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Zusatztext 77568512 Informationen zum Autor Seth Lipsky Klappentext Part of the Jewish Encounters seriesThe first general-interest biography of the legendary editor of the Jewish Daily Forward! the newspaper of Yiddish-speaking immigrants that inspired! educated! and entertained millions of readers; helped redefine journalism during its golden age; and transformed American culture. Already a noted journalist writing for both English-language and Yiddish newspapers! Abraham Cahan founded the Yiddish daily in New York City in 1897. Over the next fifty years he turned it into a national newspaper that changed American politics and earned him the adulation of millions of Jewish immigrants and the friendship of the greatest newspapermen of his day! from Lincoln Steffens to H. L. Mencken. Cahan did more than cover the news. He led revolutionary reforms-spreading social democracy! organizing labor unions! battling communism! and assimilating immigrant Jews into American society! most notably via his groundbreaking advice column! A Bintel Brief. Cahan was also a celebrated novelist whose works are read and studied to this day as brilliant examples of fiction that turned the immigrant narrative into an art form. Acclaimed journalist Seth Lipsky gives us the fascinating story of a man of profound contradictions: an avowed socialist who wrote fiction with transcendent sympathy for a wealthy manufacturer! an internationalist who turned against the anti-Zionism of the left! an assimilationist whose final battle was against religious apostasy. Lipsky's Cahan is a prism through which to understand the paradoxes and transformations of the American Jewish experience. A towering newspaperman in the manner of Horace Greeley and Joseph Pulitzer! Abraham Cahan revolutionized our idea of what newspapers could accomplish.(With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations.) Leseprobe 1 Sometimes, when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lower depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. 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. So Abraham Cahan began his literary masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky, a novel about a Jewish boy from Russia who comes to America, abandons his religious orthodoxy, and plunges into the world of business, only to find wealth but lose his soul. The novel, published in 1917 by Harper & Brothers when Cahan was fifty-seven, wasn’t precisely autobiographical. Cahan had arrived in America in 1882 and had made his mark not in the cloak-and-suit trade but in the world of newspapers, politics, and literature. It is unlikely that he was worth anything near two million dollars, but he resided in a handsome house in Greenwich Village and moved comfortably at the highest levels of political life in New York and Washington. Over the course of his life, however, Cahan went through a metamorphosis not unlike that of his fictional hero. He was born on July 7, 1860, in the Lithuanian village of Podberez’ye and spent his boyhood in Vilna. His father, Scharkne Cahan, was a religious teacher and tavernkeeper; his mother, Sarah Goldbreiter, was an educated woman who taught reading and writing to girls and kept house. Cahan was blessed—or burdened—with an extraordinary memory. It stood him in good stead when, in his sixties, he sat down to write a memoir he called Bleter Fun Mein Leben (Pages from My Life). It ultimately ran to five volu...
