Abraham Cahan

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Early life and childhood

Abraham Cahan was born in Paber, Lithuania, on July 7, 1860, (at the time in Vilnius Governorate, Russian Empire) and became an Orthodox, Litvak family. His grandfather was a rabbi in Vidz, Vitebsk, and his father, a Hebrew and Talmud teacher, was a rabbi. In 1866, the devoutly religious family migrated to Vilnius, where the young Cahan aspired to be a rabbi. He was attracted by secular wisdom and clandestinely studied Russian, eventually requesting that his parents allow him to study at the Teachers Institute of Vilnius, which he graduated in 1881. In the same year, he was hired as a tutor in a Jewish school funded by the Russian government in Velizh, Vitebsk.

Both the government and the Russian Orthodox Church in Czarist Russia placed limits on travel, settlement, and educational opportunities for Jewish students, who were subjected to discrimination and violence. Cahan had identified himself with Russia's growing nirvana by 1879, when he was still a youth. All revolutionary sympathizers became suspects of the Russian police after Emperor Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by a Socialist Revolutionary Party member in March 1881. The Russian police searched Cahan's room for radical journals that could be traced to the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1882. The police teacher's tour inspired the young socialist schoolteacher to join the growing migration of Russian Jews to the United States, which was under pressure (at the time, three quarters of Jewish immigrants to the United States came from the Russian Empire). Cahan arrived by steamboat in Philadelphia on June 6, 1882, at the age of 21, and immediately moved to New York City, where he would live for the remainder of his life.

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Career

Cahan attended his first American socialist meeting in July 1882, just over a month after arriving in the United States, and a month later, he delivered his first socialist address in Yiddish. Despite the fact that American society is a significant improvement over life in Russia, he began to voiced some reservations of American life from a Marxist viewpoint.

Cahan quickly understood English. He began teaching English to working-class Jewish immigrants in 1883, in addition to writing for various publications. He worked at the Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA) and often integrated socialist speeches into his lesson plans. In 1887, Cahan officially joined the Socialist Labour Party of America. Cahan's education in Russian and English, as well as his literary and journalistic skills, enabled him to flourish as a socialist, and toward the end of his career, he was regarded as a leading figure of the orthodox Jewish left.

Cahan believed that immigrants would need to combine formal education with informal research about local life and community customs in order to achieve not only an education but also integration into American society, in keeping with his socialist ideals. He also advised women to use service and education to raise their status in society.

Cahan, a writer who arrived in America, wrote articles on socialism and science, as well as translated literary works for the pages of the Worker Zeitung, the Yiddish language newspaper., lit. (Worker's Newspaper) Cahan edited the Arbeiter Zeitung from 1891 to 1895, then took over as editor of the newspaper Di Tsuuddish (Yiddish:, lit. : 'The Future') from 1887 to 1887. Cahan was later promoted to full-time reporter for the New York Commercial Advertiser, and it was in this capacity as an apprentice of reporter Lincoln Steffens that prepared him for his forthcoming role as a founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Cahan founded the Forward while juggling multiple newspaper jobs and releasing the newspaper's first issue in 1897.

The horror of the Kishinev pogrom, which the Forward chronicled extensively, inspired Cahan to take over the Forward full time in 1903, taking over complete editorial control and running the newspaper full-time until 1946. Cahan converted the self-identified socialist newspaper from an obscure paper with fewer than 6000 readers to the forefront of Yiddish journalism in his years as a reporter at the Forward. The Jewish Daily Forward became a symbol of American socialism and Jewish immigration, and it took on the role of an Americanizing agent for educating its readers in the country's social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions. Cahan was chastised by fellow Jewish journalists for limiting the Forward to Jewish topics but he wrote on a variety of topics, including respecting his readers' religious convictions and advocating a more moderate and reformist version of socialist politics as time progressed.

Cahan distinguished himself by writing about the cultural and historical transformation of immigrants into Americans rather than just Yiddish literature. Cahan's first short story, "A Providential Match," was published in 1896, and a year later, he published Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, a New York Ghetto (later filmed as Hester Street). Cahan had already published six of his stories in a variety of well-known magazines by 1901. The Rise of David Levinsky, a semi-autobiographical book that related Cahan's own experience of immigration, chronicled a Jewish immigrant's journey of Americanization and the display of Jewish-socialist cultural institutions in New York, and it was Cahan's most popular book.

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