Abraham Cahan

In Abraham Cahan, Sanford E. Marovitz relates in telling detail Cahan's rise from green newspaperman to discriminating novelist and shrewd editor of the daily Yiddish Forward. After a difficult start, Cahan, a founder of the Forward, edited the paper for nearly 50 years, bringing its circulation to an impressive quarter million during its heyday in the early 1920s. An ardent advocate of assimilation, Cahan saw the Forward as a means of acculturating newly arrived Jewish immigrants to America and helping them gain economic stability. Although Cahan was first and last a newspaperman, he wrote…