[On
June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming
the first
Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories
of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special
weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]
On the pioneering Jewish American author who crossed numerous genre and social boundaries.
There are a lot of compelling reasons to tear down the walls that,
for much of the 20th century at least (and I would say still
frustratingly frequently in the 21st century), were erected between
different academic majors and scholarly disciplines: literature, history,
journalism, political science, and so on. At the broadest levels, the simple
reality is that American culture and society and identity comprises an
interconnected mixture of all those areas, and many others besides; so if the
concept of AmericanStudies means anything, it certainly means a methodology and
understanding that brings those distinct disciplines into conversation with
each other. Yet there’s also a more specific and perhaps even more salient
argument against such disciplinary divisions: many if not most individual
authors (like most individuals period) don’t adhere to them in their careers
and lives; and the more we try to force those authors into one category or
another, the more we elide the diversity and depth, and thus the real value, of
their works and voices.
An exemplary case in this point is that of Abraham Cahan
(1860-1951). I first encountered Cahan through his fiction, generally
considered the first works
of Jewish American fiction (at least the first published in English); and
particularly through his epic masterpiece of immigration and Jewish American
life, the New York ghetto, the shifting meanings of the Talmud and other Jewish
traditions in the Old and New Worlds, and the worlds of sweatshops and the
garment industry, The Rise of
David Levinksy (1917). If Cahan were only remembered for such works,
or even solely for Rise, I believe
he’d still be well-remembered: the novel is both an incredibly detailed and
compelling realistic portrayal of those and many other social themes and topics
and a complex psychological depiction of its title character; David’s perhaps
unreliable first-person narration thus serves both as our guide through these
social experiences and worlds and as a central subject in its own right, one we
have to analyze as well as hear. The book thus serves as a great transitional
text between the realist and modernist eras in American fiction, as well as a
powerful social document and primary source; in and of itself it allows us to
cross disciplines, to consider aspects of history and politics, economics and
religion, ethnicity and assimilation, and many others as well as its literary
elements and details.
Yet
Cahan did not limit his engagement with those questions to his fictional works,
and likewise no reading of him is complete if it remains so circumscribed. For
example, Cahan served for
more than forty years (1903-1946) as the editor of the Yiddish-language
daily newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts), and as
part of that role he himself wrote an advice column he called A Bintel Brief;
without any doubt the sum total of words he produced for that column far
outstrips even the 800-page Rise, and
in the course of those columns he covered a far greater range of topics and
questions, and of course his perspective and writing evolved and deepened far
more than they could in any individual novel. There is at least one more hugely
prominent genre in Cahan’s career: while the Forward’s politics were explicitly radical (it was founded by the
same Jewish socialist organizations to which Cahan belonged from very early
after his immigration to America in 1881), the Bintel Brief tended to address topics other than political ones; so
was in numerous other publications and pamphlets, including the Socialist Labor
Party of America’s Yiddish-language paper, Arbeiter Zeitung
(Workers’ News), that Cahan produced his voluminous radical texts. And
that’s to say nothing of the five-volume
autobiography he wrote in Yiddish (with the first three volumes translated
into English) in his later years.
From a purely
literary critical perspective, being aware of—and ideally reading at least
excerpts from—these other works greatly informs an analysis of Cahan’s fiction,
makes clear both the differences in his styles and goals across these genres
and the social and political contexts in which he was always working. But from
an AmericanStudies—and an American—perspective, such awareness is even more
key; it’s in his full range of efforts that Cahan can illuminate so fully a
plethora of national themes, from immigration and ethnicity to labor and
reform, from multilingualism to early 20th century urbanization.
Cahan, like America, knew no disciplinary boundaries—and neither, ultimately,
should we. Next journey tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?
