SOURCE: "Fiction in English by Abraham Cahan," in The Image of the Jew in American Literature, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974, pp. 485-524.

Abraham Cahan began to publish short stories, novellas, and novels in the 1890s. The themes and character types adumbrated through Cahan's fiction reached their mature development in 1917 in The Rise of David Levinsky, the most important fictional work about American Jewry up to that time by any American writer, Jewish or non-Jewish.

The depth of Cahan's fiction, both as social drama and as a personal statement, raises complex questions and invites interpretation on several levels. Part of these complexities and subtleties arise from the fact that Cahan was personally involved in and helped effect the transformation of the immigrant Jewish community from a poverty-stricken, densely packed mass in the ghetto to a highly significant force in much of American life. The fact that this milieu was Yiddish has made the materials for a thorough and comprehensive interpretation of Cahan's life and work almost inaccessible to most English-speaking critics and biographers. An adequately analytical biography of Cahan and a just evaluation of the positive and negative aspects of his life and work remain to be written. His work, indeed his life, was tied up with the Yiddish language and culture of the American ghetto, a culture from which virtually all writers in English were sealed off. Such a work would require an immersion in the passionately lived Yiddish milieu, which lasted from the 1880s to the 1940s—and in the Yiddish language.

Most critical writing on Cahan has been distorted by political or personal predisposition. The changes that occurred in both the Jewish community and Cahan's response to these changes, from the radicalism of his earliest years to his abandonment of socialism and the obsessive anticommunism of his last years, render it exceedingly hard to make a just evaluation. He has been considered as a central positive influence in the acculturation of the Jewish mass immigration and as a "misfortune" (umglik) for the Jewish people. Whatever judgment history may make on Cahan, it seems likely that his David Levinsky will be deemed a permanent contribution to American literature and will continue to be read as a social novel of permanent interest.

The essential facts of Cahan's life convey the remarkable scope of his activity and influence. He was born in a Lithuanian shtetl in 1860, and his father began to give him instruction in Hebrew when he was four. The family moved to Vilna when he was six and he continued his education at a yeshiva, until he persuaded his parents to allow him to go to a government school at thirteen. He began to read Russian writers and lost his faith in Judaism. He went on to the free government Jewish teachers college at seventeen, and was attracted to and joined the peasant-oriented, nihilist Narodnaya Volya movement when he was nineteen. Following graduation in 1881 he taught at a Jewish school in Velizh, where he joined a local revolutionary circle. During the ensuing repression after the assassination of Alexander II, Cahan narrowly eluded arrest, and fled to the United States in June 1882. After several months of work in a cigar factory and a tin shop in New York, he had learned English sufficiently well to earn a living by giving private English lessons to immigrants.

Cahan became deeply involved in socialist activity soon after his arrival in the United States and quickly became a noted speaker, especially in Yiddish. He had his first article in English published in the New York World only six months after his entry into this country, and within two years was writing regularly for the New York Sun and other papers. He edited and wrote for the Yiddish socialist press until 1897, when he participated in the founding of the socialist Forward (Forverts), a paper which he edited for a few months until a dispute about his journalistic methods caused him to resign. For five years thereafter he worked wholly in English as a reporter for the New York press and wrote articles and short stories for national magazines. During this period he was not only a colleague of Lincoln Steffens and Norman and Hutchins Hapgood on the daily New York Commercial Advertiser, but also published two volumes of fiction, Yekl (1896) and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (1898), as well as short stories in magazines.

In 1902 he returned to the editorship of the Forward, and, except for a few months, ruled that daily with absolute, dictatorial authority until his late years. When he took over the Forward in 1902 its circulation was about six thousand: at its height in the late 1920s circulation was said to be almost a quarter of a million. In its earlier years especially, it was the organizing center of union and socialist activity and was a driving force for the organization of the Socialist party and Jewish unions and the propagation of labor fraternalism. Cahan himself was at the center of this activity, and there can be no doubt that he was personally a significant influence in all aspects of the acculturation of the immigrant masses in their earliest years. A properly balanced, comprehensive judgment of the precise nature of this influence, it seems to me, has yet to be made.

Interpretation of Cahan's fiction can contribute substantially to an understanding of the man. At the core of his personality was a set of contradictions, a conflict, hints of which are discernible in his fiction and appear most clearly in David Levinsky. The central conflict was between fidelity to his intellectual, social, and esthetic convictions and his capitulation to expedience and the lure of success. At one pole was his fiction, in which his esthetic taste, founded on the realism of Turgenev and Tolstoy, and his social and intellectual integrity are expressed. At the opposite pole was the Forward, through which he carried on a campaign of vulgarized "Americanization" of the immigrant masses and the vulgarization and finally abandonment of socialism. Cahan's career as a fiction writer in English and as the journalist who dominated the Forward are distinct, and indeed opposite, because each was a path antagonistic to the other.

What were the sources of the contradictions within Cahan?

He had extraordinary talent. This was recognized early, when Lincoln Steffens hired him as a reporter for the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1897. Steffens had just taken over this stodgy daily, dismissed most of the staff, and hired a group of young writers fresh out of college—among them Norman and Hutchins Hapgood—to present the news in terms of its warm human significance, rather than as dry fact or sensationalism. He wanted, Steffens writes, "writers," men who "could see and express the beauty in the mean streets of a hard, beautiful city." He was interested in the motives behind deeds. A murder, he thought, should not be reported as a "bloody hoked-up crime," but rather "as a tragedy," and he instructed Cahan to write in this way. Steffens was himself deeply interested in the ghetto, and at that time, as he writes, he was himself "almost a Jew, … and nailed a mezuza to my office door. I went to the synagogue on all the great Jewish holy days." He reports that Cahan was the catalyst of much serious discussion in the paper's editorial rooms on the nature of art and realism, and under Cahan's influence the paper reported on the Yiddish theater of the time. "Whether it was Cahan and the Ghetto or my encouragement," Steffens concludes, "the Commercial city room had ideals and flaunted them openly." Cahan's full-time occupation as a journalist in English ended in 1901, when he resigned from the Commercial after Steffens left for McClure's and muckraking.

When Cahan was asked to become editor of the Forward in 1902, he agreed on the condition that he be given absolute editorial control. He differed from colleagues like Morris Winchevsky and Michael Zametkin in his conception of a socialist paper for the immigrant masses, and in some respects he was probably right in trying to make the paper more palatable to the nonsocialists in order to bring them closer to socialism. We can perceive from our present perspective that he was right in eschewing the open and offensive flouting of Orthodox Judaism that was then common among socialists. Although it is generally acknowledged that theoretical analysis was not among his talents, he had a great talent for popularization. However, he carried a sound approach too far, from popular journalism to vulgarized journalism.

He undertook to publish material new to the Forward—stressing a vulgarized lower-middle-class view of women and marriage that verged on sensationalism. The classic instance is the Forward's method of promoting the Yiddish translation of August Bebel's Woman and Socialism in 1912 by advertising that it would throw light on "Why Were Women in the Past More Beautiful Than Today?"; tell why "Moslem Women Are Not Allowed to See a Doctor"; reveal that "Solomon Had a Thousand Wives and That Was No Sin"—all ending, "Read August Bebel's Book." It was said at the time that this type of advertising was stopped by the intervention of Bebel himself.

From the start Cahan rejected "Daitchmerish," a stilted Germanified form of Yiddish, and supervised the use of "Yiddish Yiddish" in a simple, "pleiner" (plain) Yiddish easily understandable by the immigrant masses. At the same time, he followed the current usage of incorporating incorrectly pronounced English words into Yiddish. Cahan composed a sentence to illustrate this, as he notes in his autobiography, ending "Ich vel scrobbin dem floor, klinen die vindes, un polishen dem stov." Those who loved the Yiddish language charged him with vulgarizing and corrupting it. Cahan was a popularizer in the negative sense; he pandered to the inferior tastes of the uneducated, instead of combining simplicity with linguistic and literary integrity. The noted Yiddish writer Joseph Opatashu says of Cahan that he "spit on our language." Cahan was the promoter of shund, an untranslatable Yiddish word whose approximate meaning is a fusion of vulgarity, sentimentality, and banality, in language and literature. After Cahan assumed his dictatorial editorship of the Forward, there were vain protests by some of his socialist colleagues against the vulgarization of socialism, which the paper was perpetuating, and many left the newspaper and Cahan's wing of the movement. Cahan notes in his autobiography that his "intelligent chaverim" charged him with "cheapening the Jewish word." To such complaints, Cahan made the telling reply: "My policies don't please you. But the circulation which they bring is welcome. I used to say this in a joking tone. But in my heart I knew it was really so."

The rising circulation and the profit-making that came with it did indeed induce a toleration of whatever Cahan did. When it was charged in debates over the paper's policies that he stooped to the masses instead of raising them up, he replied: "If you want to lift up a child from the ground, you must first bend down to him. If not, how will you reach him?" The trouble was, however, that he did not lift the child.

The fact was that in the end Cahan was closer to the Hearst press than to the more responsible wing of the American daily press. Moses Rischin leaves an erroneous impression in his article on Cahan's apprenticeship in journalism at the Commercial Advertiser. In a fully documented account of Cahan's relationship with the paper, Rischin concludes that his employment there was "a seminal period in his journalistic apprenticeship," and asserts at the end that Cahan "carried back with him to the Forward the refreshing liberal American spirit that animated that paper." One would never guess from Rischin's article that the Forward approximated the Hearst press more nearly than the Commercial. Several other writers with a more personal, intimate working knowledge of the Forward do not make this mistake. Melech Epstein, who worked for the Forward, observes that Steffens's training "stood Cahan in good stead [in] building the Forward into a powerful medium. It must also be noted that Joseph Pulitzer and William R. Hearst shared with Steffens in guiding the course of editor Cahan."

Cahan's Forward differed in essential respects from the Commercial. While Steffens sought writers and individuality of writing, Cahan expected something quite different from his staff. Lamed Shapiro, who worked on the Forward in 1907, has written that Cahan considered the editorial room his "shop," and used to say to his staff men: "I don't need any writers here, only 'hands.'" (David Levinsky, in the novel, several times alludes to the workers in his shop as "hands.") Cahan succeeded in alienating many, if not most, of the leading Yiddish writers of his time by his insulting behavior and insistence on promoting shund. Even a partial list of the men whom Cahan offended or forced out of the Forward reads like a roster of the outstanding figures of the East Side: Jacob Gordin, Michael Zametkin, Morris Winchevsky, Abraham Liessin, Isaac Hourwich, Morris Rosenfeld, Lamed Shapiro, Leon Kobrin, and Sh. Niger. So passionately did some Yiddish writers feel the culture-corrupting influence of Cahan to be that one of them, David Pinski, was led to exclaim that "the Forward is the greatest misfortune to befall the Jewish people since the destruction of Jerusalem."

