For students of early twentieth-century Jewish American literature and culture, Seth Lipsky’s compact chronicle of the life and times of Abraham Cahan will be of only limited interest. Distilled from a modest range of primary and secondary sources—above all from Cahan’s autobiography, The Education of Abraham Cahan (1969); Ronald Sanders’s still richly evocative The Downtown Jews (1969); and an unpublished 1959 dissertation on Cahan’s life by Theodore Marvin Pollock—Lipsky offers a fiercely chronological and surprisingly partisan account of Cahan’s life.
For Lipsky, as all previous students of Cahan have observed, Cahan’s journey to America in 1881 mirrors the collective uprooting of millions of Jews—exiles from across the Pale of Settlement seeking new lives in a bewildering, and often unwelcoming, new world. In his journalism and above all in his fiction, Cahan registered the anxieties and hopes of his fellow immigrants. Lipsky argues that Cahan himself, like his famous alter ego...
