SOURCE: "The Yiddish Fiction of Abraham Cahan," in Yiddish, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall, 1975, pp. 7-22.

[In the following essay, Chametzky provides an overview of Cahan's writings in Yiddish.]

Cahan began to write fiction cautiously—that is, in Yiddish, in the pages of the Arbeiter Zeitung, where critical tastes in literature were as yet largely unformed. Nevertheless, his first story, "Motke Arbel and His Romance" (1892), was a more than respectable performance, embodying a new literary voice and sensibility. The story tells of a low-bred fellow whose modest business success in America enables him to contract to marry the daughter of his former employer and social superior in Russia, but who is frustrated in the end because the young woman becomes engaged to another man on the journey to America. Even this cursory summary shows the undercutting of "romance" suggested in the title; "Motke Arbel" displays a sure sense of the Jewish immigrant experience and a lively feeling for real character, dialogue, situation. It was a great success with Cahan's readers.

Cahan's first English story was a translation and version of this one. As "A Providential Match" (1895), the story was to have fateful consequences for Cahan's career when it attracted the attention of William Dean Howells. On the basis of that story Howells urged Cahan to attempt a longer work on the experiences of the ghetto—the genesis of Yekl.

Encouraged by the reception of his first story, Cahan undertook a longer work in Yiddish, which went on for many issues in the Arbeiter Zeitung in 1894 and which had an even greater impact on his readers than the earlier effort. Called Rafael Naarizokh iz gevorn a sotsialist (Rafael Narizokh Becomes a Socialist)—and subtitled in its book version. "The Story of a Carpenter Who Came to His Senses"—it was a didactic tale about a simple immigrant's awakening class-consciousness in America and his conversion to socialism. Largely a vehicle for transmitting Socialist ideas to the readers of the journal, the story avoids aridity by its concrete details of street, shop, and cafe and its overall wit and good humor. The real strength of the story as it drags on (occasionally) through many episodes and twenty-one chapters is the sympathetically conceived and presented character of the naive Rafael.

A carpenter in his native village of Kriletz, Rafael Radetsky is extremely honest, speaks his mind, hates lies—and so is thought something of a fool. He is a gifted artisan who likes good work, a good bean stew, the singing of a good cantor. His nickname "Naarizokh" comes from the name of a portion of the sabbath service that he continually hums and sings while engrossed in his work. Above all, although without education, Rafael likes to think and reflect on just about everything. A letter from his brother in America describing glowing conditions (he could make $10 a week as a carpenter in America, besides there being no Czar and tax assessor) induces him and his Sara Giti to emigrate. They sell all that they own for $45 and go to New York.

He soon discovers that the New World is no golden land. Almost immediately he learns that the many "machines"—a word that in Kriletz referred only to locomotives—employed in America's shops mean amazing productivity, but not, to his surprise, more rewards for those who work the machines. As a countryman tells him, he is truly a "greenhorn" to possess such a simple idea. Factory work and mass-production techniques are entirely new and alienating to Rafael. In his first job he is whacked on the back by the foreman and told to shut up ("Sharrup!") or be fired when he starts singing his familiar "naarizokh" He stops singing, feels defeated and shamed, no longer the man he was formerly; his wife, too, is lonely and forlorn as she sits in her dreary East Side apartment—both regret leaving Kriletz.

Within six months, Rafael has aged ten years. But in his thoughts he has also lived ten years. He reflects continually on his situation—a boss who is more concerned with his machine (which Rafael is expected to attend like a robot) than with him, the disparity between East Side ghetto streets and Fifth Avenue, the existence of rich and poor. At first he blames the machines for all his and other workers' troubles, but in an argument with his wife he talks himself into a new idea: machines themselves are not the cause of misfortune—in fact, they ease his work—but rather it is the ownership of them that is the root problem. He pursues this insight with great excitement—if only he owned the machines … but one man alone cannot run a factory … so if many workers got together and bought a factory they could then be the bosses and live well! But where to get the money?

As he continues to work in different furniture factories these ideas are further refined and he gains new insights into the system. He learns that bosses are not necessarily enviable—they are caught in a savagely competitive situation and can be ruined at any time: the big fish eat the little fish. When he learns about monopolies and their control of prices, he concludes that a single cooperatively run factory could not succeed. He arrives at the notion that a supermachine, above all the others, that would make them all work rationally is really needed. This he calls his "song of songs," which would make the workers rejoice. The more he thinks about the world, the more it seems a prison to him and that he needs a plan of escape to a wider, more beautiful world.

