American audience, the story succeeded in picturing the lives and problems of the garment hands and the bosses and their cockroach shops, so common then, and the human dimension of the Jewish immigrants in the 1890s. Contrasted with the realistic description of the sweat-shops was the limited but real emotional stress of the lovers, the would-be lover, and the boss and his wife. At first, Beyle wondered whether she was really in love, because she "never feels anything melting, nor can she keep disliking certain things about Hyman" Later, it was David's image that overwhelmed her, "the image of a pluckier fellow than Hyman, or one with whom there was more protection."

In spite of its weaknesses, the story was memorable for it was a transitional phase on the way to Yekl the later stories, and David Levinsky.

The sweatshop, in which many Jews were employed, was the most prominent and lucrative industry of the ghetto at the turn of the century. The shop, the Lipmans' apartment after hours, had three rooms; the hot stove served to keep the flatirons hot. Beyle was a finisher, David was a baster, and Hyman (whose name has sexual connotations), the sewing machine operator. Piece-work ruled, for, as Cahan put it, "the sweatshop day will not coincide with the solar day unless a great amount of work be accomplished in its course." As Cahan contended, the Russian Jewish immigrant entrepreneur was not responsible for the sweating system; it was the inevitable outgrowth of mass production industrialism, and unregulated capitalism in America. The Jewish immigrants learned America's values and the rules for success and practiced them well. That, along the way, they exchanged their Old World values for those of the New World, was not unexpected; however, it was an event of importance to Cahan and to several generations of Jewish American writers.

The Yiddish word "roman" in the original title means "romance" and "novel." The "sweatshop romance" that we read implies growth, and suggests characters larger than life. Perhaps Cahan meant to see Beyle and David grow, but his inability to make them full-dimensional is a disappointment. Hyman is obviously disapproved of: he failed as a man when he silently watched his beloved humbled and fired, and again when it takes him a week to get up enough nerve to see her. Similarly Beyle, an innocent, appears out of place as the prize over which two men fight, while David, for all his earnestness, is sticklike, a serious but pontificating suitor. Yet, withal, "A Sweatshop Romance" succeeds because of its vivid descriptions of a tenement sweatshop and its delineation of a widespread immigrant problem, consisting of adapt-ability, loneliness, love, and the dynamics of mobility in sweatshop capitalism. The conditions that surround them are harsh, but their failures are due to their inability to retain their old values in the new context, not to their being ground down by the system. As for Cahan, as Ronald Sanders so eloquently put it, he "seems to have been unable to find the proper control of his own ambivalences about Jewishness." Perhaps because he was in transition from being a Socialist in Russia to being an American Socialist, his discussions of immigrant dislocation and trauma, of rising from greenhorn to "Yankee" to American Jew, were affected by his biases. He forced his point, which was not needed; his impatience and lack of compassion detracted from his artistry and realism. Pushing heavy-handed irony into the realm of anti-Semitic caricature, in "A Providential Match," interfered with the local-color of the Lower East Side; similarly, his socialist didacticism, in "In the Sweatshop," combined with a persistent account of unhappy love, continued his use of themes that he would rely on throughout his career, though more skillfully later on.