by Seth Lipsky
Yet Cahan appears, in David Levinsky, to be seeking to get past superficial similarities and differences. In the famous opening paragraph, Levinsky says that when he thinks of his past “in a superficial, casual way,” the metamorphosis he has gone through strikes him as “nothing short of a miracle.” He was born in the “lowest depths of poverty” and arrived in America with four cents in his pocket, and he eventually rose to become a multimillionaire and captain of industry. Then he gets to the point: “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 to be devoid of significance.”
One clue to where the story of David Levinsky fits into Abraham Cahan’s life would appear twenty years after Cahan died, in a memoir written by a staff member of the Forward. David Shub was a crony of both Cahan and his wife, Anna. She was, Shub writes, “a very intelligent and well-read woman. She knew not only Russian and English literature, but also French. She and her father used to correspond in French.” He called her “a very skilled translator” and notes that she translated nearly all of Cahan’s English stories and novels into Russian. She also translated Chekhov’s stories from Russian into English. And one time she sent a story of her own to The New York Sun. Cahan discovered it in the paper and ran home to exclaim, “Anyuta, it is a gem.” But she told Shub that she did not pursue a career as a bellettrist because she felt that Cahan didn’t want her to compete with him. When Shub asked him about this, Cahan replied, “Rubbish. That’s utter nonsense. She was just too lazy to write. She was always rather lazy.”
Anna, in any event, declined to translate The Rise of David Levinsky into Russian. “Not only will I never translate his David Levinsky,” she told Shub when pressed on the point, “I haven’t even read it, and I’m not ever going to read it.”
“Why not?” he asked in amazement.
“Because he chose as the hero of his great novel a Jewish immigrant, an ordinary man who worked himself up in America and became a successful manufacturer, an ‘all-rightnik.’ Couldn’t he find a nicer, more intelligent type among all the other American Jewish immigrants to put forth for the American reader?”
Shub believed that Anna’s response was an example of her “caprices, her own strong convictions, and also her own ‘meshugas.’ ” But there was a certain truth in what she said. David Levinsky is superficially an unattractive, lonely, isolated figure, but Cahan undoubtedly portrayed him with a profound sympathy; that he chose a lonely capitalist to be the hero of his masterpiece can’t be an accident. When he sat down to write the story, a great deal was going on in his life, and in the world at large, over which he had to brood. Within the next few years, all the beliefs that Cahan and his comrades on the left held so dear would be profoundly shaken. Soon the world would be engulfed in a war unparalleled in history, one that would rattle the foundations of all political ideologies save democracy. The left-of-center movement from which Cahan was emerging had, at least at the outset, sneered at the suggestion that workingmen and women had a stake in the war or its outcome. But once America entered the war, the Forward, like many of the skeptics at the opposite end of the political spectrum, became a supporter of the war. Then there was the matter of Soviet Communism. The Rise of David Levinsky was published on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. Cahan and the Forward soon grasped that Communism was a flawed, even evil enterprise.
None of it happened immediately, either at the Forward or at the other great American newspapers. A number of them, including The New York Herald, welcomed the February Revolution that, as we have seen, ended the Romanov monarchy and installed a democratic socialist government headed by Alexander Kerensky. Nor, eight months later, were they able to see immediately the catastrophe of the October Revolution, when hopes for democratic socialism died and the Bolshevik tyranny began. Cahan, whom the historian Richard Gid Powers would describe as “the most important Jewish anticommunist of the twenties,” was not much quicker than others to see the Leninists for what they were. He defended the Bolsheviks, Powers says, “even when their regime was clearly indefensible according to democratic Socialist principles.” When the Communists were accused of stifling civil liberties in Russia, Cahan wrote that “the fruit of the whole revolution would be … swept away if [the Bolsheviks] were to allow political freedom.”