Cahan exercised arbitrary personal judgment by simply excluding from mention, let alone review, certain Yiddish writers and intellectuals, so that a reader of the Forward alone would be unacquainted with leading figures and writers and movements in the Yiddish-speaking community. He did not tolerate dissent in the paper.

Furthermore, nothing could be farther from the "refreshing liberal American spirit" of the Commercial than the obsessive anticommunism that gripped Cahan and the Forward after 1922, and especially during the McCarthy period. Melech Epstein relates one reason why Cahan refused to employ him during the early years of World War II: Epstein, who had recently broken with the Communist party and the Morgen Freiheit, refused "to write pieces of 'inside information' on the workings of the Communist Party" and refused "to appear before the Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by Congressman Dies." On the other hand, Cahan readily employed informers against the Left.

Another phase of Cahan's inner conflict resulted in his gradual abandonment of socialism. In organizing and propagandizing for socialism in the earlier years of his career, his contributions to the unionization of the Yiddish-speaking workers were such that even his severest critics acknowledge that he was among the "pioneers." Paul Novick writes that "Ab. Cahan was one of the pioneers of the Jewish worker-movement in America. He took part in the founding of unions, socialist organizations and was a leader in the movement to found the Forward." Novick adds that, because the Forward was the sole labor daily in Yiddish until 1922 (when the Freiheit was established), it was indispensable for the labor and socialist movement; but Cahan converted it into a "necessary evil."

It is probable that Cahan's contributions were more positive in his earlier days, for it should be recalled that his participation in the socialist movement dates from shortly after his arrival in this country in 1882. But with the success of the Forward came the degeneration of his social thought. His socialism was so watered down in the last few decades of his life that it became imperceptible. Furthermore, his affinities in the labor movement early proved to be with the labor bureaucrats, just as was the case with Samuel Gompers, who was his ally. When the rank and file of the United Garment Workers refused to follow their leaders' settlement of a strike in 1913, the Forward supported the settlement, and irate workers broke windows at the Forward. In 1905 the typesetters on the Forward struck, and the impartial arbitrators concluded that the Forward used "capitalist methods" in fighting the strike. In 1909, 1917, and 1946 the staff writers of the Forward struck. There were occasions when a strike was reported on page one and an advertisement for scabs to break the same strike appeared on another page.

Philip Foner has succinctly stated the relation of the Forward to the labor movement:

In the opening years of the twentieth century the Forward had helped the Jewish workers in their struggles to organize unions and conduct strikes for better conditions. As a result, the majority of Jewish immigrants read the paper. Before many years had passed, however, the character of the Forward changed sharply. As its circulation soared and its revenue from advertisements increased, the Forward became a wealthy and powerful organization. The interests of the Forward were paramount to any consideration. Those trade unionists who "played ball" with the paper were assured of its powerful support. Those who dared to take issue with Abraham Cahan, head of the Forward Association, and editor of the paper, would be attacked as enemies of the labor movement.

Cahan's promotion of the Americanization of his readers was another source of inner conflict. His notion of the function of the Forward was to speed the Americanization of the uneducated Jewish immigrant masses. But his concept lacked perspective and was limited to striving toward the prevailing code of manners and Anglo-Saxon mores—the use of a handkerchief instead of the sleeve, proper table etiquette—and minimizing external differences from the "Americans," like not using hand gestures while talking.

That Cahan's actual communication through the Forward did not exceed this elementary level of acculturation is indicated by Bezalel Sherman. One year before Cahan died, Sherman wrote an article for the Yiddisher Kemfer on the occasion of Cahan's ninetieth birthday in which he says that Cahan taught the largely uneducated masses of the pre-1905 immigration their ABC's, but never carried them further once they learned the elements. Thus, Sherman continues, Cahan did not respond to the needs of the more highly educated, liberal, and revolutionary immigrants who came after the 1905 revolution. Cahan was in error, says Sherman, when he tried to dictate the taste and social attitudes of these newer but more sophisticated Yiddish-speaking immigrants, as he had done for the earlier immigration.

Cahan's efforts to Americanize these Jewish masses were replete with personal contradictions. On one hand, Cahan was convinced that Yiddish was a dying language. He repeatedly prophesied that it had five or ten years more to live. Furthermore, he opposed efforts at Jewish education because he was an assimilationist, believing that the best course for the Jews was to become indistinguishable from their non-Jewish fellow Americans. At the same time, hardly any Jewish leader of his time was more deeply rooted in Yiddish and Jewish life than Cahan. Considering Cahan's well-known contempt for the immigrant masses, it is not surprising that his method of weaning them away from Yiddish and Jewishness was to exploit the less admirable potentialities of the masses of men in the Hearstian manner of the yellow press, through its Yiddish counterpart, shund. There was an inner conflict between the Cahan who was most at home in the Yiddish-speaking milieu and the Cahan who willed himself to live on the conscious level as closely as possible to the Anglo-Saxon American ideal. The mass of contradictions that we have tried to set forth provides the key to the meaning of Cahan's fiction. In these stories he writes out a kind of spiritual autobiography, whose fullest expression comes in David Levinsky. These unresolved conflicts largely explain the pervasive tone of dissatisfaction, longing, "yearning" (a recurring word in his fiction), and frustration of his main characters.

Cahan quite consciously adopted a different attitude toward the literary and journalistic work written before he took over the Forward and his work on the Forward itself. He was a socialist and an artist of integrity in the former, and in the latter he was essentially an opportunist whose objective was to increase circulation. He subordinated his ambitions to his socialist conscience in his early years, as he explains in his autobiography. In those pre-Forward days, he writes, he "felt that there were limitations to what a socialist could write in the capitalist press. Frequently I would refuse to write on subjects editors tried to assign to me … because I thought it improper." He later realized that he was "naive" in turning these down, but his scruples indicate the strength of his integrity in those early years.

Moreover, he was uncompromising in his condemnation of the new sensational journalism—which he was later to emulate—of Pulitzer's New York World. He relates how in 1898 the Sunday editor of the World asked if he could reprint several chapters of his novel Yekl with a sensational layout, and Cahan refused on the advice of his literary mentor, W. D. Howells. When the World's managing editor asked Cahan to write regular feuilletons about life in the various New York immigrant sections, Cahan refused the flattering and lucrative offer. For it appeared, writes Cahan, "that he meant them to be cheap, sentimental stories, fancied up with 'local color.'" Cahan's attitude toward his literary work was similarly austere, and it persisted, but his journalistic standards deteriorated steadily. "I expected," he writes, "no financial rewards [gliken] from my literary career. One could earn money from writing stories, romances, or pieces of the cheaper sort, and that kind of literature I could not think of doing." And, he added, "today, only shund-writ- ers are rich." Although he promoted shund in the Forward, he was not himself a "shund-writer" in his own fiction.

Cahan's activity as a literary figure in English was largely concentrated in the decade between 1895 and 1905. In addition to several novels and short stories, his articles on Russian literary figures, on Zangwill, on Russian revolutionary politics, and on Russian Jews in this country appeared in leading national magazines. As a youth in Vilna, Cahan had started to read the great Russian authors of the century with enthusiasm and adopted their literary creed, as he understood it, in his theory of realism. He particularly admired Turgenev and Tolstoy, and delivered a lecture on "Realism" in 1889 that was published in the Workman's Advocate, the Socialist Labor party weekly, on April 6 of that year. Cahan had read Herbert Spencer, and he attempted to give his literary theory of realism a Spencerian philosophical foundation. More concretely, he discussed realism in terms of the socialist-oriented painting of Vassily Vereshchagin, a contemporary Russian who had exhibited in New York a year earlier, and most particularly in terms of the work of Leo Tolstoy, whom Cahan regarded as "the greatest of realists." Cahan looked upon Henry James as a realist, and evidence that he had read James is found rather quaintly in his repeated use in David Levinsky of James's revival of the Elizabethan phrase "as who should say."

But it was Howells to whom Cahan looked as the prime American advocate and exemplar of realism, as indeed he was. Because of Howells's devotion to the American reality, writes Cahan, his "pen makes a more dangerous assault on the present system than the most eloquent speeches of the most rabid 'foreign socialist.'" Cahan criticizes the then current view that "the beautiful" is the sole aim of art. An honest depiction of human reality is also art, and hence inevitably leads to social criticism. "The rottenness of capitalist society," he writes, "inevitably lends color to every work of realistic fiction."

Cahan was a devoted reader of Howells's work even before they became acquainted. Cahan was thrilled when Howells sought him out in 1892 as a union activist, a "walking delegate," and Howells was amazed and pleased to learn that Cahan had read his novels.

When Howells read Cahan's first published short story in English, "A Providential Match," in Short Stories for February 1895, he invited Cahan for a talk. Howells did not think the story was a "serious thing," he added, "but it convinces me that you can write. It is your duty to write," The story is a harsh depiction of Rouvke, an ignorant immigrant who works his way up from nothing to prosperity as a peddler, and thinks it time he enhanced his social position with marriage. After communication with his shtetl, a match is arranged with the daughter of his former wealthy employer, who is now bankrupt and accedes to the match out of desperation. Money for Hannah's journey to America is sent. When Rouvke and the shadchen (matchmaker) meet her boat on arrival, they learn to their fury and frustration that Hannah is engaged to a young student she met on the boat. The plot is amply filled with East Side lore.

One can understand why Howells urged Cahan to write: as a first effort the story is remarkably good. From the perspective of his entire work several features stand out. Already he has sounded the note of yearning, a theme that was to pervade his fiction. In his first few months in America, Rouvke yearns after his shtetl; after Hannah's father loses his money, the unmarried girl's "soul would be yearning and longing, she knew not after what." The syndrome of yearning and longing was in one form or another to afflict many of Cahan's fictional creations. Another recurrent feature is frustrated relations with women, as in Hannah's rejection of Rouvke.

One feature of this story he was to drop shortly afterward from his literary arsenal—his use of dialect. American literature is strewn with the Jewish stereotype who speaks a heavily accented, ungrammatical English, and the use of dialect in Cahan's story awakens the feelings aroused by the stereotype. Set in the context of Rouvke's vulgar ignorance and Cahan's palpable contempt for this type of character, some phrases attributed to Rouvke—"bishness is bishness"; "buy a teecket for a ball, veel you? A ball fi'sht clesh"; "I vant my hoondered an fifty dollar!"—verge on the anti-Semitic.

