The White Terror and The Red

Abraham Cahan was arguably the most influential Jewish American, culturally and artistically, in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1860 in Vilna, Lithuania, the son of Jewish teachers, Cahan received a fairly broad education during his adolescent years. He graduated from the Vilna Teachers Institute in 1881 and began teaching in the town of Velizh. Over the next several months he became involved in the radical revolutionary movement. After the assassination of Czar Alexander of Russia, he and other socialists were forced to flee the region. Cahan emigrated to the United States in 1882 as a result, eventually settling in New York. Over the next several years he established a reputation within socialist and labor circles as an articulate and persuasive journalistic advocate. In 1890 he assumed the editorship of a Hebrew Trades newspaper, to which he also contributed columns that combined Jewish cultural materials with Marxist ideology.By the mid-1890s Cahan began writing fiction. His first success came in 1896 with the publication of his novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. Praised by leading critics such as William Dean Howells, Yekl established Cahan as a keen observer of the seemingly oppressive social forces bearing down on the immigrant classes at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1898 his The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto appeared, and over the next decade he published numerous additional short stories in national magazines. Cahan also wrote several important novels in the early decades of the twentieth century, including The White Terror and the Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia (1905) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). In addition to publishing fiction, he served for more than forty years as editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, a socialist Yiddish newspaper with a reputation for addressing the everyday struggles faced by its massive immigrant readership. In the final years of his life, he was hampered by illness. Abraham Cahan died at the age of 91 in 1951.