David Levinsky

7 Pages 1651 Words

n the traditional world of Jewish religious life he, nonetheless, became a socialist. Fleeing the Russian programs of 1881, he arrived in New York at the beginning of the largest Jewish wave of immigration to America. He quickly involved himself in the intellectual and political life of the Lower East Side. Working odd factory jobs, he gradually established himself as a trade union activist and journalist. He also began writing fiction in Yiddish and English.

In 1897, Cahan co-founded the Jewish Daily Forward, which would become the largest Yiddish language newspaper in the world. He edited the paper from 1902 until his death in 1951. He was considered uniquely qualified for this position because he seemed to have his feet in three worlds: the Yiddish, the Russian and the American. As such, he was able to write as an insider about the tensions inherent in acculturation, a word invented in the 1880s to describe the immigrant experience of adaptation to a new world.

Though he wrote several other English and Yiddish short stories and nov...