Abraham Cahan

Abraham Cahan
socialist newspaper editor and novelist
Born	July 7, 1860 Podberezhie, Belarus
Died	August 31, 1951 (age 91) New York City
Occupation	newspaper editor, writer
Language	Yiddish
Alma mater	Teachers Institute of Vilnius

Abraham "Abe" Cahan (July 7, 1860 – August 31, 1951) was a Belarusian-born Jewish-American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.

Abraham Cahan was born July 7, 1860, in Podberezhie in Belarus (at the time in Vilnius Governorate, Russian Empire), into an orthodox Litvak family. His grandfather was a rabbi in Vidz, Vitebsk, his father a teacher of Hebrew language and the Talmud. The devoutly religious family moved in 1866 to Vilnius, where the young Cahan received the usual Jewish preparatory education for the rabbinate. He, however, was attracted by secular knowledge and clandestinely studied the Russian language, ultimately prevailing on his parents to allow him to enter the Teachers Institute of Vilnius, from which he was graduated in 1881. He was appointed teacher in a Jewish government school in Velizh, Vitebsk, in the same year.

Abraham Cahan lived in Russia when the country was a pre-industrial Christian autocracy that restricted the travel, settlement, and educational opportunities of Jewish subjects. The Czarist government treated the Jewish minority as a distinct, autonomously governable population; it was subject to discrimination and even brutality. By 1879, when Cahan was still a teenager, he had associated himself with the growing radical revolutionary movement in Russia. After Czar Alexander II was assassinated by a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in March 1881, all revolutionary sympathizers became suspect to the Russian police. In 1882 the Russian police searched Cahan’s room for radical publications that could be linked to the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The visit from the police prompted the young socialist schoolteacher to join the great emigration of Russian Jews to the United States that was under way (at the time, three quarters of Jewish immigrants to America came from the Russian Empire). Cahan arrived by steamboat in Philadelphia on June 6 of 1882 at the age of 21 and immediately traveled to New York, where he would live for the remainder of his life.