by Seth Lipsky
26 freelance journalism work: Ibid., pp. 11–12.
27 “for its influence, the resultant prestige”: Ibid., p. 12.
28 “Belles lettres is one thing”: Quoted in Sanders, Downtown, p. 211.
29 “ ‘We’ had use for anyone”: Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), pp. 314–15.
30 “We are doing some things”: Steffens quoted in Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan, ed. Moses Rischin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. xxi.
31 “I love you … clever good fellows”: Ibid., p. xxii.
32 “Give me assignments that will bring”: Cahan quoted in Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 235.
33 “The duties of a police reporter”: Abraham Cahan, “Police Headquarters with Jacob Riis,” trans. Leizer Burko, Jewish Daily Forward, May 19, 2010, www.forward.com/articles/128149/.
34 “Riis was not a tall man”: Ibid.
35 “At the words ‘call it in’ ”: Abraham Cahan, “I Need to Make a Call But Can’t,” trans. Leizer Burko, Jewish Daily Forward, May 19, 2010, http://forward.com/articles/128147/i-need-to-make-a-call-but-can-t/.
36 “I had become as infatuated”: Steffens, Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 244.
37 “a socially prominent Jewish lady”: Ibid., p. 243.
38 “As he chanted his poems”: Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto, ed. Moses Rischin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 94.
39 “Cahan took us, as he could get us”: Steffens, Autobiography, vol. 1, pp. 317–18.
40 “was a dark-eyed young woman”: Abraham Cahan, “East Side Talks Maine,” Feb. 22, 1898, in Rischin, Grandma, pp. 4–5.
41 “the same penetrating intensity he had come”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 253.
42 “who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all”: Immigration Act of 1903, text of law via: http://library.buffalo.edu/exhibits/panam/law/images/alienact1903.html.
43 “The deeper you probe into corruption,”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 254.
44 “Oh, let’s rather talk about socialism”: Ibid., p. 255.
Chapter 7
1 Cahan found himself gravitating: For this period in Cahan’s life, I have relied on Sanders, Downtown, p. 246ff, drawing on Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn.
2 “Socialism occupies the place of religion,”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 248.
3 “When I was a fool, a socialist,”: Ibid., p. 249.
4 two advertising agents for the Forward: The details of this meeting and Cahan’s accession are from Sanders, Downtown, pp. 250ff, citing Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn.
5 “There will be much more to read”: Ibid., p. 256, citing Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn.
6 “a kind of highbrow Yiddish”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 299.
7 “In Love with Yiddishe Kinder”: On Cahan’s first Forward issue, see Sanders, Downtown, pp. 257–262.
8 “the three stages in the life”: Ibid., p. 258.
9 “Mazel is somebody else’s schlimazel”: Ibid. [Sanders spells the words “Mazzel” and “shlim-mazzel”], p. 263.
10 By midsummer, 19,000 copies: Ibid., p. 268.
11 “I wanted to know what sort of impression”: Abraham Cahan, “I Go Among the Public to Study How to Write for It,” trans. Leizer Burko, Jewish Daily Forward, May 19, 2010, www.forward.com/articles/128154/.
12 “Sometimes somebody did recognize”: Ibid.
13 “If you want to pick a child up”: Cahan quoted in Pollock, “Clarinetist,” pp. 302-3.
14 “more socialistic”: Ibid., p. 307.
15 the locals called him the “bird-man.”: Sanders, Downtown, pp. 273ff, and Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 307, both citing Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn.
16 “In the bird manual you would read”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 274.
17 the Kishinev massacre: Ibid.
18 “In the march on the first of May”: Editorial, Jewish Daily Forward, April 30, 1903.
19 “the stupendous growth of the revolutionary”: Abraham Cahan, “Jewish Massacres and the Revolutionary Movement in Russia,” North American Review, July 1903, p. 58.
20 “Russia seems to be on the eve”: Ibid., p. 62.
21 New York was home to one million Jews: Sanders, Downtown, p. 350.
22 “Judaism [had] not much of a chance”: Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 95.
23 “stood mutely by his side”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 308.