In a conversation about the new technology, he realizes that the achievement of such a plan is not impossible: surely a "song of songs" should not be more difficult to invent than the telephone, telegraph or horseless carriage! One day, short two cents for his fare on an elevated train, he walks across the bridge from Brooklyn to New York. Once there had been a charge for this walk, but it had been dropped as soon as the cost of building the bridge was repaid. The bridge now belonged to the community, the train to a private owner. Suddenly all becomes clear to Rafael. The answer is community-owned trains and then why not community-owned bread and clothing factories? In the idea of public ownership of everything he has discovered his "song of songs."

Immensely excited, Rafael wants to bring this idea to the whole world, which he feels sure will accept it and put it into effect at once. What he needs, he believes in his innocence, is to take out a patent on the idea. He gets a lawyer, who quickly sizes him up as a "damn fool" and obligingly agrees to get him a patent in three days for twenty-five dollars. The days and the fees stretch on, but of course Rafael receives no patent, and is ultimately thrown out by the lawyer.

Still bemused by his dream, Rafael responds to a leaflet that announces a meeting promising to explain why the workers are miserable and what they can do to make their existence a paradise. In great anticipation he attends the meeting and discovers, much to his surprise, that his "song of songs" has a name—Socialism—and that he is, in fact, a Socialist. This knowledge comes in a strange new language, in many long speeches, frequently too abstract for his simple, concrete turn of mind (when Rafael decides to speak his full mind from the floor it causes much good-natured laughter at the meeting). But it does come, and he soon becomes a passionate convert to Socialism. The goals of liberty, equality, and fraternity which the Socialists claim as their own enrapture him and the "Marseillaise," he himself reflects, replaces the "Naarizokh."

His transformation is completed through a relationship with a cafe intellectual and Socialist named Vicker. From him Rafael learns about Science and Nature (which brings him out of the darkness of his religious superstitions), dialectics (as difficult for him, and as intellectually tempting, as Gemorrah), political and economic class war, the history of social organization, and, finally, the need to remove from love and marriage any trace of economic interest. In becoming a Socialist, Rafael has become a new man—he has shaved his beard (with mixed feelings), taken pains with his wardrobe and personal hygiene, looks and acts younger (as does his wife, prodded by his example), is capable of abstract discourse—in short, he has become, as one of the chapter headings affirms, "Not richer, not more pious, but more of a mentsh (more of a person)."

As can be seen from this summary, there are long stretches of theorizing in Rafoel Naarizokh—several chapters are devoted to the speeches at the crucial meeting attended by Rafael, others to Vicker's patient exposition of the Socialist line on everything. Yet the book does not quite sink under this weight, or survive merely as an extended pamphlet. Action and development are minimal, to be sure, in any traditional fictional sense—it is episodic, and the characteristic "action" is a speech conversation, or inner reflection on a social idea. But as all of it serves to illuminate the straightforwardness and wonder of Rafael's consciousness, it can be read sympathetically. The vernacular, too, works to take the curse off arid theory—in Rafael's homey translations of abstruse matters, in Sara Giti's crusty responses to his efforts to enlighten her, in the American-English learned and needed by the characters (a glossary of 145 such terms is appended to the volume: among them "barber," "boss," "furniture," "party," "wages"). All in all, Rafoel Naarizokh displays the developed skill of Cahan as the old Proletarian Maggid and Hester Street Reporter, who can take a small concrete incident or insight—no charge for walking across a bridge, let us say—and develop it into a larger general idea. The overall achievement of this book lies in its coherence, deriving from the socialist spirit informing it, and the charm of its central character.

Cahan published one other story in the Arbeiter zeitung—"Di tsvey shidukhim" ("The Two Matches")— which he later thought the best short story he wrote in the early period in either language.

The story concerns Harris and his friend Jake and their marriages to Becky and her aunt. Harris is an installment agent, lively and good-looking, who woos Becky too ardently. She allows him to kiss her, but then regrets it, thinking he may consider her "cheap." Although she likes Harris, she refuses to marry him. She almost immediately regrets that decision, but it is too late to rectify it. A few weeks afterward, Harris marries Mrs. Zager, Becky's widowed aunt. Jake meanwhile consoles Becky. He is aroused by her, and though Jake seems less attractive than Harris, Becky marries him. At the story's end, both marriages have foundered—Jake abandons Becky after a few months; Harris is revealed to be a lazy and worthless charmer.

Slight as the tale may seem, the situation and characters are unforced and credible, and Cahan reveals a fine sensitivity toward psychological states of mind and the subtlety, new in his work, of awakening sexuality. This element in the work may account for Cahan's decision not to convert the story into English for an American audience. In matters of social theory and sex he seems less restrained with his Jewish audience. On the other hand, he published the story under one of his two Arbeiter zeitung pseudonyms, Sotsius (the other, David Bernstein, was used for his Tolstoy translation), which indicates an attitude not without ambiguity toward them or toward his emerging identity as a writer. It was the last story he wrote in the Yiddish language for several years.

Cahan's first stories in English, "A Providential Match," and "A Sweatshop Romance," were included in The Imported Bridegroom, a collection of five stories published in 1898, two years after the success of Yekl. But they appeared first in the magazine Short Story in 1895, so it will be useful to focus upon them at this point as forerunners of the more significant Yekl.

They may both be considered somewhat slight stories, but "A Providential Match" shows real talent, and even the less interesting and successful one, "A Sweatshop Romance," flashes to life occasionally as it depicts a locale new to American fiction, the tenement sweat-shop. Cahan later preferred "Di tsvey shidukhim" because he thought the people in that story, their speech, relationships, spirit, were (despite a bad ending), more natural and full of life than the others; but this kind of judgment only points to the difficulty of Cahan's often ambiguous relation to the languages he worked in.

The original Yiddish title of "A Providential Match," it will be remembered, was "Motke Arbel and His Romance." To the Yiddish audience, the title reveals the coarse, somewhat comic nature of the story's central character. Motke is a familiar diminutive that can be slightly patronizing, while "arbel" is Yiddish for "sleeve." In the opening paragraph of the English version, the narrator explains the significance of the hero's curious nick-name, "Rouvke Arbel" (his American name is Robert Friedman): "Before he came to America, and when he still drove horses and did all sorts of work for Peretz the distiller, he was in the habit of assigning to the sleeves of his sheepskin coat such duties as generally devolve upon a pocket handkerchief." Cahan changed the name Motke to Rouvke, the diminutive of Rouven, because it seemed more understandable to the audience in English. That audience might lose the significance of his former occupation, as well—the word for a drayman in Yiddish ("balegole") is the word for a coarse, low-bred type of person. After four years in America, the narrator tells us, Rouven is "now quite a different young man in a different coat and with a handkerchief in its side-pocket." He is also the proud possessor of a business card in English ("his diploma"): "Robert Friedman, Dealer in Furniture, Carpets, Jewelry, Clothing, Ladies' Dress Goods, etc. Weekly Payments Taken." He took the name Robert instead of Reuben because he thought it had a more "tzibilized" sound to it.

The basic elements of many Cahan stories can already be discerned: the superior narrator explaining to a reader, whose values he presumably shares, some inside information about the Jewish immigrant culture in America. The emphasis will be on the effects of the culture-clash upon the immigrant. In this case, the protagonist is faintly comic, although a success (on some level) in business, and "Americanized" in his name, dress, and on the crudest level of deportment. He is a "freed man" in America, but, as the story shows, he is not fully liberated. Much of his old character and ethos remain, while his grasp of the new ethos is partial, crude, superficial. New coat and business card notwithstanding, the laugh finally is on him.

The story is as follows: Rouvke has done relatively well in America, but despite his efforts at self-improvement and meeting "young laddas," he is still a bachelor. Reb Feive, a shadkhn (marriage broker) enters the picture. He convinces Rouvke that he can negotiate a match with Hanele, the previously inaccessible daughter of Peretz, Rouvke's former employer and the first citizen of Kropovetz in Russia. Rouvke always felt great tenderness for the lovely Hanele, but such a match would have been unthinkable in the old village. He wonders, too, if he wouldn't be better off in a business way to marry a merchant's daughter who could bring him a dowry. Feive prevails, however, and letters sail back and forth between New York and Kropovetz. At first Peretz is outraged at the suggestion that his former balegole aspires to wed his refined and accomplished daughter. Gradually, however, Peretz comes to reflect that she is in her twenty-fifth year and no new suitors have recently appeared, and that America does indeed make new men. The glowing account of the shadkhn about Rouvke's piety, success, education, and general excellence (all wild exaggerations) take effect and Peretz consents to the match. Hanele, being a "true daughter of Israel," soon acquiesces in her father's decision. Rouvke is delighted and sends enough money (to Rouvke the "only fly in the ointment") for her clothes and transportation. When the times comes for her to arrive, Rouvke waits excitedly at Castle Garden with carriages and in the company of friends. Hanele arrives, charming and beautiful, but on the arm of a young man in the seedy uniform of a Russian collegian. She and this man, called Levinsky (how curious that this name appears in Cahan's first and last fiction—probably an echo of Levin from Anna Karenina, the work that meant so much to Cahan), have met on shipboard, where the moon was the best shadkhn—they have fallen in love, in a true "Providential Match." Rouvke is stunned, but cannot do anything except exclaim, in Yiddish, "I want my hundred and fifty dollars back!" and then in English, "I call a politzman. I vant my hoonred an' fifty dollar." Rouvke is brushed aside by a burly employee of an immigrant hotel who takes Hanele and Levinsky away. Rouvke is speechless, Reb Feive wrings his hands, and the young peddlers Rouvke has brought along to show his triumph now bandy "whispered jokes."

Despite its apparent simplicity and the O. Henry quality of the ending, Cahan gets a good deal into his story. He tells the American reader many things about Jewish life and customs, about the new immigrant's experience in America, and Rouvke's climb in business. But what marks the story off is Càhan's sensitivity to character and theme. He presents a careful analysis of motive and behavior in Rouvke and Peretz, shrewdly showing the inter-play of each as they realistically appraise their situations. An earthy material incentive is shown to combine with the longing in their hearts about Hanele. The laugh is certainly on Rouvke at the end, but it is somewhat chilling. That Rouvke is left speechless is a fine touch. There is a real sense of loss, but he is incapable of expressing precisely the nature of his loss. Shylock had cried "My ducats! My daughter!" when he lost Jessica, placing money before the human relationship. That seems to be Rouvke's first, almost instinctual cry ("My hundred and fifty dollars!"), but that is clearly a displacement, not the real or central loss he feels. There is a poignant note in his inability, in a new language and in a hostile environment (the burly runner who pushes him aside, his unsympathetic colleagues), to express his innermost feelings. Cahan strikes this note—a theme of longing, unfulfillment, and essential loneliness—early, continues it through many stories in various guises, until its culmination in the complicated and final statement of The Rise of David Levinsky.

In a story like "A Providential Match" we are aware of several verbal structures, languages, operating simultaneously. There is the immigrant's English—crude, to a native speaker often comic; there is the language of low-life America, both directly and indirectly coming through in the immigrant—in other stories there may be other, more ordinary or even refined American speech; there is Yiddish in translation by the narrator, usually as simple as the characters, but nevertheless more supple and resonant than any ostentatiously sophisticated English, which tends to be lifeless, although acceptable to the best literary taste of the time. This pattern, with variations, of course, will appear in most of Cahan's work.

Upon the success of "A Providential Match," Cahan quickly wrote "A Sweatshop Romance." This is less complicated in almost every respect than the first story, but not without some characteristic and interesting touches.

The sweatshop of the title is the three-room tenement apartment of Leizer Lipman, a "contract tailor." Besides Leizer and his wife Zlate, there are four workers in the shop: Meyer the presser, Heyman the operator, Beile the finisher, David the baster. Beile and Heyman are interested in each other, although Heyman is too timid to propose to her. All the relationships are transformed suddenly when Zlate, trying to impress some visitors, tries to treat Beile like a domestic, ordering her to go out to buy some soda pop. David, the shop joker, urges Beile to refuse to go. Zlate is angered; Beile and David quit their jobs. Heyman had sat silently throughout the altercation, too intimidated to speak out. For two weeks following the incident, Heyman can not screw up the courage necessary to visit Beile and commiserate with her. When he finally does go to her apartment, he is in time to overhear the conclusion of David and Beile's wedding ceremony.