Cahan obeyed Howells's injunction to write, and after he finished a novel Howells read it and offered to see to its publication. Harper's Weekly rejected the manuscript because, the editor wrote, "the life of the Jewish East Side would not interest the American reader." Another rejection, Cahan recalls, offered the opinion that the magazine's men and women readers wanted romances about "richly-clothed cavaliers and women, about love that unfolds on the playing fields of golf. How then can they be interested in a story about a Jewish immigrant blacksmith who became a tailor here and his ignorant wife?" In a conversation, the editor of McClure's, who also rejected the novel, recommended that Cahan use his talent "to create art, by which he meant that I should write about 'beautiful things.'" Discouraged by these rejections, Cahan published his Yiddish translation of the novel in the Arbeiter Zeitung, which he was editing at the time (1895). However. Howells could finally report that Appleton and Company would publish the book, which appeared in 1896.

As in "A Providential Match," 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. His as yet insecure taste emerges from his discussion with Howells about the title of the book, as he recalls in his autobiography. Cahan suggested "Yankel the Yankee." Howells gently chided Cahan with the comment that such a title "would be appropriate for a vaudeville, but not for such a story as yours," and they finally agreed on Yekl.

Cahan's taste was insecure in another important respect: he makes Yekl talk in an extremely ugly dialect throughout the story, and, as was the case with the earlier Rouvke, Cahan's contempt for his character is patent. Leon Kobrin, the Yiddish short-story writer, who was working with Cahan on the Arbeiter Zeitung at the time, reports that Cahan would read the Yiddish translation of Yekl to him. Kobrin once remarked that the Jewish character was "a little caricatured," a criticism Cahan made Kobrin suffer for and for which he never forgave him. Cahan reports that while some reviewers praised his use of dialect because, they said, it reflected real life, the reviewer in the Commerical Advertiser expressed some impatience with the addition of Yiddish dialect to the already existing Irish and Negro dialects; he felt that though dialect may be necessary on occasion, it was not needed so constantly. Cahan then realized that the frequent use of dialect is "no more than a cheap bit of comedy." He then and there determined that he would "henceforth avoid such 'dialect' in my subsequent English stories."

As with other contemporary followers of Howells's realism, like Stephen Crane, the quality of much of Cahan's fiction—and this is especially true of Yekl—is naturalistic. Unlike Frank Norris, who was a devoted disciple of Zola's, Cahan did not read Zola or other naturalists, as far as we know. Perhaps Cahan's tough-minded attitude toward the ignorance and squalor and unpleasing realities of East Side life, together with his low opinion of the immigrant masses, led him by a logical process to naturalism. Yekl has been a blacksmith in the shtetl, but becomes a sweatshop worker in New York who emulates the "Yankees" by displaying his knowledge of boxing and baseball in conversation with his shopmates. Three years earlier he has left his wife, Giti, and their six-month-old son in Povodye, expecting to send them their steamship tickets when he has saved enough. Yekl, or Jake, as he now calls himself, lives the free life of the single man, associates with several women without letting them know he is married and without being especially attached to one, and loses his incentive to bring over his wife and child, though he sends them a monthly allowance. Cahan describes Yekl's visit to a dance hall on Suffolk Street and the several women who figure in his life; the story is replete with authentic details of ghetto life.

Yekl's course takes a sudden turn when he learns that his father has died. He borrows money for steamship tickets, and Giti and his son arrive several weeks later. When they meet, Jake's "swell attire" makes him look to Gitl like a poritz, or nobleman, while Jake's "heart sank at the sight of his wife's uncouth and un-American appearance." Jake is ashamed of his wife's Old World manners and Orthodoxy, her appearance, and her lack of English. The couple follow the East Side practice of taking in a boarder, Bernstein, Jake's shopmate, "a rabbinical-looking man" and a reader of English books, to help pay the rent. Jake has not told his several girl friends that he is married, but when one of them, the perfumed Mamie Fein, comes to visit him after his long absence, she discovers this fact. Giti is thrown into doubt about her husband's fidelity. For his part, Jake finds Giti less and less tolerable, and Mamie more attractive. In a fit of jealousy another former girl friend of Jake's informs Gitl of her husband's infatuation with Mamie.

Gitl and Jake are divorced. Gitl marries the quiet Bernstein, and they open a grocery story with the divorce settlement from Jake. On his way to City Hall to marry Mamie, Jake feels that "he had emerged, after the rabbinical divorce, from the rabbi's house the victim of an ignominious defeat." His own future now "loomed dark and impenetrable." Life with Mamie is not really what he wants. "Each time the car came to a halt he wished the pause could be prolonged indefinitely; and when it resumed its progress, the violent lurch it gave was accompanied by a corresponding sensation in his heart."

The central character's frustrating relation with women and his vulgarized Americanization that results in unhappiness for him—Cahan was setting forth themes here that were to become more and more pronounced as his work matured. And herein lies one of the main contradictions of Cahan's life and work: Cahan, the Americanizer of the ghetto, projected the frustrations and unhappiness that issue from Americanization.

Although Yekl earned little money for Cahan, it did immediately project him onto the American literary scene. While it was generally reviewed favorably, the positive response was not unanimous. Nancy Huston Banks's review in The Bookman notes that the book has been "unreservedly praised" by the best critics, but she is dubious about the wisdom of publishing such a work. While granting that the story is "realism in the narrowest sense of the term," the book reveals "not a gleam of spirituality, unselfishness, or nobility.… It is a hideous showing, and repels the reader." Does Cahan wish the reader to believe, she asks, that the characters and ghetto mode of life depicted in the work "are truly representative of his race?" If this is so, "was it wise to develop the pictures?… Are such books ever worth while?… are they literature?" This reviewer was no doubt reflecting the conventional genteel conception of literature that led to rejection of the manuscript by several editors. But not entirely. For as we have seen, Cahan later realized that his taste was not yet secure, and the reviewer's observations were therefore not altogether lacking in penetration.

But Howells's review jointly of Cahan's Yekl and Stephen Crane's George's Mother in the Sunday, July 26, 1896, edition of the New York World, under the title "NEW YORK LOW LIFE IN FICTION," literally catapulted Cahan into public attention, for the review appeared on posters all over the city, advertising in its text that Howells had discovered a great new writer. The headline over the reat Novelist Hails Abraham Cahan, the Author of 'Yekl' as a New Star of Realism, and Says That He and Stephen Crane Have Drawn the Truest Pictures of East Side Life." Howells calls the story "intensely realistic." Cahan's "sense of character is as broad as his sense of human nature is subtle and deep," and he will "do honor to American letters.… He sees things with American eyes, and he brings in aid of his vision the far and rich perceptions of his Hebraic race." Howells sees in the book "its promise of future work."

The review stimulated great interest in Cahan on the part of the public and the press. A long biographical article was published in the Boston Sunday Post on September 27, 1896. In addition, Cahan came to know Stephen Crane. On September 22, 1896, a dinner in honor of three young "realists," Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Abraham Cahan, was given at the Lanthorn Club, a Bohemian group of artists and writers.

The temptation for Cahan to adopt the vocation of American writer must have been very strong. But his roots in the Jewish community were too deep and his devotion to socialism too intense at the time to permit him to sever his ties with Yiddish journalism. As we have mentioned, in 1897 he was one of the founders and an editor of the Forward (Forverts), but he resigned a few months later because his colleagues would not accept his proposals for popularization of the paper. The next five years, until he assumed the autocratic editorship of the paper, were consumed in writing essays and short stories in English. He continued to write short stories until 1901, and in 1905 he published a long novel, The White Terror and the Red.

By 1898 Cahan had five more short stories, several already published, for a second volume of fiction, The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto. In addition to "A Providential Match," the group included "A Sweatshop Romance," which the eager editor of Short Stories published in the June 1895 issue. The scene is a vividly etched picture of a subcontractor's sweatshop in his tenement apartment. Typical immigrants people the scene: Leizer Lipman, the ruthlessly aspiring boss subcontractor; his wife, Zlate, shrewish and ridiculously pretentious; the operator Heyman, miserly, clinging to his job in fear of his boss's displeasure; the girl he loves, Beile, the young finisher who awaits his proposal of marriage; David, the baster, also in love with Beile. When Zlate orders Beile to go to the store for soda for some visitors Zlate wishes to impress, David urges Beile not to do the personal errand. Zlate fires Beile without demur from Heyman, who is loath to risk his job; and David walks out with Beile. Heyman is ashamed and does not attempt to see Beile for two weeks. When he does approach her house, he hears a wedding celebration in progress—the wedding of Beile and David. The story serves to highlight the dehumanizing and oppressive sweatshop conditions. But the stamp of the Cahan outlook is on Heyman's frustrated love for Beile.

The milieu of the immigrant Russian Jewish intellectual in which Cahan moved was first put in his fiction in "Circumstances," which Cosmopolitan published in April 1897. Tanya, the daughter of a Jewish merchant and Hebrew writer from Kiev, and her husband, Boris, who has studied law at a Russian university, live in hardship because Boris earns a pittance in a button factory and refuses to allow Tanya to work. To make ends meet, especially during the dreaded "slack season," Tanya reluctantly agrees to take in their mutual friend Dalsky, a medical student and English teacher, as a boarder. After a few months Tanya becomes increasingly wearied of her work-sodden husband and attracted to the lively young student, until she succumbs to love for Dalsky. First the atmosphere of irritation between husband and wife, and then small hints in her behavior lead Dalsky to realize her feelings for him, and he invents a reason to move. Tanya, finding life with Boris intolerable, leaves him and takes a job as a sewing-machine operator. Boris is heartbroken, and everything ends quite unhappily. Once more, frustrated love is the theme, and the hard life of intellectual immigrants unable to pursue their professions in the new land is depicted.

Cahan returned to the life of the uneducated immigrant workers in "A Ghetto Wedding," which appeared in the Atlantic in February 1898. Goldy and Nathan, living in the Grand Street area, wish to marry, but have not saved enough out of their pitiably meager earnings in the shop for the "respectable wedding" Goldy insists upon. After many delays, Goldy suggests that they spend all their money on a "respectable wedding" as a device to get an appropriately rich return in presents which will furnish them with money for their married life. Unfortunately the wedding occurs during a period of severe unemployment. Very few of the invited guests come because they cannot afford presents, and very few presents arrive. Goldy and Nathan walk home to their barren rooms. On the way home they are harassed by anti-Semitic hooligans; Goldy restrains Nathan from fighting back and they go home, drawn more closely together by the event, and warmly happy in each other. While love itself is not frustrated in this story, Cahan cannot avoid the element of frustration, which applies in this instance to their wedding plans.