24 the Bintel Brief (“bundle of letters”): For the case that the Bintel Brief arose from competition with other Yiddish papers, see Sanders, Downtown, pp. 350–71.
25 “Send us interesting true novels”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 356.
26 “Not an invented one but a real tragedy”: Ibid., pp. 357–58.
27 “which didn’t seem suited”: Abraham Cahan, “A Bintel Brief Is Born,” Jewish Daily Forward, reprinted May 19, 2010, http://forward.com/articles/128152/a-bintel-brief-is-born/. Cahan’s account of the birth of the Bintel Brief column appears in Sanders, Downtown, pp. 361–63.
28 “It’s a Godsend”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” pp. 323–24, citing George M. D. Wolfe, “The Bintel Brief of the Jewish Daily Forward as an Immigrant Institution and a Research Source,” M.A. thesis, Graduate School for Jewish Social Work, 1933, p. 88.
29 “poor working woman”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 362.
30 “because he had a beard”: Ibid,. p. 363.
31 “Among the letters the Forward receives”: Ibid., p. 361.
32 “What a picture of workers’ misery”: Ibid., p. 362.
33–94 “Permit me to convey”; “Well, we can give no better”: Ibid., p. 365.
34 “I must write to you about my situation”: Ibid., p. 366.
35 “Many of these encounters took place”: Cahan, “Bintel Brief” Forward, reprinted May 19, 2010.
36 “comparing their litany”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 369.
Chapter 8
1 “draw a graphic picture of conditions.”: “A Revolutionary Novel of Russia,” New York Times, April 22, 1905.
2 “were moving about musingly,”: Abraham Cahan, The White Terror and the Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1905), p. 388.
3 “Does the Zionist idea have any reality to it?”: Editorial, Jewish Daily Forward, July 9, 1904.
4 “About socialists … there is nothing to say”: Ibid.
5 60,000 people jammed into Seward Park: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 328.
6 “Modern Jewish life has been characterized”: Howe, World, p. 289.
7 “The Jew’s conception of a labor organization”: John Commons quoted in ibid., p. 290.
8 “The interests of the workingmen”: Morris Hillquit, quoted in ibid., p. 314.
9 “They don’t begin to ask”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 329.
10 “Thank God! … A stone has been rolled off”: Ibid.
11 “your mind’s eye travels to the West”: Ibid., p. 331.
12 “300 People Burned in a Theater”: Ibid., p. 334.
13 His wildly popular novel The Brothers Ashkenazi: Rebecca Goldstein, “Love, Tough and Not Tough,” New Republic, July 27, 2010.
14 the overall tone of the Forward: Howe, World, pp. 529–30.
15 We used to write that one side: Adolph Held, YIVO interview, May 23, 1964, quoted in Howe, World, p. 531.
16 Cahan could be ruthless: Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, pp. 94–95; For Cahan’s dispute with Gordin, see pp. 151–57.
17 his attacks on Gordin were not soon forgotten: Sanders, Downtown, p. 390.
18 “Jewish in WORD—American in THOUGHT”: Printers’ Ink, February 26, 1920.
19 “Our One-Quarter-of-a-Million Readers”: Circulation figures are from Pollock, “Clarinetist,” pp. 335–36.
20 a Yi
ddish-language history of the United States: Sanders, Downtown, pp. 386–87.
21 “How did you become a socialist?”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 335.
22 “holy duty”: Ibid., p. 337.
23 “I’m tired of listening to speakers”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 400.
24 “You are on strike against God and nature”: Ibid., p. 401.
25 “Medieval America always”: George Bernard Shaw quoted in both Sanders, Downtown, p. 401, and Howe, World, p. 299.
26 “The girls, headed by teenage”: Howe, World, p. 299, citing Coleman McAlister, “All of Which I Saw,” Progressive, May 1950.
27 “Stay firmly together, sisters and brothers!”: Forward, February, 9, 1910, in Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 338.
28 The paper itself donated $2,000: Ibid., p. 340.
29 The Protocols of Peace: Sanders, Downtown, p. 403; Howe, World, pp. 301–2; and Tyler, A Vital Voice, p. 32.
30 “At his birth Nature said to Cahan”: “Karnegie Hall gepakt mit toyznter Ab. Kahan tsu bagrisn oil zany yubileum,” Forward, November 12, 1910, quoted in Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 342.