The story is obviously slight—the ending especially caused Cahan distress when he later reflected on it ("how on earth did it pop into my head?"), although he explained it away on the grounds that it was the sort of thing American audiences at the time expected. With all its faults and inconsequentiality, the story does provide a good picture of a shop, the crowding, the scramble for work when the boss entered with his "bundles"; more than anything else there is the retained and recognizable humanity of the people, however crudely presented or however crudely they presented themselves (Zlate is a bit of a ranting hysteric, not a person). The portrayal of the sweatshop was not as stark as Jacob Riis's account, but Cahan was making an effort to show his characters as rounded people, not merely victims of a system. He erred in ending his small tale in a romantic glow, although even in this regard, because his characters did not really possess the vocabulary of love (it was something Beile had only heard of), there is authenticity in the flat-footed exposition and dialogue. This story should be seen as essentially transitional and experimental. Yekl would provide a greater challenge and achievement.

Cahan was restlessly moving between various worlds during the years of his earliest literary ventures, and to some extent this uneasiness shows in them, although not necessarily in obvious and literal ways. In addition to his immense activity in these years as editor, translator, journalist, he made three trips to Europe as a Socialist delegate to international congresses. On his last trip in 1894 he went as a companion to an American friend, James K. Paulding, who was eager to have Cahan's running commentary and impressions of the scenes, events, personalities they encountered. This role may have kindled in Cahan a perception of his great potential as an interpreter to the broader English-reading public of the materials of his radical, Russian-Jewish world. The medium of this interpretation, obviously, would have to be the English language.

Despite the success of Rafoel Naarizokh, or his own high regard for "Di tsvey shidykhim," a literary career in the conditions of the 1890s meant, for Cahan, writing in English. The prevailing attitude among Jewish intellectuals and much of the middle-class toward Yiddish was that it was a subliterary jargon, incapable of a rich and subtle literature. As we have seen, this was a view that Cahan certainly did not wholly share. He was sympathetic to the substantial development of the Yiddish stage and was aware of and appreciated the birth of serious Yiddish literature then taking place. In the year he re-read Anna Karenina for the third time he also published and wrote enthusiastically about the first stories to appear in America by I. L. Peretz, and in the year of Yekl he was writing appreciatively and shrewdly about Sholem Aleichem. Nevertheless, the Yiddish audience in America was small and relatively unsophisticated, and the term "Yiddish Literature" was then something of a joke (Bleter fun mayn leben, IV, 20).

In his memoirs Cahan tells of an experience that crystallized for him his feelings about the language he would have to write in if he was to have a serious literary career. At the Zurich Socialist Congress he encountered several sympathetic Bulgarian and Romanian delegates, Jews and writers. Their situations seemed to parallel and illuminate his own. These writers knew they were cut off from readers outside their native countries (few of whom could be expected to learn Bulgarian or Romanian), so that if they wanted to reach a significant audience that would take their work seriously, they would have to write in one of the great languages of the world. Cahan believed that his situation as a Yiddish writer in America was analogous to theirs.

The question came down to one of an audience, therefore, and the inevitable writer's problem of relationship to that audience. For Cahan, Socialist, Jew, Realist, immigrant, the problem of the right balance to be struck with a potential American reading public was an acute one.

Cahan was uniquely qualified to render the subject of his fiction, although he did not always resolve satisfactorily the complicated pull of subject, audience, vision. He had sympathy for the Jews, his people, but as a Realist he eschewed mere advocacy and tendentiousness He understood the limitation of the Jewish immigrant—indeed, one of his self-proclaimed tasks for more than a dozen years had been to help bring a semi-literate, largely un-educated and backward people (despite the high value placed on learning in the Jewish ethos, this was the truth about the masses) into the contemporary and enlightened world. On the other hand, a feeling of gross superiority would be offensive and, indeed, un-Socialist (although elitism was embodied in some of the offshoots of Socialism). Modulating this tension was the pity and compassion for the human condition that he absorbed from the Russian writers. As we have seen, Cahan asked for truth in dealing with Jewish life, despising "shund" (pulp) literature or its counterpart in inflated rhetoric and historical melodrama. He knew that the "greenhorn" and what was happening to him was an important subject and that it should be presented without ridicule or romance. It cannot be said that Cahan always achieved equilibrium amidst the contending forces; the balance was always perilous. That he achieved it at all, as I think he does in Yekl and with far more complex material in Levinsky, is remarkable.

For obvious reasons, Cahan was fascinated by the differences among languages as well as the class and character differentiations within a language. For him, Russain was the embodiment of his intellectual life, Yiddish of the emotional, English of the fascinating and rich "other" world, the mastery of which was a measure of one's sophistication and status. Language, of course, is the embodiment of culture, and everywhere in Cahan's work we see his attention to linguistic expressions of the clashes between and within cultures.

