Word: cahan
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...angry roar subsided; the tailors broke into cheers. They and their children and grandchildren have been cheering the paper ever since. For Ab Cahan's Forward, biggest U.S. Yiddish-language daily, has been the most influential single institution in helping many immigrants adjust to American life. Last week at a dinner in Manhattan's Hotel Commodore, 1,500 admirers paid tribute to Ab Cahan (rhymes with Don) in celebration of his 90th birthday and his 48th year as editor of the Forward. From President Truman, Britain's Herbert Morrison, Israel's Prime Minister Ben-Gurion...
Young Teacher. Ab Cahan was a young teacher in Vilna, and a Marxian Socialist, when the Czar's police began shadowing him. He fled to New York, got work in a cigar factory. To learn English well, 22-year-old Ab Cahan unashamedly went to grade school with children, working nights so that he could do so. He devoted his spare time to the Socialist and labor movements, by 1885 was editing the Socialist weekly Arbeiter Zeitung and writing perceptive short stories about East Side Jews. His novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, written in 1917, is still regarded...
After a spell as a reporter for City Editor Lincoln Steffens of the Commercial Advertiser and for the New York Sun, Cahan in 1902 became editor of the then struggling Forward, which he had helped found five years before. Cahan found a paper with a picayunish circulation of 6,000, full of tedious, dust-dry Socialist polemics, written in jabberwocky that few garment workers could understand...
...Cahan substituted lively feature stories. To make his writers stop using long words, Ab would call in the elevator operator to see if he could understand their stories. He gave his readers such homely advice as urging mothers to see that their children carried handkerchiefs. When his sponsors protested such trivialities, Ab asked: "Since when is Socialism opposed to clean noses...
Shrinking Success. By 1922, the Forward was selling 225,000 copies a day, its circulation peak. But Cahan's own measurement of success was the rapidity with which Jewish immigrants were absorbed into American life and turned to non-Yiddish papers. In effect, the paper's success could be measured by its drop in circulation. How well Cahan has succeeded may be gauged by the fact that the Forward, though still the biggest Yiddish daily, has dwindled to 83,226 daily and 94,390 Sunday. One of Cahan's favorite jokes is that for every $4 made...