31 “A fifty-year-old smiling public man”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 391.
32 “Above all, he kept pounding”: Leon Wexelstein, “Abraham Cahan,” American Mercury, September 1926, p. 92.
33 “One girl after another fell”: Rosenfeld quoted in Sanders, Downtown, pp. 394–95. The excerpt from his poem can be found in Tyler, Vital Voice, p. 33.
34 “The entire neighborhood is sitting shiva”: Abraham Cahan, “The Blood of the Victims Calls to Us” (March 27, 1911), trans. Chana Pollack, Jewish Daily Forward, March 15, 2011, www.forward.com/articles/136161/.
35 “Come and pay your last respects”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 396.
Chapter 9
1 “to bestride the Lower East Side like a colossus”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 405.
2 “only the electric sign of the Jewish Daily Forward”: Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), p. 107.
3 “restless and unsettled,”: Abraham Cahan, “The Dreyfus Trial,” trans. Chana Pollack, Forward, May 19, 2010, www.forward.com/articles/128150.
4 “ ‘You probably want to be with your Jewish friends’ ”: Ibid. 110 “inexplicably nervous”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 351.
5 “pleasant, almost childish smile”: Ibid., p. 351.
6 Dreyfus “viewed himself as merely a symbol,”: Ibid., pp. 351–52.
7 Lenin was living incognito: Ibid., p. 353.
8 “When I had immigrated to America”: Ibid, p. 355.
9 “our politics is that Jews must”: Ibid p. 356.
10 “when whole days are spent on such”: Ibid., p. 357.
11 “as healthy as a brick building”: Ibid, p. 358.
12 “Tailors on Brink of a Complete Victory,”: Sanders, Downtown p. 405.
13 “The Great Tailors’ Strike Settled”: Ibid., p. 407.
14 “To the Warheit!”; “The Warheit, the Center of the Revolution”: Ibid., pp. 408–9.
15 “The hungry expressed satisfaction”; “unruly children”: Ibid., p. 410.
16 “felt years younger and took juvenile pleasure”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 362.
17 a circulation of nearly 140,000: Ibid., p. 362.
18 “a condition which provided grist”: Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), p. 1.
19 “We believe the reasons there are the same”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 366.
20 “trying harder to understand his position”: Ibid., p. 367.
21 “irrational race hatred; fanatic, ingrained”: Ibid., pp. 368–69.
22 “many kindnesses,”: Ibid., p. 369.
23 most likely contributed to Frank’s lynching: Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise (New York: Pantheon, 2003), pp. 590–92.
24 The heady optimism among European socialists: Sanders, Downtown, pp. 428–29.
25 “Stories of Tammany violence and fraud”: Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, p. 173.
26 “I do not expect to work wonders in Congress,”: London quoted in Howe, World, p. 315.
27 “the special representative of the alleged”: Ibid., p. 314.
28 “fountainhead of socialist thought and doctrine”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 371.
29 “The Great War came closer”: Henry Roth, Mercy of a Rude Stream: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, vol. 1 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994–98), pp. 74–75.
30 “The blood curdles, the brain splits”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 371, citing Forward editorial of Sept. 3, 1914.
31 “I am convinced that in the interests”: This quotation and those in following paragraphs are drawn from Pollock, “Clarinetist,” pp. 371ff.
32 Germany certainly did its best: See Howard M. Sacher, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 239–40.
33 “Nearly all the public expressions”: Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars and Communism: The Attitude of American Jews to World War I, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and Communism (1914–1945), vol. 1 (New York: KTAV Publishing House), p. 8.
34 Philipp Scheidemann: Gennady Estraikh, “The Berlin Bureau of the New York Forverts,” in Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture, eds. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), p. 144.
35 “Mecca of socialism,”: Ibid., p. 141.
36 “adopt Germany’s proposal that he forbid”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” p. 377.
37 “not renounce its convictions,”: Howe, World, pp. 539–40.