The story was so well liked by Walter H. Page, editor of the Atlantic, that he asked Cahan for another story. The novella that Cahan submitted, "The Imported Bridegroom," was too long for the magazine, but was published as the title story of a collection of his short stories. This novella was Cahan's most mature work so far. The range of material was broader, and the contradictions in Cahan's views and feelings were becoming more distinct. His themes exhibit how with seeming inevitability desired aims are frustrated.

Asriel Stroon has amassed a fortune in bakeries and real estate. Now in retirement thirty-five years after his arrival in this country from the shtetl of Pravly, he yearns to see the old home again and experiences a religious reawakening, partly out of fear of retribution for his sins after death. He goes to Europe to renew the link with his old home. His daughter, Flora, is a superficially educated, Americanized girl who aspires to marry a doctor, an alliance most desired by socially ambitious girls. In his hometown, which has changed little in the interim, Asriel refreshes his memories of people and the old life, and he realizes that he could buy up the town. In the synagogue he outbids Reb Lippe, the richest man in town, in the auction for the reading of the Peutateuch, but Reb Lippe is called nevertheless. Asriel makes a shocking scene in the synagogue to claim his right to the reading, but is prevailed upon to yield and apologize. That evening, Shaya, a talmudic prodigy, is to be claimed by Rep Lippe for his daughter, but Asriel's far more alluring bid, including an income for life in America, wins Shaya for Asriel's daughter, Flora.

Before presenting Shaya to Flora, Asriel bedecks Shaya in elegant American clothes. But Flora will not hear of accepting Shaya, brilliant as he may be in talmudic learning. She is determined to marry a doctor, certainly not an Orthodox rabbi. She consents to tolerate Shaya's presence in the household, however, and Asriel does not give up hope. After a few months Flora discovers that Shaya has been bootlegging secular learning at the Astor Library, thanks to the stimulus of the English teacher hired by Asriel. She proposes to Shaya that if he will study medicine and become a doctor, she will marry him, to which he agrees.

Asriel is overjoyed that Flora will have Shaya, but of course he is ignorant of the real state of affairs. Shaya not only studies profane subjects, but abandons his faith and violates the dietary laws—he is an appikoros, a nonbeliever. When Asriel learns the truth he forbids Flora to marry Shaya. But she now cannot live without him. They are married in a civil marriage; then Asriel capitulates and the pair are married in a Jewish wedding ceremony. Asriel gives Flora half his property and sells the rest, marries his housekeeper, and goes to Jerusalem to end his days.

But Flora soon faces an unhappy truth. Her husband is completely absorbed in his intellectual activities. He is now a member of a discussion group that is studying Auguste Comte. Flora accompanies him, but comes to realize that she is alien to these men and their interests. The scene

impressed her as the haunt of queer individuals, meeting for some sinister purpose. It was anything but the world of intellectual and physical elegance into which she had dreamed to be introduced by marriage to a doctor. Any society of "custom peddlers" was better dressed than these men.… She had a sense of having been kidnapped into the den of some terrible creatures, and felt like crying for help.… A nightmare of desolation and jealousy choked her … of the whole excited crowd, and of Shaya's entire future from which she seemed excluded.

Cahan's basic themes are developed in the story. Asriel's yearning and longing for the familiar and essentially congenial life of the old country reflect one form of Cahan's perpetual dissatisfaction with the present, and were probably experienced also by the author. The theme of frustration takes several forms in this story, in which Americanization turns out to be a disillusioning experience. Asriel's desire to unite his daughter to a learned talmudist and to have a son-in-law to say kaddish for his memory are frustrated by Shaya's Americanization. And Flora's Americanized longings for a doctor husband, and the respectable, exalted life she envisions as its concomitant, are thwarted by her own actions. Despite Cahan's own efforts in behalf of Americanization of the immigrant masses, his own deep roots in Yiddish life and his Russian childhood aroused in him ambivalent feelings toward Americanization, and all that it implied. In "The Imported Bridegroom," both the results of Americanization as they affect Asriel and Flora and the tribulations entailed by the transition are exposed.

Between publication of "The Imported Bridegroom" and 1901 Cahan published half a dozen stories which have not been reprinted or collected. In "The Apostate of Chego-Chegg," (Century, November 1899) Cahan continues to explore the theme of apostasy that was opened in the earlier story. The Jewish woman Michalina is married to a Polish Christian immigrant, Wincas, and is a meshumedeste, a convert to her husband's faith. Cahan describes the horror with which the Jews traditionally look upon apostasy: "Years of religious persecution and enforced clannishness had taught them to look upon the Jew who deserts his faith with a horror and loathing which the Gentile brain could not conceive." It was even worse than atheism: "Atheism would have been a malady; shmad (conversion to a Gentile creed) was far worse than death."

Michalina and her husband live in a Long Island village whose name, "Chego-Chegg," was bestowed by a politician as the closest approximation he could make to the Polish name of the village. Michalina expresses various forms of yearning: "She was yearning for her Gentile husband, and their common birthplace, and she was yearning for her father's house and her Jewish past." In the opening of the story Cahan thus enunciates the contradictions by which his characters (and he himself?) are riven, longing for the old home while in America, longing for the Jewish traditional past while repudiating it in practice. Near Michalina is a Jewish town, which her longing directs her to despite its rejection of her. She bears a daughter, but she is mocked by her Gentile townswomen as the "Jew woman."

Rabbi Nehemiah of the Jewish town had been horrified by Michalina's conversion earlier, but he is now a peddler, an atheist "cured of my idiocy." They now share contempt for the Jewish community. Nehemiah complains: "The one thing that gives me pain is this: The same fellows who used to break my bones for preaching religion now beat me because I expose its idiocies." America, he adds, wipes out all distinctions: "All are noblemen here, and all are brothers." Michalina longs for the devout Jewish world that he brings close to her, and clings to him as a "fellow-outcast"—she cannot resolve her contradictory longings. She persuades her husband to give up his farm and move closer to the Jewish town; she does her shopping there. Nehemiah agitates in the town for assimilation, while Michalina condemns herself for her doomed soul and for her apostasy.

Nehemiah tells her that in the eyes of the Talmud her marriage to a non-Jew is nonexistent. A venerable rabbi on the East Side whom she consults advises her that if she is genuinely repentant and properly marries a Jew, she will be that man's wife. The reformed Michalina, now called by the Jewish name of Rieva, is welcomed in the Jewish town; she goes through the Jewish marriage ceremony with Nehemiah, and they are about to leave for New York and the boat to Europe when Wincas appears. Michalina is torn between her Jewish roots and her love for Wincas, and she chooses the latter. "I know that I am doomed to have no rest," she cries, "either in this world or the other, but I cannot leave him—I cannot." Is Cahan torn between his Jewish roots and his American assimilationism, unsettled by his unquiet, unresolved acceptance of the latter?

His next story was free of these concerns. "Rabbi Eliezer's Christmas," published in the December 1899 issue of Scribner's, is, as Cahan said, "a light, humorous story." Pious old Eliezer had been a sopher (a Pentateuch scribe) in the old country, but has had to resort to push-cart peddling in New York. During the pre-Christmas period, Miss Bemis, headworker of the College Settlement, and the philanthropic Miss Colton notice Eliezer during their tour of "deserving cases," and learn from him that with a few dollars he could bring his stock up to standard. Miss Bemis gives him a twenty-dollar bill. His neighboring peddlers tease and terrify him by suggesting that the money is a Christmas gift. After much soul-searching, Eliezer decides to return the money to the settlement worker. Miss Bemis assures him that the money was not a Christmas present, suggesting that he return the money to her for presentation to him later as "a fresh present." While he is reassured that he has not sinned, he is torn with anxiety as to whether Miss Bemis will really give him the money. Cahan exhibits considerable depth of sympathy for the displaced, lonely, unhappy old man, whose skill in fine lettering is obsolete in technologically advanced America. The pathos of the story gives it deeper meaning than Cahan's characterization of it as "light, humorous" would indicate.

Perhaps it was in response to Howells's remark in his review of The Imported Bridegroom—"It will be interesting to see whether Mr. Cahan will pass beyond his present environment into a larger American world"—that Cahan attempted several non-Jewish stories in the next few years. As if to proceed by gradual steps, these stories deal with the life of non-Jewish immigrants. But after this first step he did not explore the American non-Jewish milieu any further. These short stories are less interesting than his others, and it is apparent that he was at his best in writing of the world that he knew to the marrow.

Frustrated love continues to play its part in the non-Jewish stories. "A Marriage by Proxy," perhaps the least interesting of his tales, published in Everybody's Magazine for December 1900, is concerned with Italian immigrant life. An immigrant Italian barber sends his brother to Italy to marry a girl by proxy and to bring her to New York. The girl, Philomena, finds the barber not to her liking and wants to return to Italy, but her landlady advises her to go to the "wine-lady" for advice. The "wine-lady" shrewdly awakens jealousy in Philomena by making her believe that her husband will marry another girl, and Philomena returns to her husband and is contented.

In a second story, "Dumitru and Sigrid," published in Cosmopolitan in March 1901, Romanian Dumitru and Swedish Sigrid are immigrants awaiting clearance at Castle Garden, the admissions depot at that time. Neither knows the other's language, but they communicate through dictionaries, and Dumitru falls in love with Sigrid. She is taken away by a relative, and for several years, while he gains a foothold in American life, Dumitru nurses his love for her. Walking in the uptown East Side one day, he sees Sigrid on the steps of a tenement building with a baby in her lap. "Her maidenly comeliness of yore was gone only to make room for the good looks and the ripe loveliness of young motherhood." As they converse, her husband comes out. She introduces him to Dumitru and says: "'Dis is de gentleman vat mashed me in Castle Garden.'… Husband and wife smiled as at a good joke." Dumitru finds the little family of three "equally uninteresting and incomprehensible to him, and he hastened to take his departure." The long-held illusion is shattered.

The third story with a non-Jewish background, "Tzinchadzi of the Catskills," published in the Atlantic for August 1901, is important in Cahan's development because it brings into explicit focus the connection between his perpetual yearning and the failure of Americanization to set his mind at peace. The first-person narrator encounters a Circassian nobleman in the Catskills, and they chat in Russian. Tzinchadzi, the Georgian nobleman, still wears his native dress. He tells his story: after he lost his beloved to a rival in the Caucasus, he was persuaded by the American consul at Batum to ride a horse at the World's Fair in Chicago. Later he sold Caucasian goods, and "a Jew" had suggested selling them in the Catskills. He is unhappy; he makes plenty of money, but that cannot bring back his lost beloved or the Caucasus.