In Powers’s telling, it was the anger of “other Jewish Socialists, who denounced him for abandoning the principles of democratic socialism out of sympathy for the Bolshevik dictatorship,” that brought Cahan around. One Socialist critic of Bolshevism, Vladimir Medem, a Bund leader who had recently come to New York from Poland and carried considerable sway in the Jewish community, told Cahan that “if a reversion to the Spanish inquisition is necessary for the realization of socialism, then we can do without such a socialism.” Medem’s words, Powers estimates, “made Cahan take a fresh look at what the Soviets were doing to socialism.” Cahan, in any event, threw the Forward into the fray and began to print all sorts of stories and editorials against the Bolsheviks.
One of Cahan’s targets was a front organization called the Friends of Soviet Russia, whose stated purpose was to raise funds for famine relief. In the summer of 1922, the Forward began to expose its operations in both editorials and news articles. It accused the FSR of siphoning off funds raised for famine relief and using them instead for Communist propaganda and for subsidizing Communist newspapers through advertising; it said FSR employees were engaging in Communist Party work using money raised for relief, and that the organization was guilty of general extravagance.
The attacks were damaging enough that the FSR formed an investigating committee, chaired by American Civil Liberties Union cofounder Roger N. Baldwin; its members included a former member of the editorial staff of The Nation and an editor at The New Republic. The committee issued a report published in Soviet Russia, the official magazine of the FSR, which said it itemized the charges and sent the list to Cahan, who “politely declined to deal with the committee in any way, on the ground that,” as the committee characterized it, “while he does not doubt its integrity, it was appointed by the organization against which the charges were brought.”
Thus the FSR committee pronounced the FSR innocent. But there would never be any love lost between the Forward and the Communists. The Forward’s feud with the Morgen Freiheit, the Yiddish-language daily affiliated with the Communist Party USA, erupted from the Freiheit’s founding in 1922 and would last until the Freiheit folded in 1988. Cahan’s anti-Communism hardened sharply after his visit in 1923 to Europe, where he gained a firsthand understanding of the irredeemable nature of the tyranny that was emerging in Russia.
When he returned, he famously proclaimed that “Russia has at present less freedom than it had in the earliest days of Romanov rule.… The world has never yet seen such a despotism.”
The Forward was one of the first newspapers in America to report on the Siberian prison camps, which most people on the left steadfastly ignored. Cahan sent Forward reporters to Russia. Eventually, in the 1930s they filed eyewitness accounts of the mass starvation that resulted from Stalin’s collectivization, during which millions of peasants died and millions more were exiled to Siberia. Cahan pushed his point so hard that some on the left began saying that the Forward was just as bad as William Randolph Hearst’s famously right-wing publications because of its “anti-Sovietism.”
Cahan’s move into the hardline anti-Communist camp clearly rattled the Communists. In May 1923 he delivered the keynote speech at the eleventh national convention of the Socialist Party of America, held in New York. The Worker, the official publication of the Communist Party, called Cahan’s remarks a “compilation of the most loathsome back stairs gossip against Soviet Russia, emanating from the journalistic house of prostitution of the entire capitalist world, combined with the vapid ravings of his own distraught mind.” It called Cahan a “noto
rious Bolshevik baiter” and mocked those who applauded him. SPA cofounder and chairman Algernon Lee had introduced Cahan, The Worker reported, as “that old, loved, and trusted fighting socialist comrade.” But Cahan had “immediately launched into a tirade that was so acrimonious, intemperate, and obviously false that the majority of the delegates were stunned.” Only the allies of Morris Hillquit, who was in Europe and for whom Cahan was filling in, appeared pleased. The national secretary of the Socialist Party, Otto Branstetter, “smirked in the most cringing and servile manner,” while Lee “grimaced like a trained baboon at each barrage of billingsgate hurled at the leaders of the World Revolution.”