38 “It is a fact, and we may as well”: Pollock, “Clarinetist,” pp. 376–77. It is unclear whether the interview was ever published.
39 “at no time could Cahan’s motives be suspect”: Ibid., p. 377.
40 “The Twilight of the Kings,”: Quoted in Lloyd Wendt, Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper (New York: Rand McNally, 1979), pp. 407–8.
41 “That which has long been awaited”: Ronald Sanders, Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration (New York: Schocken, 1988), p. 296.
42 “As if by magic,”: B. Razman, Forward, March 30, 1917; quoted in Pollock, “Clarinetist,” pp. 378–79.
43 “His Majesty’s Government view with favor”: Text from Balfour Declaration in Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Jerusalem (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011), p. 415.
44 “Declaration should really be named for Lloyd George”: Ibid., p. 415.
45 “we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda”: Sebag-Montefiore, Jerusalem, p. 414.
46 “the friendship of the Jews of the World”: Ibid.
47 “mighty change that socialist enlightenment has brought”: Abraham Cahan, “The ‘Victory’ of Zionism and the Socialist Enlightenment of the Masses,” Forward editorial, December 1, 1917.
48 “This changes none of our problems”: Ibid.
49 “Economic interests will ensure that”: Ibid.
50 “personally … sympathetic to the movement”: Quoted in Moses Rischin, “The Promised Land in 1925: America, Palestine, and Abraham Cahan,” YIVO Annual 22 (1995), p. 85.
51 “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past”: Quoted in Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics (New York: Times Books, 1983), pp. 113–14.
Chapter 10
1 “to eat a mint cake”: This phenomenon is described in John Geiger, The Third Man Factor (New York: Viking, 2009), reviewed in Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2009.
2 David Levinsky was born: This and all subsequent passages from the novel in this chapter are from Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Modern Library, 2001).
3 “the cartoonists of the Yiddish humor press”: Eddy Portnoy, “Ab. Cahan Hates Cartoons,” reprinted in Jewish Daily Forward, May 19, 2010, http://forward.com/articles/128146/ab-c
ahan-hates-cartoons/.
4 “spiritual obscenity”: Marovitz, Abraham Cahan, p. 163.
5 “that type of Jew who raises the gorge”: Ibid., p. 164.
6 “Among the many different kinds of immigrants”: “Vital Problems in Current Novels,” New York Times, September 16, 1917.
7 John Macy, writing in The Dial, … seer”: Marovitz, Abraham Cahan, p. 163.
8 “pretty great autobiographical novel.”: Ibid., p. 153.
9 “David Levinsky seems to become”: Sanders, Downtown, p. 419.
10 “the differences between the author and his central character”: Marovitz citing Jules Zanger, Abraham Cahan, p. 154.
11 “a very intelligent and well-read woman”: David Shub, On the Revolving Stage of History: Recollections of People and Events in Russia and the West (New York: Cyco, 1970), chap. 80. The quotations are translated from the Yiddish by Gloria Sosin.
12 “Anyuta, it is a gem.”: Ibid.
13 “Not only will I never translate”: Ibid.
14 “the most important Jewish anticommunist”: Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 49.
15 “if a reversion to the Spanish inquisition”: Ibid., p. 50.
16 “politely declined to deal with the committee”: “Report of the Investigating Committee of Five,” Soviet Russia [published by of Friends of Soviet Russia], Nov. 1, 1922, p. 238.
17 “Russia has at present”: Powers, Not Without Honor, p. 50; also Howe, World, p. 542.
18 one of the first newspapers in America: Howe, World, p. 542 and J. C. Rich, Sixty Years of the Jewish Daily Forward (New York: Forward Association, 1957), p. 30. Howe writes of the comparison of the Forward to Hearst’s publications because of “anti-Sovietism.”
19 “compilation of the most loathsome back stairs gossip”: “Socialist Party National Convention Delegates Remain Silent in Face of Attack on Soviet Russia: Cahan Rages in Attack on Soviet Rule.” The Worker, June 2, 1923, online at http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1923/06/0602-wicks-spconvention.pdf.
20 “notorious Bolshevik baiter”: Ibid. 144 “bombastic windbag”: Ibid.