Six years later the narrator meets him in New York. He is dressed in the American style; his name is now Jones; he has a good business and owns real estate. Then follows a passage that casts revealing light on Cahan and his work:

"Shall I tell you the real truth?" he asked.… "I have money and I have friends, but you want to know whether I am happy, and that I am not, sir. Why? Because I yearn neither for my country nor for Zelaya, nor for anything else. I have thought it all out, and I have come to the conclusion that a man's heart cannot be happy unless it has somebody or something to yearn for. Do you remember how my soul was while we were in the Catskills? Well, there was a wound in me at that time, and the wound rankled with bitters mixed with sweets. Yes, sir. My heart ached, but its pain was pleasure, whereas now—alas! I have nothing, nothing!… It amounts to this: I do enjoy life; only I am yearning for—what shall I call it?" "For your old yearnings," I was tempted to prompt him.… He finally said, … "if you want to think of a happy man, think of Tzinchadzi of the Catskills, not of Jones of New York."

In other words, the desired mode of life for Cahan does not consist in a settled contentment, but rather in unresolved conflict. His ambivalence toward traditional Jewish life, assimilation, and Americanization would thus appear to be what at bottom he desired. A decisive break with one or the other would render life stale and unprofitable. For him, the essence of life was indeed this tension.

The successful but lonely and yearning manufacturer, who was to receive fullest treatment in David Levinsky, is prefigured by Aaron Zalkin in "The Daughter of Reb Avrom Leib," published in Cosmopolitan in May 1900. After twenty years in business, the prosperous, nonreligious, unmarried Zalkin has "a great feeling of loneliness" and begins to "yearn for the Jewish quarter, his old home." He goes to an East Side synagogue, where his attention is caught by Sophie, the daughter of the cantor Reb Avrom Leib; Leib is also a composer whose work consists of "Hebraized snatches of popular operas and recent street music." Drawn by Sophie, Zalkin comes often to the synagogue and Anally sends a shadchen to Reb Avrom. Zalkin impresses Reb Avrom with his talmudic learning and wins him over. Sophie and Zalkin are betrothed, but she is unresponsive and confesses that she is ambivalent about the marriage. He breaks off the engagement, but after a time he renews his suit and they are engaged again. Sophie is still indifferent, and again the engagement is broken.

Meanwhile, Reb Avrom dies; his final wish is that Sophie be reunited with Zalkin, who returns to the synagogue on Yom Kippur in longing for her. In common sorrow at the death of Reb Avrom, whom Zalkin has loved, Sophie gladly agrees to marry him. Yes, she will love Zalkin—and, "as if afraid lest morning might bring better counsel, she hastened to find herself by adding, with a tremor in her voice: 'I swear by my father I will.'" Ever distrustful of a satisfactory outcome for a love relationship, Cahan cannot help but introduce a nagging element of doubt in this "happy ending."

Cahan's fiction met with a mixed reception. W. D. Howells continued to welcome Cahan's work as it appeared. In a review of The Imported Bridegroom, Howells places Cahan among the regional realists, like Mary E. Wilkins Freeman of New England. "No American fiction of the year," writes Howells, "merits recognition more than this Russian's stories of Yiddish life, which are so entirely of our time and place, and so foreign to our race and civilization." Howells seems to me to be stretching the point when he calls Cahan a "humourist"; "ironist" would perhaps be closer. Cahan, he continues, "does not spare the sordid and uncouth aspects of the character whose pathos he so tenderly reveals.… Of a Jew, who is also a Russian, what artistic triumph may not we expect?" The severest criticism, however, issued from the American Jewish press. Cahan reports in his autobiography how the American Israelite was indignant at "The Apostate of Chego-Chegg" because, they held, the story was mistaken in asserting that marriage with a non-Jew is not recognized by Judaism. The paper asserts that Jewish law does not teach one to violate the law of the land, and says that "Cahan is prepared to sell the Jews for the price given him for a story." Cahan notes that "the 'Yahudim' are forever afraid that one might say they were not loyal Americans." He insists that his story is accurate, for he has conferred with two Orthodox rabbis. The established German Jews, the "Yahudim," he concludes, have "denied the law "in the interests of Judaism.'"

Complaints by the Yahudim against both fiction and descriptive stories about immigrant East Side life were frequent. They were embarrassed and even a little apprehensive that the emphatic differences between the Jewish immigrants and the Americans, of whom they considered themselves an inseparable part, might jeopardize their status and might even arouse anti-Semitism. The Reverend Rudolph Grossman, a Reform rabbi, charges in the American Hebrew of March 18, 1892, that "nothing has contributed so much toward keeping alive the old prejudices against the Jew, as these productions of fiction that place them before the reader, not only in the most unfavorable but in the most ludicrous and false light." It turns out, however, that the author includes among these "caricatures" articles "that represent the Jews of New York as observing the ceremonies and superstitions of the ghetto.… These garbled and misleading accounts of the Jew and Judaism … foster not only ignorance but prejudice and hatred." Apparently wishing the East Side ghetto out of existence, or else believing it only decent that one should be quiet about it, the rabbi points out that the Jew—that is, the assimilated German Jew—is different "in one respect only … from the generality of men—in his religion." To him, and to so many German Jews, the East European Jew of the ghetto was no more a valid subject for literature than the caricature and stereotype.

Displeasure of the Yahudim at Lincoln Steffens's feature stories in the New York Post about Orthodox East Side Jews was so great that in a letter to the editor one indignant "socially prominent Jewish lady" decried the great amount of space given "to the ridiculous performances of the ignorant, foreign East Side Jews and none to the uptown Hebrews." After Steffens called on her and defended his stories, she tried to get him fired. Since the paper was at the time campaigning against exclusion of Jews from clubs, the Jews could hardly insist on the firing.

Cahan's stories especially drew protest from the Yahudim. The Bookman came to Cahan's defense editorially: "To judge from the attitudes assumed by some of the Jewish newspapers, any attempt by a member of that race to depict the life of the Ghetto in a frankly realistic manner constitutes an offence only slightly less heinous than treason." Zangwill's and Cahan's work were targets of this protest, and a boycott of their works was threatened. The American Israelite is quoted as being

convinced that this fellow Cahan has intentionally exaggerated what is worst among his own class of people. A man who is capable of painting the people from whom he comes in such vile colours would be enough of a scoundrel to lie about them for the sake of a few dollars.… It is infinitely better for Jews to buy books and other publications which advocate their cause, than to give through vulgar curiosity financial support and encouragement to writers and publishers who do harm to the cause of Judaism and to the Jews.

The Bookman editorially replies that such criticism increases the market value of Cahan's work and observes that Cahan is far too much the genuine artist and student of human life to allow such criticisms to inhibit him from further work.

These comments prompted one daughter of the Sephardic aristocracy, Annie Nathan Meyer, a cousin of Emma Lazarus's and a founder of Barnard College, to write her views; while rejecting the threat of boycott and personal abuse, she complains that "the Americanized Hebrew is denied in toto the luxury of pointing to any literature that pretends to describe him seriously." The exotic ghetto Jew is more interesting to the non-Jewish reader "than the Talmudically ignorant Americanized Hebrew," who is in turn getting tired of seeing these exotic Jews in print. She notes that in a world of discrimination, persecution, and anti-Semitism, "the Jew is asking himself is it wise, is it expedient, to hold up in literature all that is foreign, all that is strange, all that is exceptional in the Jew?" Is it any wonder that the Jew has a thin skin, she concludes?

In the same issue Martin B. Ellis replies to the Jews who threaten to boycott Cahan's stories, relating that he himself sees much beauty in the religious observances and way of life in the ghetto, while the uptown Jews seem not unlike the Christians. "The rich, Philistine, semi-Christianized Jews of the uptown or Golden Ghetto," he writes,"—I believed they are ashamed of Israel.… He is trying to become just like everybody else."

The bitter attacks by the Yahudim must have reinforced Cahan's intention to write a novel about a Russian immigrant that would, for one thing, show the deep gulf between the East Side Jews and their prosperous uptown German Jewish brethren. The theme he chose was the barriers placed in the way of intermarriage between children of the two groups. Cahan must have discussed this novel, The Chasm, at some length with The Bookman's editor, who mentions that it is "nearly finished." The Chasm promised to be an epic of the post-1882 Russian immigration: it would show how the immigrant life of the time was a superimposition of second-century life on the nineteenth; would maintain that the struggle to abolish the sweatshop was an internal Jewish class struggle between the Jewish workers and Jewish bosses; and would point out the deep incompatibility between the two Jewish communities of New York. The editor notes that although Cahan grants the material aid bestowed upon the immigrants by the uptown Jews, their cultural differences "explained the half-veiled superciliousness, the unspoken animosity" of the uptown Jews. The irony of this is that Cahan himself was guilty of a like condescension toward the immigrant masses whom he was ostensibly raising up.

As it turned out, The Chasm was never finished. Instead, Cahan published a long novel, The White Terror and the Red (1905), which does not deal with the subjective themes that run through his other fiction. There is not yearning love—only militant revolutionary activity. The novel is, in fact, a fictionalized account of the related themes of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Jewish participation in it, and the counterrevolutionary pogroms that figured in Cahan's article "Jewish Massacres and the Revolutionary Movement in Russia," in the North American Review for July 1903.

The bulk of the revolutionary army is made up of Gentiles [he writes], not of Jews.… But it is true that the Jews have more than their quota among the men and women who defy the isolated prison-cell and the gallows in their devotion to the cause of liberty; … they take an exceptionally active part in the dissemination of Western ideas; and this is another reason why an anti-Jewish outbreak, on the eve of the proposed May demonstrations, would have been an advantage to the government in troublesome times like those. When the news of the Kishineff horrors spread, and the panic-stricken Jews of other towns begged the authorities to protect them in case of an anti-Semitic attack, they were given to understand, through their "official" rabbis, that full protection would be guaranteed to them provided they undertook to prevail upon the revolutionists of their faith to stay away from the prospective demonstration. The result was that in several cities the May parade was abandoned.

While the novel dramatizes these themes, as well as the revolutionary movement in general, it also adds in analytic detail attitudes of the Jews to the revolutionary movement and to their Jewish identity, and those of the revolutionaries to the Jews. The writing, though competent, is uninspired and lacks the vitality of his other fiction. It is not surprising that the book has almost completely dropped from attention. From the historical point of view, however, it is of interest in its depiction of the nihilistic attitude of the Jewish revolutionaries to their Jewishness and to their fellow Jews.