Cahan's stories in English combine, as we have seen, the elements of his Russian and Jewish experience within an American framework—bringing news of other worlds, other sensibilities, to his American readers. During the years as a reporter on the Commercial Advertiser, his essays in American periodicals, as well, inform an English-reading public about Jewish and Russian life, Jewish and Russian authors. Toward the end of this period, Cahan was induced to write in Yiddish again for the audience of the Forward, to help articulate for those readers some qualities of their American experience. The most notable difference from his English stories is that the Yiddish work was scarcely to be considered "fiction" and that in it Cahan was overtly the teacher and Socialist.

Between November 1900 and January 1901 Cahan produced a series of "articles" in Yiddish, later published in book form as Neshomeh yesere, that tells a good deal about Cahan's feelings about Socialism at the time and about his more casual attitude toward writing in Yiddish than in English. The series was only undertaken after much imploring by the editor of the Forward, the busy Cahan hoping to find somediing in his notes that would not take much effort to work up. Among his notes for "The Imported Bridegroom" he found such an idea—a sketch for a story that would involve a disappointment like Asriel Stroon's, but whose central character would be a Socialist worker, not a successful and religious businessman.

An honest Socialist worker, Cutler, has a daughter, Rachel, who marries another Socialist (Harry). Cutler also has a son named Muzi whom he brings up in the true faith from childhood on. Harry and Rachel have a cheerful household—many guests come there, all Socialists. The careers of Cutler and his family and some of their acquaintances are followed over many years. Harry owns a store that thrives; he becomes rich and abandons Socialism. He and Rachel now see only two of the former comrades, both doctors and utterly in the grips of money-making. The old neshome yesere (the transcendant spirit of idealism) is gone from them all. The Socialist Party itself is in the control of less admirable types than formerly and so has lost die respect of the masses. Muzi has gone to City College and grown away from his father. Cutler has kept the faith, but wanders about like a lost soul. His final tragedy occurs when he sneaks into a Tammany beef-steak party and hears his son make a speech for the local boss. Cutler shouts a protest and is thrown out. Ultimately, he becomes ill and dies. His name is not even commemorated in his comrades' newspaper, since he has not been a well-known writer or speaker. His survivors continue to ride in their carriages and to play poker.

Another story of the death of the spirit is told about a once virtuous man who became an important and corrupt saloon owner. America had made him a worse man than he had been formerly; of course there are instances of the opposite occurring. Circumstances can occasionally improve people whose inner spirit enables them to act humanely.

The narrator recalls that in the first group of immigrants all were poor, all lived in one world, all were Socialists. Now at New Year's, two parties are held on the East Side: a Socialist one at which beer is drunk, and one at which full-dress suits are worn, champagne is drunk, and Socialist ideals are held in contempt. There are now two worlds where formerly there was one.

Finally, the narrator notes that the neshome yesere does not discriminate between Jews and Christians. There can be an aristocracy of the spirit. The largest number of great men in the world are, after all, not Jews; but still, for their small numbers, Jews do have the greatest proportion of poets, singers, martyrs (he had spoken earlier of the Russians, especially the nihilists), good heads, and good hearts. The time will come when we will all be united and the result will be a stronger and better mankind. On this note the story ends.

The work runs to over eighty pages, in nine sections, and betrays, even in the summary above, the makeshift and structurally awkward quality to be expected from the circumstances of its composition. Cahan fleshed out his idea about the honest Socialist worker—a later, sadder version of Rafael Naarizokh—with several other case histories and much commentary. Cutler does stand out, and the theme of disappointed expectations, paralleling the Asriel-Shaya story in "The Imported Bridegroom" is nicely handled, but even more than in the earlier story characterization is overwhelmed by narrative comment and moralizing.

Cahan knew his audience, however, and the series was a great success. Neshome yesere is a Hebrew phrase, referring to the second soul that is supposed to descend on Jewish households on the Sabbath. It is a concept that has a great appeal for Cahan. Towards the end of the series he defines it as being like Emerson's "oversoul," so that a good translation of the phrase would be "The Transcendent Spirit." That spirit should inform all idealist aspirations and deeply humane relations. It is the spirit which should inform true Socialism. Cahan's ethical idealism, the spiritual nature of his Socialist commitment—and the rueful sense of its precariousness in the American reality—has rarely been better or more directly conveyed than in this work. Neshome yesere was even praised by his then great adversary Jacob Gordin; but the best comment reported by Cahan was that "In the several years in which Cahan has been writing only English, his Yiddish has become better." (Bleter, IV, 251-54).

