Abraham Cahan
Abraham Cahan (born July 7, 1860 in Podberesy , now in Smarhon Raion in Belarus ; died August 31, 1951 in New York City ) was an American journalist, publicist and writer. He wrote his works partly in Yiddish and partly in English .
Life
In Lithuania he took part in anti-Tsarist activities during his student days and fled to the United States in 1882 for fear of arrest. There he soon worked as a journalist and wrote articles for the Jewish Arbeiter Zeitung . In 1896 he became famous with the novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), written in English, which thematized the situation of Jewish immigrants in the USA in a documentary- naturalistic way. As a book template for the film Hester Street , Yekl found new attention in 1975. In 1917, Cahan took up the subject again in The Rise of David Levinsky , which is now considered one of the most important novels about the experience of immigrants in the United States.
On April 22, 1897 he founded the Yiddish-language daily Vorwärts (English. The Forward ), which reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies at its heyday and thus became the largest non-English-language newspaper in the USA; the paper is still published today in Yiddish and English (since 2019 only electronically).
From 1926 to 1931 Cahan published the five-volume autobiography Bleter fun mein Leben .
Secondary literature
- Sanford E. Marovitz and Lewis Fried: Abraham Cahan (1860-1951). An Annotated Bibliography . In: American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 197-243
- Jules Chametzky: From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan . University of Massachusetts Press , Amherst 1977, ISBN 978-0870232251
- Julian Levinson: Forverts. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 359-361.
- Seth Lipsky: The Rise of Abraham Cahan . Schocken, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0805242102
- Sanford E. Marovitz: Abraham Cahan . Twayne, New York 1996, ISBN 9780805739930 (= Twayne's United States Authors Series, 670)
- Marianne Schüz: Between Appeal and Accusation: The Short Stories Abraham Cahans and Anzia Yezierskas 1890–1920 . Peter Lang, Bern 1991, ISBN 9783631439432
- Pascal Fischer: Yidishkeyt and Jewishness. Identity in Jewish-American literature with special attention to language: Cahan's “Yekl”, Lewisohn's “The island within”, Roth's “Call it sleep”, Malamud's “The assistant” . Winter, Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 3-8253-1567-3 . Zugl .: Würzburg, Univ., Diss., 2003 (Vita p. 23 f.)
- Horst Immel: Literary design variants of the immigrant novel in American and Anglo-Canadian literature. Grove , Cahan, Rölvaag , Henry Roth . Peter Lang, Bern 1987 (Mainz Studies in American Studies, 21). Additional: Diss. Phil., University of Mainz 1986
Web links
- Literature by and about Abraham Cahan in the catalog of the German National Library
- Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto . Original English text on: ibiblio.org . Retrieved April 11, 2015.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cahan, Abraham |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American journalist, publicist and writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 7, 1860 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Podberesy , now Belarus |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 31, 1951 |
| Place of death | New York City |