Cahan had experienced some of these attitudes in 1891, when he went to Zurich as delegate from the United Hebrew Trades to the Second Congress of the Second International. He insisted upon placing a resolution about anti-Semitism on the agenda. He discovered considerable antagonism to his proposal, for the current agitation against Jewish bankers—especially the Rothschilds—was popular on class grounds and was reinforced by traditional anti-Semitism. Furthermore, there was a disproportion of Jews among the socialist leaders. An unqualified condemnation of anti-Semitism, it was feared, might tend to confirm the identification of Jews and socialists that anti-Semites insisted upon (as Chief Rabbi Dreyfus of Brussels tried without success to convince Cahan). Austrian socialist leader Viktor Adler tried to dissuade Cahan from pressing the resolution with the argument that it would lead the anti-Semites to call the congress a Jewish affair. But Cahan was adamant, and was shocked when the best that the congress could come up with was a condemnation of both anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism; then it passed on to the next order of business because the congress was not considered to be the proper place for consideration of the question. The ambiguous attitude toward anti-Semites in the context of the Russian revolutionary movement among both Jews and non-Jews is brought out in the novel in connection with the pogroms.

The locus of the novel is Russia of the 1870s and early 1880s. The activity centers about the love story of a young nobleman, Pavel Boulatoff, a leader of the revolutionary movement, and Clara Yavner, a Jew and leading revolutionary activist. Other significant Jewish figures are Clara's cousin, Volodia, an educated assimilationist; Elkins, "an underfed Jewish youth, with an anaemic chalky face and a cold intelligent look," a revolutionary who finally becomes a Jewish nationalist after disillusionment with his comrades' attitude toward the Jews; Makar, a brilliant medical student and talmudic scholar who is a revolutionary. The plot carries these characters through their interactions in revolutionary activity. At the end Pavel and Clara are married, and all but Volodia are thrown in the tsarist jail during the repression that follows the assassination of the tsar, Alexander II, in 1881.

Clara moves from an initial indifference to the Jewish question, to a disturbed feeling that all is not well with her comrades' attitude after she experiences a pogrom. Early in the story Cahan shows that her conceptions about the peasants are "so many literary images" and are quite distinct from the world of "Jewish realities." Thus when she discusses the hanging of four Jewish revolutionaries with her educated, assimilated, bourgeois cousin, Volodia, he complains that the execution does the Jewish people no good. Clara replies: "What else would you have Jews do? Roll on feather-beds and collect usury? Would that do 'the Jewish people' good?" Volodia replies: "You talk like an anti-Semite, Clara." Clara answers that she is proud of the four and then challenges him: "Since when have you been a champion of 'the Jewish people'—you who have taught me to keep away from everything Jewish, you who are shocked by the very sound of Yiddish, by the very sight of a wig or a pair of sidelocks; you who are continually boasting of the Gentiles you are chumming with; you who would give all the Jews in the world for one handshake of a Christian?" Volodia replies that his attitude toward Yiddish and earlocks harms no one. "If all Jews dropped their antediluvian ways and became assimilated with the Russian population half of the unfortunate Jewish question would be solved."

Clara chides Volodia for "worrying over the Jewish question" at a time when the "whole country is choking for breath." She further taunts him, as an assimilationist, on his interest in the question. Volodia insists that Jews have a right to protest because they are the target of "unnatural oppression." Clara replies that Jews should participate in the struggle, since they will participate in the ensuing freedom from all oppression. The argument goes back and forth, Clara charging Volodia with total indifference to the Jews and insisting that, when the revolutionaries have succeeded, "there won't be any such thing as a Jewish, Polish or Hottentot question." Volodia replies that Clara's "golden mist of that glorious future" does not negate enforcement of equal rights in the present. The argument ends in an unfriendly impasse.

This exchange has a certain irony, for each represents one side of Cahan's own views: he was both an assimilationist and a socialist. His assimilationism, though, was troubled by his actual immersion in the Yiddish-speaking community, and his socialism included a specific concern for the Jewish question (although many of his comrades, both nationally and internationally, believed with Clara that Jewish issues would automatically be resolved with the victory of socialism).

Volodia's dilemma is carried further. When he visits a Russian princess, he manifests great love for Russia and its literature. She is both surprised and bored—"I had an idea," she says, "Hebrews were only interested in money matters"—and dismisses him. He agonizes over this rebuff and this challenge to his "right" to love "Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoyevski." Volodia's father, an enlightened Jew who is learned in both secular and talmudic thought, calms him with the thought that the princess, a "penniless spendthrift," is like a pig who knows only the backyard of a mansion: it is quite natural that "she should mistake a handful of usurers for the whole Jewish population." A "Gentile reprobate" would have no occasion to go to any other kind of Jew because the latter has no money to lend.

As for Clara, she comes to the realization at last—after the pogroms have begun, and her party shows insensitivity at best and anti-Semitism to the slaughter and persecution of the Jews at worst—that all is not well on the Jewish issue among her comrades. She is now married to Pavel. An issue of the Will of the People, the organ of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will party), comments on the anti-Jewish riots in a manner "as puerile as it was heartless." Clara resents this position. "As long as it does not concern the Jews they have all the human sympathy and tact in the world.… The moment there is a Jew in the case they become cruel, short-sighted and stupid—everything that is bad and ridiculous." Even of her husband, she thinks to herself that "he is a Gentile after all.… There is a strain of anti-Semitism in the best of them." Her conclusion is that she must endure.

For Pavel, his love for Clara has given the problem immediacy. On one hand, he shares the view of his party that if the peasants "can attack Jewish usurers, I don't see why they could not turn upon the government some day." But he feels uneasy and guilty about his view in relation to Clara, for he knows on reflection that the Jewish poor and workers are the targets of the pogroms at the hands of those whom his party aims to liberate. At the same time, the cult of the Russian peasant projects him under a "golden halo," so that "if the Russian masses were rioting, could there be a better indication of a revolutionary awakening? And if the victims of these riots happened to be Jews, then the Jews were evidently enemies of the people."

In a proclamation the revolutionary party has at first joined the Jews with the tsar and landlords as enemies of the people, but protests by both Jews and non-Jews have forced withdrawal of the proclamation. Despite the generally unsympathetic attitude of the nihilists toward the Jews, writes Cahan, "so far as the higher strata of the movement were concerned, the personal relations between Jew and Gentile were not affected by this circumstance in the slightest degree." Most Jewish comrades, moreover, greet the pogroms as "a popular revolutionary protest." Makar, the gifted student and erstwhile talmudic scholar, sees nothing new in persecution of the Jews: "One might as well stay away from the Will of the People" he says, "because, forsooth, Jews were burned by Gentiles in the 15th century." Clara is not at this stage occupied with the threat to Jews in general, but concerned for the safety of her parents in Miroslav, her hometown. She has gone there to be with them, and the loving Pavel ardently hopes for her sake that the Jews of Miroslav will be spared. Moreover, Pavel realizes that his uncle, who is governor of the province, might be able to stop the pogrom if he wishes, and since "he is in league with his fellow-fleecers, the Jewish usurers, … he simply cannot afford an anti-Jewish demonstration, the old bribe-taker."

The pogrom does take place after the peasants are incited by false rumors. Pavel, now in Miroslav, observes the whipping up of a pogrom spirit, and he is inspired by the thought of the French Revolution. "So our people are not incapable of rising!" he thinks to himself. The nihilists decide that during the riots they will try to divert the mob away from the Jews and aim their fury at the tsar and his officials. One revolutionary shouts to the pogromists: "Don't drink too much boys! Don't befog your minds! For this is a great historical moment! Only why attack the Jews alone? Behold, the Czar is at the head of all the blood-suckers of the land!" The crowd accuses him of having been sent by the Jews with such talk, and they rush at him. After it is all over, the revolutionaries still do not understand the counterrevolutionary nature of the pogroms. They are mesmerized by the prospect of an actual mass rising, mistaken by them for a sign of revolutionary awakening against economic oppression, which the masses identifies with the Jews. Even Clara finally works herself into approval of this view of the matter, regarding her earlier doubts as a relapse into "racial predilections."

The effect of the pogroms on Elkins, who has become a revolutionary earlier than Clara or Pavel and is the original organizer of the Miroslav group, is different. He now decides that his loyalty to the Jewish people transcends the claim of Russia upon him. He still believes in socialism, but his tactic now is to organize communistic colonies and to emigrate to the United States with them. In a conversation with Elkins Pavel is angered by what he conceives to be Elkins's attempt "to mix socialism with Jewish chauvinism." Elkins's retort is: "Can socialism be mixed with … the welfare of the Russian people with a pailful or two of Jewish blood thrown in; in plainer language, socialism can only be mixed with anti-Semitism. Is that it?"

Pavel's reply is that there are other Jews in the movement on whom the pogrom does not have the same effect that it does on Elkins. The feeling on both sides grows bitter, and Elkins leaves. The gist of the conversation is that "no effort should be spared to keep the mob from attacking the Jewish poor," but that an attempt should be made to divert the pogromists to attack the tsar, "to lend the disturbance a revolutionary character." Elkins and Volodia are in the Jewish defense force, and during the pogrom the nihilists and Elkins are on opposite sides. After the pogrom, Clara's efforts to win Elkins back to the revolutionaries are unsuccessful, nor does he convince her to join his emigrating colonists. Before he can leave, however, the repression has imprisoned him, Clara, Pavel, and their other comrades. At the novel's end they communicate with one another by a wall-tapping code.

What makes The White Terror and the Red distinctive from the rest of Cahan's English fiction is that it is his most objective work, in which typical attitudes toward the Jews, especially among revolutionaries, are set forth. His purpose in the novel, as in the North American Review article, is to convey the truth about the Russian revolutionary movement, especially as regards Jews in general and Jews within the movement in particular. No single character represents his own view, but each of them manifests what he considers valid or invalid aspects of the movement. The characters are treated very sympathetically, with less sense of personal tragedy than in his other works. In sum, the novel is virtually his sole effort at socio-political realism in fiction divorced from his personal ambivalences.

When Cahan was again offered the editorship of the Forward in 1902, he faced a dilemma. The reception his fiction had received forecast a promising career as an American writer in English. At the same time, he was assured absolute control of the Forward, subject only to confirmation each year by the Forward Association. At first Cahan thought that he could pursue both his writing career and his editorship by leaving the paper at two o'clock each day and returning home to write. But the press of editorial work was too heavy to allow for afternoon writing sessions. Nevertheless, for a few years Cahan did turn out fiction in English, as we have seen. After The White Terror was published in 1905 no more fiction in English appeared until 1913, and this at a significant point in his life which helps account, at least in a symbolic sense, for the underlying meaning of David Levinsky. Since Cahan had taken over the Forward a decade earlier the paper had prospered mightily: its circulation had risen to over a hundred thousand, and in 1910 the Forward started to build a ten-story building that towered over the Lower East Side. As the sole Yiddish labor paper it was looked to by the Jewish workers for support of their trade union struggles.