The relation of the two languages and the different parts of his sensibility Cahan explored in each is vividly demonstrated in another work he undertook at this time. Cahan wrote an English draft of a long story called "Fanny and Her Suitors," which he hoped some day to polish and make the basis of a book. But he never found time to fulfill the plan. Instead, several years later he reworked it, translated it into Yiddish and published it as Fanny's khasonim in a volume along with Neshome yesere, where it appeared for the first time 1913.

Fanny's khasonim is a third longer and is more unified than Neshome yesere, but shows even more clearly the split between Cahan's Yiddish didacticism and his less tendentious English literary work. The novella of seven chapters that originally composed "Fanny and Her Suitors" is included within a Prologue and Epilogue that are added for the Yiddish version. The additions introduce a Socialist editor given to long speeches presenting the Socialist line on love, marriage, the family, whereas the body of the tale allows Fanny, an ordinary shop worker, to tell her story in her own words.

The Prologue sketches an encounter in a park where Cahan (or, rather, an unnamed "I"—and an editor) and several friends are having a discussion that draws a crowd around them. Among the listeners is a middle-aged woman who involves him in an intense conversation, wanting to know his—and generally the Socialist—view of love, marriage, and related questions. She poses good questions and interests him. She reveals that she has a manuscript at home, and though she is an uneducated and ordinary woman, a shop worker, it might be of some interest to others. She would like him to read it and then do what he pleased with it—throw it out, revise it, publish it. She brings it to him the next day. The editor reads it and decides it should be published just as she wrote it. The tale that follows purports to be this story in her own words, only slightly edited.

Fanny tells about a series of suitors she has had who have ultimately turned away from her, and about twice being in love. Through her tale she sprinkles reflections on being an "old maid," one who was "left," and upon men and women's relations—love and marriage—generally. Marriage has been urged upon her for many years, largely by her younger sister (who ran off in the old country with a deserting Jewish soldier) and her old mother—although the mother is in conflict, since Fanny is her breadwinner. All of her popular sister's friends also enter into the sport of finding appropriate suitors for her. Fanny is under a great deal of pressure from them all, as she sees it, and from the community at large.

Fanny cannot hold any suitor's interest for long. Even one who admires her good sense and steadiness and thinks he is beyond romance finally seeks out someone who can touch his heart. She believes that the root of her problem is, vicariously, that unlike her sister she simply does not radiate feminity that she is only ordinary in appearance—neither beautiful nor ugly; she simply cannot attract attention to herself—or that she does not have a large enough dowry (from which she concludes that money in itself is the source of all evil). The men she meets are not always entirely attractive types, either. But the double standard of morality places them under less pressure to marry and, in any case, they are always the choosers, not the chosen.

When she finally does fall in love, where for the first time in her life her heart impels her to behavior her intellect recognizes as absurd, the man she loves rejects her. When she presses him for a reason, he succumbs to her importuning and blurts out the truth: she bores him. This revelation is the most insupportable blow yet to her self-esteem. When she rallies and falls in love once more—the greatest love of her life—she is thwarted again. This time it is by her lover's selfish children. She has met a man at last who fully reciprocates her feelings, but he is much older than she (in his 50s—she is in her 30s) and his children break up the affair. Fanny believes that they are afraid he will leave her money when he dies, and so for the sake of a few dollars they sacrifice his hopes of peace and love in his late years. An ugly world.

