The moral evolution of the Russian–Yiddish–English writer Abraham Cahan

Abstract

One of the ways in which Cahan remained culturally Russian was his devotion to the kind of literary realism that embodies a clear system of values. This article examines the kind of values Cahan promoted, looking specifically at how this writer of educative but realist fiction dealt with the disconnect between socialist ideals and immigrant life. It follows the evolution of Cahan’s literary formula from the transparency of the early stories to the cynicism of The Rise of David Levinsky, seeing the seeds for transformation in the “Bintel Brief” advice column of the Forverts, which was executed and possibly written under Cahan’s direction. The moral vision of Levinsky is compared to that of two predecessors with which Cahan was familiar: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Pyotr Boborykin’s 1881 Russian novel Kitaigorod.