Cahan denounced Trotsky as a “bombastic windbag,” The World reported, and said Trotsky’s physical ailments were “undoubtedly due to his earlier complete moral collapse.” The World continued that “the mountebank Cahan … screeched deliriously that the great leader of the Bolshevik revolution [Lenin] was a ‘muddle head lunatic.’ ” Cahan apparently attacked several other Bolshevik leaders, including Karl Radek and Gregory Zinoviev, both of whom had traveled to Russia with Lenin from Switzerland through Germany and Sweden aboard the infamous “sealed train.”
With this speech, Cahan took his place within the leadership of an anti-Communist movement that would not be fully vindicated until 1989, nearly forty years after Cahan’s death, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the face of a three-pronged strategy led by President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Lane Kirkland of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations.
Cahan’s campaign cost the Forward. In 1926, when the Communists tightened their grip on several unions, the Forward experienced a plunge in its circulation due to its unrelenting anti-Communist stance. At a meeting on this subject, Cahan declared, “I would rather see the Forward go under than weaken the struggle against the communists.”
Cahan was facing another potential circulation problem from a different quarter: the closing off of immigration into the United States. In the early 1920s, the Forward was at the apex of its success. Circulation stood at nearly 250,000. The paper had a dozen bureaus across the country, in Los Angeles, Detroit, Boston, and Milwaukee, and abroad, in Warsaw, Moscow, and other European cities. A separate edition was published in Chicago.
The American public took note. In 1922 Oswald Garrison Villard, the longtime editor of The Nation, wrote, “Which is the most vital, the most interesting, the most democratic of New York’s daily journals? … In my judgment it is the Forward, or the Vorwaerts, to use its Yiddish name.… It is printing today by far the best fiction and belles lettres of any newspaper in America.”
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act forever altered Cahan’s readership, as it ended the era of unfettered immigration that had seen millions of Jews and other peoples from eastern Europe, Asia, and the Mediterranean come to America. “A great misfortune,” Cahan called the Johnson-Reed Act, in a front-page Forward headline. In the early stages of the immigration debate, Meyer London had argued on the floor of the Congress that immigration was essentially self-regulating. He characterized the chauvinistic element among the anti-immigration forces as “utterly incomprehensible when found among the American people, full of the vigor of youth and absorbing unto itself all that is strong and virile in the human stock.” But the trends that culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act had been evident well before it was passed, and the Socialists—even the Jewish Labor Bund—fell in with those who favored restriction.
The act had a collateral impact on the Zionist struggle, and Cahan’s role in all of this was significant enough that an entire book, Jewish Socialists in the United States: The Cahan Debate, 1925–1926, by Yaacov N. Goldstein, has been devoted to it. The debate it refers to was about Zionism; as Goldstein explains, the closing off of Jewish immigration to the United States and the economic crisis in the newly established independent Polish commonwealth had the unintended consequence of setting the stage for the Jewish state; these factors contributed to the swelling of Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1920s, which came to be known as the “Polish Aliyah.”
In the summer of 1924 the general manager of the Forward, B. Charney Vladeck, made an important visit to Poland together with the director of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. The report they submitted on their return was “harrowing,” says Goldstein, telling of, among other signs of crisis, “six thousand Jews who were roaming around various parts of Europe with the aim of reaching the United States” but with no chance of entering the country. The Forward’s correspondent in Poland reported that the “Jewish surge to Palestine [was] the most important event at the moment in Poland.”
Goldstein presents these developments as “a pivotal factor in the intensification of the debate in the American-Jewish workers’ movement on its positions regarding Zionism and Palestine.” The “general American workers’ movement” supported the restrictions on immigration put into place by the American government. In 1922 the annual conference of the American Federation of Labor, held in Cincinnati, resolved to “support the policy of closing the gates despite the opposition of the Jewish unions.” In this context, on July 1, 1925, the Forward announced that its editor would be departing for Europe in August to serve as a delegate to the second congress of the Labor and Socialist International in Marseilles and would then travel on to Palestine.
* * *
* As a warm-up to Cahan’s pieces, the March 1913 issue of McClure’s contained an article by Burton J. Hendrick, the magazine’s associate editor, entitled “The Jewish Invasion of America.”
