by Seth Lipsky
It was in “The Proletarian Preacher” and in his column “The Hester Street Reporter,” which related the colorful day-to-day events of the Lower East Side, that Cahan found his voice, a winning mix of politics and cultural and religious topics that his fellow immigrants immediately responded to. The Arbeiter Zeitung quickly became a success, and its editors and writers, Cahan chief among them, delighted in its rivalry with the anarchists’ newspaper. The following year Cahan assumed the editorship of the Arbeiter Zeitung, a year that marked another personal milestone as well: on June 8, 1891, less than a decade after landing at Philadelphia, Cahan became an American citizen.
Cahan began to branch out in other directions with his writing as well. He became an admirer of Henry James and William Dean Howells. Anna Cahan insisted that her husband take another stab at reading Anna Karenina, which he did and found eye-opening. He turned to Tolstoy’s other works as well and began taking his own fictional efforts seriously.
In 1892 Cahan penned his first short story, “Motke Arbel,” which ran in the pages of the Arbeiter Zeitung. He read the story aloud to an old Russian friend, a man by the name of Zhuk, whose literary opinion he held in great esteem, diligently translating it for him word by word into Russian. The story itself was not a serious work of literature, Zhuk told him, but it showed great promise, and he pressed Cahan to continue writing fiction. This vote of confidence meant much to Cahan. Zhuk lent him a collection of short stories written by Anton Chekhov, an author not particularly well known among émigrés at that time. This book, Cahan later wrote, “caused a revolution in my brain.” He went back to Anna Karenina for a third time and immersed himself in the work of other Russian writers. Perhaps distance was what Cahan, like so many of his fellow immigrants, required. Only in America, more than a decade after he left Russian soil, did he find himself entranced and consumed by the writers of his homeland.
Cahan might have been thinking and dreaming about literature by night, but by day he had to contend with more pressing, mundane matters. In the mid-1890s, the Socialist Labor Party was riven by the feud between its leader, Daniel De Leon, and a reformist branch led by Morris Hillquit. De Leon was a lawyer and a professor at Columbia University. He had been born in Curaçao to well-off parents of Sephardic Dutch ancestry and had become a socialist during the mayoral campaign of 1886. An uncompromising, doctrinaire Marxist, he was more interested in advancing revolution than in improving the workplace. “Reform is chloroform,” De Leon was quoted as saying by one long-time writer for the Forward, Augustus “Gus” Tyler. De Leon believed that improving conditions for workers only obfuscated the true problem—capitalism—thereby lulling exploited workers into complacency and postponing the day when they would collectively rise up and dismantle the capitalist system altogether. De Leon’s chief rival was Eugene V. Debs, a founder of the American Railway Union who had become a socialist while in jail for obstructing the delivery of the United States mail in connection with the Pullman Strike of 1894.
Hillquit and Cahan eventually left the Socialist Labor Party and joined up with Debs, insisting “that the place of the socialists was within the American Federation of Labor,” the union that was winning the contest to become the main representative of organized labor. As Tyler related it, Hillquit and Cahan believed that “although the Federation was nonsocialist, even anti-socialist, in time, through the experience gained in a common struggle, the workers would come to realize that the ultimate solution was socialism.”
Cahan’s biographers have all had to plow through the many political battles that rent his world during this time, and it would be shortsighted to set them down as unimportant. The remarkable thing about these struggles, from the perspective of a century later, is the degree to which they foreshadowed later feuds—between, for example, the New Left and American liberals in the 1960s, and between liberals and neoconservatives in the 1980s. This is particularly true when it comes to the Jewish dimension of the debates, an element that time and again during Cahan’s long political metamorphosis emerged as a pivotal issue, one that asserted itself in his fiction, in his newspaper work, and in his engagement in the political struggle.
Just how the “Jewish question” fit into all of this was a subject that began to take on increasing importance as the situation for Jews in Russia continued to deteriorate. It was becoming increasingly apparent that they had to leave the country and go somewhere, and more and more immigrant Jews were becoming involved in the various socialist organizations that were springing up in the United States. The question, as Tyler put it, was “how to put an end to the endless persecution of the Jews. To Cahan and others of his political persuasion, the answer was clear: socialism. In a global cooperative commonwealth, without national, religious, or ethnic antagonisms, there would not, there could not, be an economic or political reason for anti-Semitism, a weapon of the capitalist ruling class to ‘divide and rule,’ to turn worker against worker.”
Cahan’s chance to test his belief came with his assignment as a delegate of the United Hebrew Trades to the second congress of the Socialist International, to take place at Belgium in August 1891. The socialists were not the only ones obsessed with the Jewish Question. That same year the German Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch established the Jewish Colonization Association, with the idea of fostering Jewish emigration from Russia to Argentina. And in the same year the noted cultural Zionist writer Ahad Ha’am made his first visit to Palestine and, upon his return to Russia, wrote his landmark essay “Truth from Eretz Yisrael.” One hundred thousand Jews left Russia that year, as Jews were being expelled from Moscow, and its Great Synagogue was closed. It was the same year that the German Zionist Max Bodenheimer wrote “Whither Russian Jewry?” Also in 1891, Theodor Herzl, while hiking in the Pyrenees, would receive word from Vienna that the Neue Freie Presse was making him its Paris correspondent, in which capacity, three years later, he would attend the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
Cahan left for Europe in July. According to Ronald Sanders, the United Hebrew Trades had chosen him to represent them because he had become “widely recognized as the most articulate” among the social democrats in New York. Sanders further notes that “nine years of activity among the Yiddish-speaking immigrants had awakened in him the germ of a Jewish nationalist that he once had not imagined to be there.” Those years had also tempered his utopianism with pragmatic realism. Advance word of Cahan’s trip reached London, and he was invited to stop there en route and give lectures. At one meeting, Cahan took on the anarchists. He asked his audience to imagine that a small village of one hundred people discovers that a stream is poisoned. Sixty of the inhabitants want to solve the problem by filling the stream in with sand, while forty want to build a bridge over it. Under socialist rule, Cahan said, the villagers would vote, and the majority would win the day. Under the anarchists, who preach the freedom of every individual to act independently, the villagers would build the bridge after they covered the stream with sand. “He’s a clown, a comedian, not a debater,” the irate anarchists protested.
Cahan found London to be much like New York. While there, he met and took quite a liking to Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, a writer and translator and erstwhile secretary to her father, who had died in 1883. Eleanor had attended the Socialist International’s first congress and told Cahan, “We Jews have a special obligation to devote ourselves to the working class.” This remark came as a bit of a surprise to Cahan, given the anti-Semitism of her father, whose parents had baptized him as a Lutheran and whose 1844 essay “Zur Judenfrage” (On the Jewish Question) advocated the “emancipation of society from Judaism.”
Cahan next went to Paris, which was not at all like New York—it reminded him of Russia. He was, for the first time in nine years, back on continental European soil, and he was hit with an attack of nostalgia. His lodging only compounded the feeling; he stayed in a working-class neighborhood in the home of David Gordon, one of his former classmates from Vilna. Unlike Cahan a
nd his socialist colleagues in New York, Gordon and his wife were living a proletarian life, not simply espousing one. The Gordons seemed not only content but happy. “He was always telling jokes and she was always laughing,” Cahan wrote somewhat wistfully. It was not only Gordon and his wife who affected Cahan, but a young woman as well: Eva, Gordon’s sister. She lived nearby and served as Cahan’s Parisian tour guide. She was “a lively and happy girl [who] usually came in singing,” he wrote, a more complimentary description than any he would bestow in print upon his wife in the course of more than fifty years of marriage. With Eva he visited parks and museums; they stood before the Venus de Milo in the Louvre and returned to view it several days in a row. Eva took him to cafés on the Left Bank, where they would talk or visit with her revolutionary friends.
One day in Paris another ghost from Cahan’s past appeared: a friend from Vilna named Anton Gnatowski. Cahan learned that in 1887 Gnatowski had taken part in a plot to kill Alexander III with the same kind of bomb that had been used to assassinate Alexander II. The plot had failed, and most of the conspirators had been captured. (One of them was a young chemistry student named Alexander Ulyanov, who went to the gallows. That sent his younger brother Vladimir into the welcoming arms of Alexander’s revolutionary comrades, from which he emerged with the nom de guerre Lenin.) But Gnatowski had escaped. Cahan felt his old anarchistic impulses stirring within him: “I had never had such a strong feeling of life passing me by as I did in that moment.” While he was in Paris, away from the pressures of trying to fit into his new country, Cahan wrote to his parents for the first time in several years.
Despite his nostalgia for his former life and despite his long-standing universalist beliefs, Cahan was by now indisputably an American. He gave a lecture where, as one attendee, George Leonard, later wrote to him: “Eloquently you spoke of the freedom you found in the United States and contrasted it with what you had gone through in your native land before leaving it for America. The plight of the immigrant worker in the new land of freedom had a prominent place in your speech. But it breathed hope, not despair. I was captivated by your eloquence. I sat so close to you that I allowed no word to escape me. I was moved. So was everybody else in the hall.”
Cahan may have felt that much about his new home needed to be improved, but he seems to have had no question that improvement was possible. He was certainly not the first American newspaper editor to spend years criticizing his country at home only to discover, when he went abroad, an urge to proselytize for America’s manifest virtues.
Becoming Americanized did not mean abandoning his Jewish identity. In August, at the congress of the Socialist International, he surprised his fellow delegates by submitting an item for discussion on the agenda: “What shall be the stand of the organized workers of all countries concerning the Jewish Question?” The item caused “considerable embarrassment,” as Sanders notes. The Jewish Question, after all, “had been a major issue in the classic struggles of European liberalism half a century before, and was thought to have been disposed of.”
Cahan, an almost compulsive newspaperman, perceived that the Jewish Question had not, in fact, been disposed of. On the contrary, political parties in Austria, Germany, and France were propagating a new wave of anti-Semitism, this one with a political element. Emancipation and the spread of Enlightenment values might have muted the older, atavistic anti-Semitism, but a backlash against the newly emancipated Jews was under way, as the economic and social success brought about by their emancipation was becoming a source of popular resentment. As Theodor Herzl was to note eloquently only a few years later, the irony of the emancipation of Europe’s Jews was that a liberal enterprise had spawned an illiberal backlash.
Socialism was late to concern itself with this dynamic. As Cahan had observed when he was still in Russia, some Jewish socialists had condoned the pogroms in the name of socialist revolution, lumping the Jewish victims of the violence in with the capitalist villains who had been exploiting the masses. Cahan had been disgusted and refused to tolerate such an elision here in Brussels. So he was prepared to embarrass a socialist movement that, precisely because so many Jews were prominent in it, took pains to downplay anything that smacked of Jewish particularity. Both Paul Singer, the head of the German Social Democrats, and Viktor Adler, the Jewish head of the Austrian Socialist Party, let Cahan know that they preferred he not raise the Jewish Question.
Cahan refused to withdraw his proposal. Even the chief rabbi of Brussels tried to get him to back down, but he wouldn’t. The matter became part of the conference agenda, and the discussion around it exposed the persistence of old prejudices in the new world order. The French delegation, as Sanders tells it, “were in no way prepared to assume what they thought would seem to their colleagues back home to be a ‘philo-Semitic stance.’ Eventually, a compromise, face-saving resolution was passed, condemning ‘both anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism.’ ”
The episode served only to strengthen Cahan’s attachment to America. Perhaps, as Sanders points out, America “did not permit a heroic and pure-hearted socialism,” but neither did it “nourish the kind of powerful and relentless anti-Semitism that was traditional to continental Europe.… If it was easier to be a good socialist in Europe, it was easier for a radical like Cahan to be a good Jew in America.” Cahan might have objected to that characterization, believing that an anti-Semitic socialism was no socialism at all. But American society and culture certainly played a large role in Cahan’s political evolution. Its careful balance between the rights of the individual or of states against a national identity allowed him to understand his Jewishness not as a contradiction of universal values but as an essential precondition of it.
