Abraham
Cahan, the son of a school teacher, was born in a Lithuanian village
in Russia in 1860. He emigrated to the
United States in 1882 and settled in the Lower East Side of New
York. Cahan worked in a factory and became involved in trade
union activities.
In 1897 Cahan founded the Jewish Daily Forward
and turned it into a mass-circulation daily. A committed socialist,
Cahan became a leading figure in the American
Socialist Party. Cahan novel, Yekl, a
Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) won the enthusiastic
support of the literary critic, William
Dean Howells, and was praised for the realistic treatment of Jewish
immigrant life.
Cahan's best known novel, The Rise of David
Levinsky was published in 1917. The book tells the story
of an ambitious immigrant who abandons the practices of Judaism in
order to be successful. Abraham Cahan died in 1951.
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