In the Epilogue, the editor meets her again and they have a long discussion of some of the issues raised in the story. During this talk the editor gets a less sympathetic impression of her than he received through the tale. Her reiterated claim to being merely an ignorant, humble and uneducated woman he perceives as a cloak for her narrowness and self-righteousness. She now looks to him "as hard as an old bagel." Despite her claim to an interest in Socialist ideas, he finds her obsessed with one subject only: love and marriage, and the relations between men and women. She displays an uneasy mixture of extraordinary knowledge—in her subject she reads everything she can get her hands on—and the coarsest ignorance. The editor lectures her at length, simply and clearly, but she never really accepts what he says. She does not seem to understand the implications of the Socialist solution to society's problems, including family relations and aspects of the woman question. He explains that morality is always relative to the class or group in power, so that if she was puzzled at the double standard, she should see it as made by and benefiting men, who had the power to impose their morality because they were the breadwinners in family relations. When women are equal, they will share in creating a new, more equitable morality. Of course Socialism did not pretend to have answers for everything—it could no more relieve the pain of unrequited love than it could that of a toothache. The editor continues with disquisitions on the history of the rise of a money economy, the inevitable combination of workers in the era of industrial production as the instruments for the overthrow of capitalism, and other Marxist ideas, but anything not bearing directly upon her obsession glances off her consciousness. Basically, she refuses to be broadened. Her portrait, and that of the didactic editor, are lightened somewhat in the last line of the novella, when she asks, all too humanly, "When were you planning to publish my piece?" She is a writer after all.

The work is written in Cahan's usual plain Yiddish, and is full of familiar Jewish types drawn from his vast experience. On the whole it seems unnecessarily drawn out and, except for discussions on the power of sex, not as subtle as some of his earlier English efforts. Fanny is interesting as a case study, and her unconscious self-revelation is nicely presented, but the reader may find himself too close to the view taken by one of her lovers and the editor: boredom and irritation. That Cahan thought the book good enough for Yiddish publication as late as 1913, but never for English publication, reveals again the somewhat lower status he accorded Yiddish as a literary vehicle—at least in his own work.

One measure of the lack of literary sophistication Cahan assumed in his Yiddish audience may be his attitude toward narrative point-of-view. Fanny's khasonim appeared in the same year he was publishing "The Autobiography of an American Jew" in McClure's Magazine, his most extensive attempt to write a fiction wholly in the first person. In the Yiddish story, the first-person technique is attempted only within a protective Prologue and Epilogue—assurance, almost, to the reader that the worthy editor was different from and wiser than the narrator. No such assurance, apparently, would be offered to the reader of "The Autobiography of an American Jew" or The Rise of David Levinsky, the complex novel that was to grow from the McClure's story.

But Fanny's khasonim cannot be dismissed altogether lightly. The focus on the woman question and on the Socialist attitudes suggested as the answer to it is intelligently double-edged, sophisticated. There is a dramatically effective opposition set up between the editor and Fanny. Hers is a good persona, since a more rigorously intellectual woman might not have been as accessible to the average reader. Self-taught, dogmatic, slightly ridiculous, Fanny is nevertheless very present and alive in the story. Cahan's—or the editor's—wrestling with this intractable woman brings the issues into bold relief.

What is salutary about Cahan's treatment of women in all of his work generally is the absence of the stereotypic Yiddishe Mamma. There are no sentimentalized, heroic kinds like Michael Gold's mother in Jews Without Money, nor the nagging, cloying types like Sophie Portnoy in Portnoy's Complaint. Cahan's women are by and large individualized; most of them do things, have separate and recognizable consciousnesses, and strengths outside the traditional wife-mother roles. Of the three women we will see in David Levinsky's life, two are intellectuals while only one chooses the traditional role. Even she displays a strength of personality larger than the role she chooses, and when she realizes at the end that the daughter for whom she makes the choice is unworthy, she bears her disappointment with pride and dignity.

Many of the women in Cahan's stories may indeed marry or, like Fanny, want to, but they do not lose themselves in the role. Tanya in "Circumstances" remains a pure intellectual; Sophie Lieb is enigmatic still; Flora may be an allrightnik, but her ambition raises her above the girls of her set; Clara Yavner in The White Terror and the Red remains impossibly idealistic. Whatever one may say of any of them there is not an earth-mother among them. Even in Yekl, the traditional Giti starts as child-and-kitchen-centered, but soon learns the limitations of that world and ends by dreaming of the grocery store she will own with Bernstein. Cahan the Socialist seems more aware of the realities and potentialities of women's lives than are provided in more sentimental versions of Jewish women locked happily into traditional roles. His women toil, think, hold firm to ideals, or have none, act well or badly, suffer, and communicate independent spirits. As the didactic Yiddish editor he may lecture (perhaps ineffectually) the exasperating Fanny; but this unenlightened woman communicates a stubborn and even admirable sense of self when she speaks in her own voice. On his literary side, which is most often English, and not explicitly Socialist, Cahan tends to allow that voice.