Tuesday, January 21, 2014

The Rise of Abraham Cahan / Seth Lipsky 224 p.

Abraham Cahan founded the Yiddish-language newspaper Jewish Daily Forward in 1897, having come to New York from Vilna (Vilnius), then part of Imperial Russia.  The Forward in its heyday had a national circulation of 275,000, making it one of the most influential papers of its time.  (It is still published today, weekly in English and bi-weekly in Yiddish; in fact, you can look at this week's copy right on the newspaper shelves at our own UCPL. )  Cahan and the paper he founded were vigorous advocates of trade unionism and social democracy.  In his career he interviewed Lenin and Dreyfus; Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for the paper.

I liked the man who emerged from this relatively brief portrait by Lipsky.  But in many ways this book is more a portrait of Cahan's time and place - Yiddish-speaking, lower east side New York in the first half of the 20th century - and the importance of journalism to this era, than of the man Abraham Cahan.  There's nothing wrong with this emphasis.  But when I'm reading a biography, or a quasi biography, I enjoy having a stronger sense of the person than I got here.

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