In the summer of 1892, Cahan was invited back to London to lecture in Yiddish. He visited Eleanor Marx and her partner, Edward Aveling (whose infidelities, it is said, would drive her to suicide in 1898). He also went to see Friedrich Engels, to propose a Yiddish translation of his and Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Eleanor accompanied Cahan to Engels’s home, and at one point during their meeting she pushed him into a big leather easy chair that stood in the corner. “She laughed, and Engels smiled happily,” Cahan recalled. “That was my father’s chair, the chair in which he died,” she said by way of explanation. So while sitting in Karl Marx’s chair, Cahan met with the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto. Two decades later Engels’s face and Marx’s would be chiseled into the facade of the brand-new Forward Building.
Past seventy but still vigorous, Engels was working on finishing volume three of Marx’s Das Kapital, which had been left incomplete at Marx’s death. Engels raised a glass of beer and they drank to “social democracy in the world.”
Cahan declined a second drink. “You know, Comrade Engels, the Jews are not drinkers,” he explained.
To which Engels retorted, “Yes, that’s truly a shame—if the Jews would drink more, they would be even better people.”
Engels promised to write an introduction to Cahan’s translation of The Communist Manifesto, and in parting he gave Cahan six photographs of Marx to share with comrades in America.
It wasn’t only European politics that helped Cahan realize that he was finally an American. One evening in 1892, after completing his day’s work at the Arbeiter Zeitung, he retired to nearby Sussman and Goldstein’s Café, the regular hangout of the newspaper’s staff. There he found a simple, penciled note waiting for him: “I wanted to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” signed William Dean Howells.
Some twenty-three years older than Cahan, Howells had begun his literary career several years before Cahan was born. By 1882, when Cahan arrived in America, Howells had been editor of The Atlantic Monthly for nearly a decade. In the intervening years, his novels had helped establish the genre of American literary realism, most notably The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). He was fascinated by the variegated place America was becoming and by the world beyond his purview. He had recently ended a co
lumn in Harper’s with the remark: “I will close with a name, which is the name of the greatest of all literary artists: Tolstoy.”
He had heard of the burgeoning Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side and had made several trips there. When he learned that a Jewish socialist newspaper was being published in the neighborhood, he resolved to meet its editor and stopped by the Arbeiter Zeitung’s offices on Delancey Street. But Cahan hadn’t been there. Someone had suggested he try the café, and it was there that Howells left his note.
Cahan, who had read all of Howells’s work and greatly admired him, was astounded—he could never have imagined meeting him in the flesh. But he immediately wrote back, and soon he received an invitation to visit Howells at his brownstone on East 17th Street, across from Stuyvesant Park.
Upon his arrival, Cahan, understandably anxious, delivered a little speech about what an inexpressible pleasure it was to make Howell’s acquaintance: “I feel so not only as the socialist editor whom you honored with your visit but also, and especially, as one of your most enthusiastic readers and admirers.”
“Have you read my work?” Howells asked, apparently surprised that a socialist editor would be knowledgeable about literature in general, let alone his own work.
Cahan replied that he had read everything Howells had written. They ended up discussing Russian and English literature, and the socialist movement. This meeting must have given Cahan a new confidence; not only was a great American novelist interested in his world, but Cahan, still very much a Russian intellectual, had something to offer Howells as well. Immersed in his work at the Arbeiter Zeitung and myriad socialist activities, however, Cahan’s own literary work took a backseat.
In December 1893 Cahan serialized a portion of Howells’s recently published novel about a utopian island, A Traveler from Altruria, which he had translated himself. Howells had by this time moved uptown, to 59th Street, near Central Park, and now frequented a nearby shop to buy stationery supplies. As it happened, the owner of the shop was Jewish and an Arbeiter Zeitung reader. When he came across the Yiddish translation of Howells’s novel, he read sections of it aloud to his customer. Howells replied that he had met and been impressed by Cahan, an observation that eventually got back to Cahan.