In 1912 the United Garment Workers, with a membership of only about five thousand, struck against oppressive conditions, but about fifty thousand workers followed the strike call. By this time the Forward had developed vested interests in certain unions and union leaders, and Tom Rickert, president of the UGW was one of these. After nine weeks of a bitter strike, Rickert reached an agreement with the bosses and settled the strike without consulting the workers. On March 1, 1913, the workers read the banner headline in the Forward: "THE STRIKE IS SETTLED—BRAVO, CUTTERS!" The workers were enraged at what they regarded as a sellout. They stormed the Forward building in protest and broke its windows. When Cahan came out to address them, he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital for an emergency abdominal operation. As a result of this strike and its settlement, the union was weakened and its leaders were rejected. A few years later the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was formed.

This incident is a striking manifestation of one of the central contradictions within Cahan—between his labor socialist convictions, and his vested interest in a successful newspaper and socio-political expendience. By 1913 Cahan not only had absolute authority over the Forward, he exercised this power tyrannically. He had already established himself as the enemy of Yiddish culture, language, and literature, and as the foremost exponent of shund in Yiddish journalism and literature. He had employed and then alienated, as he was to continue to do, outstanding Yiddish writers. As Bezalel Sherman has written, while one must recognize Cahan's early pioneering work for socialism among the masses, one cannot deny "his dilution and vulgarization of socialism." The contradictions in Cahan's life and career form the basis for his culminating work in English, David Levinsky.

The first form of this story was published in 1913. Cahan was asked by McClure's to write some articles on the sensational successes in the economic world achieved by erstwhile Jewish immigrants. Cahan responded with two articles in the form of a fictional autobiography of a successful garment manufacturer. McClure's was delighted with them and asked for more. Before Cahan could comply he was involved in the United Garment Workers strike, which as we have seen ended in collapse for him. During his convalescence he supplied two more parts, and the whole was published serially in McClure's from April to July 1913. This early version was amplified in the novel published four years later as The Rise of David Levinsky.

Like all his English fiction, Cahan's novel is a vivid, perceptive document of aspects of Jewish life on the East Side between the 1880s and World War I, the heyday of Yiddish-speaking immigrant life in New York. No single work of fiction can capture all the features of the richly varied life of that community. Later works of permanent value like Mike Gold's Jews without Money and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep provide different angles of vision on East Side life. But Cahan's sensitive, tough-minded rendering of that life preserves for posterity a vision by one who was himself immersed in the community. By placing his central character in the garment industry, in which the largest portion of the Jewish immigrants were engaged as boss or worker—a sector of economic life Cahan was intimately familiar with, both as observer and labor organizer—Cahan was able to picture the growth of that industry.

It is a matter of history that the garment manufacturers in the 1870s and 1880s were mainly German Jews, and that they were pushed out by the newer East European immigrants. This process is portrayed by Cahan though his depiction of the "rise" of Levinsky as garment manufacturer. John Higham has observed that David Levinsky is "among the best novels of American business." He further notes that other novelists of the period, like Dreiser and Frank Norris, present business tycoons and show, as Cahan does, "the conquests of the market-place as morally debasing." But Cahan does more. "Whereas Dreiser and others concentrated on the businessman's personal style of life, Cahan also wrote, in the guise of fiction, a critically important chapter in American social history."

Cahan himself writes in David Levinsky:

The time I speak of, the late 80's and the early 90's, is connected with an important and interesting chapter in the history of the American cloak business. Hitherto in control of German Jews, it is now beginning to pass into the hands of their Russian co-religionists, the change being effected under peculiar conditions that were destined to lead to a stupendous development of the industry. If the average American woman is today dressed infinitely better than she was a quarter of a century ago, and if she is now easily the best-dressed average woman in the world, the fact is due, in large measure, to the change I refer to.

The talent of the pioneer German manufacturers in an industry "scarcely twenty years old" was primarily mercantile, while the workers in the shops, the East European immigrants, knew tailoring and practiced better product control. As he is trying to obtain an order from an influential non-Jewish Chicago buyer, Levinsky explains the reasons why the rising Russian Jewish manufacturers were displacing the German Jewish ones:

The Russian cloak-manufacturers operated on a basis of much lower profits and figured down expenses to a point never dreamed of before; … the German American cloak-manufacturer was primarily a merchant, not a tailor; … he was compelled to leave things to his designer and foreman, whereas his Russian competitor was a tailor or cloak-operator himself, and was, therefore, able to economize in ways that never occurred to the heads of the old houses.

Levinsky's ascent of the economic ladder is pictured in detail. Beginning on a shoestring as a shopworker, he parlays his small capital into success as a small manufacturer. Finally, through skillful manipulation and good luck, he works his way up and uptown from the sweat-shops of Division Street, via Broadway, to the pinnacle of Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue. It is obvious from Cahan's account that the survival and growth of Levinsky's business would never have occurred without his resorting to a series of deceptions and to antiunion manipulation of his workers. These were the classical business methods of the laissez-faire age, as the histories of the great corporations attest, and Levinsky is an astute practitioner of them. He is able to get started in business by deceiving his designer as to the extent of his capital. When he is in dire need of capital, he proposes marriage to a fellow worker, a "homely" girl who has saved money to attract a prospective husband in lieu of physical beauty. Possessed of great common sense, she rejects his offer.

But his greatest resource for undercutting his competitors is to employ cheap nonunion labor. This did not mean inferior workers. Levinsky runs an informal shop in which the workers feel at home, and he permits them to observe the Saturday Sabbath and work on Sunday instead. Although his piecework rates are low, his workers operate at greater speed and work longer hours than in other shops, so that they draw more pay. Furthermore, Levinsky cuts his profit margins below those of established firms. When the union is strong enough to require his shop to become a union shop, his workers still continue to work on a nonunion basis. He betrays not only the union, but his fellow manufacturers. When they lock out the workers, he formally agrees to follow suit but clandestinely continues to operate his shop. He even sub-contracts to established firms during the lockout. His deception is exposed, and the labor paper calls him a "cockroach manufacturer." When the strike is won, his workers receive the union wage but are forced to kick back the difference between the union and his own scale of wages. "The lockout and the absolute triumph of the union," he says, "was practically the making of me."

The designer who has made possible the beginning of Levinsky's business has continued in his old job with the understanding that he is to become Levinsky's partner when the firm is established. But when his business expands, Levinsky gets rid of the talented designer: why share his profits when he can hire a designer? Another reason he no longer needs the designer is because he knows an employee of a large shop who agrees to let him steal the designs of the shop. This practice of copying designs from the big firms soon becomes a regular practice in the trade.

In addition to his antiunion practices, the shrewd Levinsky helps form a "Levinsky Antomir Benefit Society," composed of immigrants from Levinsky's home-town. Most of his workers are members of the society, thus affording him a cosy personal connection with them that virtually assures him of freedom from "labor troubles." Levinsky uses a "shadchen," a bought shop chairman who cheats the union in the employer's favor, and stool pigeons to report any union agitation.

Levinsky has come to the United States with four cents in his pocket; thirty years later he is worth several millions. Cahan shows how this was done by what is in essence a vivid case history. Along the way Cahan depicts many East Side characters: Anna Tevkin, the young woman with whom Levinsky is desperately in love at the novel's end, her socialist sisters and brothers, and her father, a Hebrew poet of declining reputation who is employed as a real estate broker. Tevkin and other characters participate in the speculative real estate boom in the first decade of the century, in which many Jews lost or gained a fortune. Various types of workers and employees are encountered. The kind of Americanization that Cahan tried to teach the Yiddish masses is illustrated, both in its more admirable aspects as a road to a cultured and useful life, and as a vulgarized emulation of the dominant culture. We meet once again the themes and types of characters that Cahan had broached in the short stories. The novel is, in objective terms, a remarkable microcosm of the East Side.

But these objective features do not at all exhaust the content of the novel. For it is also Cahan's personal testament, and thus derives added interest and significance, in light of the important role played by Cahan in the life of the Jewish immigrant community for more than three decades. The dominant mood of the novel is one of melancholy and yearning. Besides occurring in so many of Cahan's stories, this word itself is used more than two dozen times in the course of the novel. What is David Levinsky to Cahan? Above all, Cahan was a realist and Levinsky, the enemy of the socialists, is the ruthless capitalist boss worshiping at the shrine of the bitch goddess Success. The evidence points to this: Levinsky is a thinly disguised Abraham Cahan.

The import of this first-person novel is announced in its first paragraph, and reiterated in the final paragraphs.

Sometimes, when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem void of significance.

At the end of the novel, as he contemplates his lonely, luxurious mode of life, he says to himself: "There are cases when success is a tragedy." He was born to live the life of the mind; he would have preferred to gain distinction in the professions or sciences instead of business, where many successful men "have no brains."

How did Levinsky happen to traduce his own best instincts? In the novel Cahan improbably attributes the choice to an "accident." In his first few years in this country Levinsky determines to save enough money by working in a shop to take him through college, and thence to the intellectual life. He is working in the shop of Jeff Manheimer, a native American of German Jewish origin, who treats his immigrant workers with contempt. One day a bottle of milk slips out of Levinsky's hands onto the floor and spills on some silk coats. Manheimer rages against him and says that the cost of the soiled garments will be charged against Levinsky, who then "became breathless with hate." He will get revenge by inducing Ansel Chaikin, Manheimer's talented designer and the soul of the business, to enter a partnership with Levinsky himself. The more he thinks of the scheme the less revenge figures in it, and the more the vision of himself as a rich man challenges him. From these beginnings develop the structure of his power and wealth. So Levinsky's manufacturing career has not been wholly an accident after all, but more deeply an expression of a commanding strain of his character.

How, then, can we demonstrate the essential identicalness of Levinsky with Cahan himself? In writing the original sketches that resulted in this novel, Cahan was fulfilling the McClure editorial request to present the success story of Jewish business. But Cahan himself represented one such success story, with his conversion of a socialist paper of limited circulation into a popular Yiddish paper with the highest circulation of any Yiddish paper in the world. What Cahan did (with what degree of awareness we do not know) was to invest his own qualities, minus his socialist convictions, in Levinsky, as if Cahan had been himself in Levinsky's situation. There is some truth in H. W. Boynton's observation: "The disconcerting thing is that we cannot make out whether Mr. Cahan appreciates the spiritual obscenity of the creature he has made; embodiment of all the contemptible qualities an enemy of the Yiddish Jew could charge him with." If Boynton implies that Levinsky is a stereotype, he seems to me mistaken, since Levinsky is a complex individual and a credible character. But it is true that in a subtle way Levinsky and his deceptions are presented so sympathetically as to justify Boynton's perception of an ambiguity in Cahan's own feeling toward Levinsky.

Like Levinsky, Cahan went through a critical period of deciding which course to follow: that of his higher inclination or the one which promised personal power and success. For Cahan, the choice was between continuing as a man of letters in English ("the ideal of my personal life") or being a journalist in Yiddish. In his autobiography he records his internal debate as to whether to reassume the editorial post of the Forward in 1902. One could make money as a writer only by writing "pieces of the cheaper sort." While shund-writers were rich, a real writer like Theodore Dreiser earned very little in the first few decades of his writing—only with An American Tragedy in 1925 did he achieve financial success. Life as a writer could yield deep spiritual satisfaction but a meager livelihood. At the same time, the prospect of building the Forward attracted him.

Cahan's decision was—as Levinsky told himself when he decided to plunge into manufacturing, and at the same time to continue his college education—"again performing the trick of eating the cake and having it. I would picture myself building up a great cloak business and somehow contriving, at the same time, to go to college." Although when he resumed the editorship it was understood that Cahan would be free after two o'clock to work on his writing, he was no more able to pursue both careers—except, of course, to write the masterpiece that gave expression to his lifelong dilemma—than Levinsky was able both to be a manufacturer and to pursue a college career. That this conflict was one source of Cahan's yearning is attested to by a comment made by Hillel Rogoff, who succeeded Cahan on the Forward. Rogoff was reported in an obituary article to have said that "Cahan did not follow the profession of his choice. He wanted, and in all probability was intended to be, a novelist and a writer of short stories." And Carian has Levinsky muse at the end of the novel: "I think that I should be much happier as a scientist or writer, perhaps. I should then be in my natural element."

Furthermore, there is a similarity, within limits, between the actual careers of Cahan and Levinsky and their desired vocations: writer and college-educated man (a doctor, perhaps.) Both Cahan and and his fictional hero were huge successes in their chosen work. When Levinsky moves into his Fifth Avenue establishment occupying five floors of a great building, he is aware of how he is regarded. "Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy splendors. Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full of her glory, and he who found favor in her eyes found favor in the eyes of man." At about the same time that Cahan reached a peak of success with the Forward he moved into the new ten-story building, and was the object of interviews and magazine articles in recognition of his success.

By this time, too, the dilution and vulgarization of his socialist views were apparent in the Forward, as we have indicated, and the decades that followed saw the end of even any pretense of a socialist approach and the adoption of some of the worst features of yellow journalism. When Cahan came to write David Levinsky, the contrast between the intellectual and personal integrity of himself as writer, on one hand, and as master journalist who stooped to the level of the uneducated and unenlightened masses and, so to speak, held them down at that level, on the other, must have been one source of the dissatisfaction he felt and transferred to his fictional hero.

In his personal life, too, Levinsky is unhappy, full of yearning and frustration, especially in his relations with women. Of Levinsky's relationships with five women with whom he is in love or who wish to marry him, none is stable or satisfactory. From beginning to end, Levinsky courts only women whom he cannot marry for one reason or other. I do not know to what extent this frustration reflects Cahan's life, since I know of no biography that conveys such intimate information about him. However, it is known that he was an unhappy man and that his marriage in 1885 to Anna Bronstein (Levinsky's last love in the novel is also called Anna), an intellectual Russian, was not altogether satisfactory. The obituary article cited earlier states that "in his personal life Cahan was a lonely and unhappy man. He had few friends and many enemies. He was respected by almost all, but loved by few." This real-life statement is close to Levinsky's lament at the end of the novel: "Am I happy?… I am lonely. Amid the pandemonium of my six hundred sewing machines and the jingle of gold which they pour into my lap I feel the deadly silence of solitude." What Cahan himself would have said about the circumstances and meaning of David Levinsky, as he promised to do in volume 5 of the Bleter (page 288), might have proved revealing, but Cahan never completed his autobiography.

The reception of David Levinsky was mixed. W. D. Howells, now eighty years old, was repelled by the love scenes, which he thought "too sensual." In a letter on September 20, 1917, he wrote: "Abraham Cahan has done a pretty good autobiographical novel, but it is too sensual in its facts, though he is a good man." Some assimilationists among the Jews were unhappy with the novel because they regarded an American Jewish novel as an invalid concept altogether. As one said of the early version of the novel in McClure's: "There is no more reason for Abraham Cahan to write the autobiography of an American Jew [the title of the series in McClure's] than there would be in Domenick Petro writing an autobiography of an American Catholic, or of Tommy Atkins writing of an American Anglican. There ought to be organized a society among the Jews … to compel both Jews and Christians to look upon the Jew as a human being and full grown." In this passage the assimilationist's insistence that the Jew is, or should be, regarded as different from all others only in religion, arising from the wish to obliterate differences he disapproves of or fears, is exposed in all its blindness to actual distinctions. On the other hand, the critic and scholar Isaac Goldberg, writing in The Call, the Socialist party organ, on September 23, 1917, hails the book as being "unique among the books published not only this year, but during the past decade.… This book is more than a literary event; it is a permanent addition to American letters."

Howells's genteel revulsion from the naturalism of the novel was shared by Kate Holladay Claghorn in The Survey. The novel, she writes, "reveals with crude and unashamed realism the growing ascendancy of the sensual over the spiritual, the material over the ideal, in the narrator's own life.… The people we are introduced to are in varying combinations crude, selfish, sensual, tasteless—above all, tasteless!—foolish, ignorant, ambitious and egotistical." The rendering of the Jews in the novel is so utterly negative, she believes, that if a Jewish author had not written it, if it had been published anonymously, "we might have taken if for a cruel caricature of a hated race by some anti-Semite." She exposes her limited comprehension of the book by calling it a "campaign poster," calling on the "non-socialist, non-union sinners of the household to repent." She assures her readers that this novel is not "a picture of Jewish life in general. There are some admirable traits in the character of even the business Jew."

She was not alone in warning of the anti-Semitic effect of the book. Cahan's own colleague on the Forward, Hillel Rogoff, reviewing the book in that paper on September 28, 1917, is unhappy with the naturalistic rendering of Jews in the novel. He says he wishes that Cahan had omitted some chapters "which portray the swamps of the former East Side and vulgarities and superficialities of the 'allrightniks.' First, these aspects are superfluous; secondly, they make a bad impression on the non-Jewish readers because the portrayals are one-sided and sometimes over-spiced. The East Side of the 90's had a lofty, beautiful, idealistic spiritual life, which the book does not mention."

The charge that the novel, and specifically the portrait of Levinsky, damages "the public concept" of the Jew has been maintained in recent years by Morris U. Schappes.

He does not challenge the portrait of Levinsky as such, but he maintains that "more of the truth is required." The piratical business ethics of Levinsky are not peculiarly Jewish but those of American free enterprise. Therefore, Schappes holds, by isolating Levinsky and his fellow Russian Jewish clothing manufacturers and by not depicting "elements of the Jewish working class, that idealistic, militant, heroic and often noble working class," and the "non-Jewish rapacious American business man, alongside of and in contact with and in fact 'inspiring' the Levinskys," he has left the reader with "a partial truth." Such partial truths are dangerous for the Jews because "anti-Semitism is a staple in the system in which we live."

Had Cahan indeed done what John Macy in a review in The Dial claims for the novel, the hazards would have been avoided. "The portrait of David Levinsky," writes Macy, "is a portrait of a society, not simply of the Jewish section of it, or of New York, but of American business. And business is business, whether done by Jew or Gentile. If Levinsky is a triumphant failure, he is so because American business, which shaped him to its ends, is, viewed from any decent regard for humanity, a miserable monster of success." As Schappes notes, "the few non-Jewish business men who appear in the volume fleetingly are all paragons of business virtue, of etiquette, of manners, of personal morality and of English speech." Only the Jewish businessmen in the book are represented as less than scrupulous in both business and their private lives. It is apparent to the reader that Cahan was like Levinsky in his awe and emulation of "American" status and manners; his chary, almost reverent treatment of the non-Jewish businessmen in the novel is a manifestation of Cahan's contempt for the immigrant.

It will not do to dismiss these considerations. When the book was first published, there remained a huge mass of recently arrived shtetl Jews living in the teeming tenements. Racist theories of Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic superiority were quite respectable and the movement for immigration restriction was strong, so that the apprehensions of some Jews and non-Jewish liberals were not groundless. It should be recalled that the anti-Semitic atmosphere in 1915 permitted Leo Frank to be lynched in Georgia after conviction on a false charge of murdering a Christian girl. Under such conditions, a candid portrayal of ruthless pursuit of profit by a Jew in a totally Jewish milieu, as David Levinsky is, might readily serve to reinforce prejudiced attitudes. Since the end of World War II, however, the Jew has become such an accepted and familiar figure of American literature that Cahan's novel may be grasped as a trenchant depiction of a talented, conflicted Jew who succumbs to the lure of money and power at a given juncture in the development of industry in the United States. The hazards to the "public image" of the Jew may perhaps always be present in some degree, but the novel must be recognized as the most talented contribution by a Jew to American literature up to that time, a work of permanent interest.

A large degree of truth inheres in the judgment of Cahan's fiction made in 1900 by Leo Stein, the brother of Gertrude Stein and a student of esthetics. While Stein may have somewhat exaggerated Cahan's "disinterested" attitude toward the fictional Jew, on the whole his statement is precise.

In the work of an American writer, Abraham Cahan [writes Stein] we have finally what we may call the disinterested attitude toward the Jew in fiction. By this I mean that the author writes about the Jew not because the Jew is more admirable than others or more interesting, but because the writer is interested in the delineation of human character in imaginative form, and deals with the Jew because, having been born and bred in the ghetto, he knows the Jew better than he knows other kinds of men.

This is, at the least, an objective judgment. But the novel is more: it is Cahan's fictionalized evaluation of himself as a conflicted person who chose success over integrity, a career as an exploiter and reinforcer of inferior journalism over a career as a writer devoted to maintaining human dignity and integrity. It must be remembered by those who would rush to his defense that this is Cahan's own judgment as revealed in the novel. But all was not lost—the best part of Cahan must have derived great artistic satisfaction and comfort from the awareness that he had produced the finest American Jewish novel of the first century and a half of the American nation.