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Cahan’s trip to Palestine was more significant than that of any other American newspaper editor, a fact that no one understood more clearly than the Zionist leadership in Palestine. Max Pine, chairman of the United Hebrew Trades and also of the fund-raising campaign of the Histadrut, the labor organization in Palestine that had been founded in 1920, wanted to overcome socialist opposition to his Zionist aims. Pine encouraged Cahan to come and see “the miracle” that was being performed by the Jewish workers in “Eretz Yisrael.” Two weeks before Cahan’s arrival, the Histadrut newspaper Davar said it viewed Cahan’s imminent arrival with “trepidation.” Columnist David Zakai wrote that “the lion [was coming] out of his lair, the king of the Forward himself.… When he praises, millions will praise after him; and when he scorns, those millions will scorn still more than they have until now.” Davar reported even the advance arrival of Cahan’s private secretary, M. Vinograd.
This was more than just a political trip; whether they favored or opposed political Zionism, Forward readers were eager to hear what its editor thought about what was going on in Palestine. Such interest, Cahan knew, could only fuel the paper’s sales. “The thing is of such unusual consequence and has stirred up so much discussion and curiosity all over Europe as well as in America that we cannot make it too big,” he wrote Vladeck from Paris. “I am learning a good deal of the Palestine and Zionist situation. Everybody seems to be bursting with this subject.… You may advertise it on the largest possible scale.”
So Vladeck did. The Forward unleashed a huge campaign to publicize Cahan’s upcoming trip. It distributed ten thousand promotional matchbooks; it took out ads in nearly a dozen magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Herald, and The Nation; and a big sign was put up in Times Square “proclaiming the Forward’s Palestine series for the whole world to see,” as Vladeck wrote to Cahan, who was by then in Tel Aviv. An astonishing 25,000 posters, half in Yiddish, half in English, were placed in store windows and on the walls in New York’s subway stations and the Boston El. Some 50,000 leaflets would be handed out throughout the United States, “to the kinds of Jews that the Jewish press does not usually reach,” Vladeck wrote to Cahan.
On September 26, 1925, Cahan and his wife arrived in Palestine, pulling into the railway station in Lydda on an overnight train from Egypt. That day the Forward ran a full-page ad proclaiming, “Today Genosse* C
ahan arrived in Jerusalem.… Of all the assignments that Genosse Cahan has accepted in his many years as editor of the Forward, this is the greatest and most responsible one.” Over the course of the next ten weeks, Cahan’s dispatches from Palestine were rolled out with great fanfare, printed in both Yiddish and English (“for your children and your English-reading friends”). On Sunday, December 8, toward the end of the series, the staff printed 220,000 copies of the paper, the largest December press run in the Forward’s history.
Isaac Ben-Zvi, a leader of the Labor Zionists and president of the Jewish National Council of Palestine who would later serve as Israel’s second president, was appointed Cahan’s tour guide in Jerusalem. They were joined by Alter Kacyzne, a prominent writer and photographer based in Poland, whose images of Jewish life throughout eastern Europe and Palestine became popular with Forward readers.†
Monday, September 28, was Yom Kippur, and Cahan visited seven Jerusalem synagogues that one day. When he got to the Western Wall, the sixty-five-year-old atheist wept. Cahan sent one of Kacyzne’s pictures of bearded men in caftans and prayer shawls, praying at the Wall, to New York to appear on the cover of the newspaper’s rotogravure section on Sunday, November 8. Cahan was so moved by his visit that he “offered to make a substantial cash contribution to a fund for the purchase of the Wailing Wall and the area around it, so that it would belong once again to the Jewish people.”
On Monday, October 5, Cahan received permission to board the Soviet ship Lenin, which had arrived in the Jaffa port from Odessa carrying 371 Jewish immigrants from Russia. Here is how he described the scene for Forward readers: