Among the distinguished American Jews of the third and largest wave of immigration to these shores, there was hardly one more representative than Abraham Cahan, at least of one of the two dominant strains of the East European cultural heritage. Novelist, essayist, socialist, and for fifty-three years editor of the Jewish Daily Forward in New York, Cahan looms large over the history of the development of the American Jewish pattern. This personality, which so strongly placed its mark on the American scene, had its growth in 19th-century Vilna, a city that was for hundreds of years a great center of Jewish life and culture. William and Sarah Schack, drawing their material from the first volume of Cahan’s five-volume autobiography (still not translated into English), try here to describe what it was that Cahan brought with him to America. 

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There are two Vilnas. The one most of our grandfathers associated with the name was the Vilna so renowned for its traditional Jewish learning that it was called “the mother city in Israel,” and also, apparently first by Napoleon during his Russian campaign, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Although the years 1620–1648, when some forty famous rabbis lived in the city at the same time, are regarded as the climax of this renaissance, 18th-century Vilna, too, produced distinguished men of learning, not the least of whom was Elijah Vilna, the Vilna Gaon (sage), who created a sensation at the age of seven by delivering a Talmudic discourse in the Great Synagogue, and then lived up to this promise for seventy years more.

But in the first half of the 19th century another Vilna emerged, which though contemporaneous with our grandfathers’, never supplanted in their minds the earlier image of pious, learned Vilna. This Vilna was a leading center of the Enlightenment and turned away from traditional Jewish to modern European learning. Secular Vilna too developed its many well-known scholars, authors, and also a new breed—journalists. Several of its journalists later emigrated and became dominant figures in the American Yiddish press: Hirsh Gershuni, who founded Die Post in 1870; Louis Miller, editor of Die Vahrheit; Peter Wiernick, editor of Der Morgen-Journal; and Abraham Cahan, editor of Forverts (Forward) from 1898 on—with a few years out for English-language journalism—until his death, at the age of ninety-one, in 1951.

The differences between the devotees of the old and the new learning were sharp and led to bitter emotional and moral conflicts—most bitter when they coincided with the natural conflict between the generations. Such was the logical pattern of this Jewish “Battle of the Books”; but in actual life the pattern was not always, perhaps not usually, so well defined. The conflict as it was actually lived is vividly portrayed in the first volume of Abraham Cahan’s five-volume autobiography, Pages of My Life.1 As memorable as his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Cahan’s autobiography is an entirely direct and personal narrative which yet documents in vivid detail the impact of a changing period on a whole sector of the younger generation. There is perhaps no book that paints so accurate a portrait of the East European intellectual of the generation that flowered at the turn of the century and was destined to play so large a part in the political and cultural life not only of Europe but of the lands of their immigration.

Considering the author’s identification from his first years in this country with the Socialist and labor movements, his longstanding commitment to rationalism in his general as well as social philosophy (he was in his sixties when he wrote his memoirs), and the habitually dogmatic character of his opinions, Pages of My Life is remarkable for being free of any thesis or ideological prepossession. One might have thought, a little maliciously, that even though he had not discarded kapote and Torah the minute he was old enough to know his own mind, Cahan would have “corrected” this fact in his recollections. But in his writing he remained the naturalist he had always been, with almost all the objectivity he shows in his famous novel; he tells his story “exactly as it happened,” with all its trials and retreats, and without making any attempt to shape it into a triumphal ode to modern ideas.

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Cahan would seem to have been drawn since early childhood towards modern—i.e. Russian—life and away from Jewish tradition. But in the period in which he grew up (he was born in 1860 in Podberezhie, a hamlet near Vilna), the Jews made up more than 40 per cent of the population of the city, so that it was easy for them to satisfy all their needs, physical, social, and spiritual, within their own community. The Russian world was only a single courtyard away from the solidly Jewish neighborhood where the Cahans lived, yet few boys ventured the short walk to Cathedral Square, which had impressed Cahan as a child most by its theater and riding academy (which housed the circus when it came to town). Nearby, too, was the home of the Governor-General; the poorest of the Czar’s subjects might gaze through its gates at that wonder of wonders, a water fountain in play. With a friend, the boy wandered further afield to the barracks of the 27th Division, fascinated by the brute harmony of the beat of drums and blare of trumpets, by the men moving stiffly in close-order drill, and by the vivid colors of banner, cap, and epaulet. He learned the names of many officers and memorized the insignia of rank. When the troops moved out of the parade ground for field maneuvers at Shnipeshok, which was then outside the city, he went right along to watch, accompanied by his friend, who carried a baby brother in his arms. Perhaps it was only the surface glamor of military life, which appeals to all children—the compelling two-four rhythm, the uniforms shining brilliantly in the sunshine—that exercised its spell on these two youngsters from an alien world. But their learning the officers’ names—surely beyond the call of ordinary curiosity—suggests another attraction: the sound of Russian words. For the Russian language was to be the medium of Westernization of Cahan’s mind. His education was pulled first one way and then another by his different enthusiasms, but of one thing he was sure at an early age: that he had to learn Russian well.

One cheder he attended was established in the same courtyard as the Russian print shop of the Romm publishing company, widely known for its editions of the Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, and many other pious books. From the balcony the boy watched the compositors at work; down below, he would often find slugs of Russian type, trading them with his companions as children here swap pictures of ball players. When the teacher became aware of this, he forbade them to touch these drucklach: it was against the law. They did not know then, Cahan any more than the rest, that the government was trying to keep type metal from reaching the underground press; he didn’t know there was such a thing as a revolutionary movement at all. If he could not play with Russian type, he was not forbidden to look at its imprint on paper, and he taught himself to read the language from random books. By the time he was thirteen he knew Russian so well that he was able to translate aloud, for the benefit of a large gathering of his fellow yeshiva students and their fathers, a new decree of Alexander II’s making all twenty-one-year olds, Jews and Gentiles alike, individually subject to conscription. The law marked an important change, for previously the Jewish community had been responsible for a quota of recruits and some boys could buy their way out. Yet knowledge of Russian was so limited that he was, Cahan says, the only boy in the school who could read the text. (Later on he earned sixty rubles writing up the affidavits of those who had no birth certificates.)

Nevertheless, he still listened to maggidim (lay preachers) and prepared his Bar Mitzvah speech with a special tutor, carrying it off in style, and even went on to a well-known yeshiva until his impoverished parents began to worry about his future. Lest he fall to drifting like his father, a gentle soul who had proved equally ineffectual as melamed (teacher), innkeeper, and bookkeeper, it was decided that the boy should learn a trade. He was apprenticed to a turner, who used him as a combination errand boy and toolroom clerk. There were seventy-seven tools in the inventory, and he would have to pay for any missing ones. When he complained about the place, his mother said, “You’ll always be a pauper like your father.” But a week of it was all he could take. After he had made a hysterical scene at home, his parents took him out of his apprenticeship and sent him back to a yeshiva to continue his study of Gemara.

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At the same time he began to be conscious of his preference for the bichl,2 the profane book. (At one time his father had been daring enough to think of allowing him to attend the Rabbinerschule, a Russian-language government institution for the training of “modern” rabbis. When he mentioned this at the yeshiva, his teacher said, “But your father is a respectable Jew. He will not make a goy of you. He will not”—and he chose the most humiliating term he could think of—“he will not allow you to go shmad [undergo conversion].”) Cahan was not content merely to read Russian, but devoted himself with almost fanatical energy to speaking it correctly. One day he ran into a childhood companion who was studying at a Folkschule, one of the schools the government set up for Jews, with Russian the language of instruction, in the hopes of promoting their assimilation. Cahan was inspired to apply for admission and was accepted into the second grade, where he delighted in his class in Russian reading, spelling, and grammar.

There was another wonderful subject not taught in cheder or yeshiva: arithmetic. In the ordinary course of living, boys at these institutions might learn to count and to add and subtract whole numbers. But what about fractions? Could a cheder yingl add two and one-quarter plus four and one-half plus seven and three-sixteenths . . . ? And that wasn’t all there was to arithmetic. A man starts walking from Moscow to a village six miles distant at eight o’clock in the morning. He walks at the rate of four miles an hour. Fifteen minutes later, a boy starts walking from this village toward Moscow at the rate of two miles an hour. What time do the boy and man meet, and at what distance from Moscow? Neither the Prayerbook nor the Gemara would help you solve fascinating problems like that. Young Cahan and his friends were very good at them; they bought three books full of such brain-teasers and started a Problems Club.

Geometry was an even greater mystery. Playing around with a compass, he was astonished by the relationship of radius to circumference, cord, altitude. . . . Here were truths more inspiring than rabbinic word-spinning. Mama’s comment on all this was: “There now, a new madness has got hold of him.”

His eyes were opened to more than pure learning as he saw an increasing number of Jewish boys in uniform—school uniforms, these were, of Gymnasium and Realschule; if not as gaudy as soldiers’ array, they, too, had a smart cut and glittering buttons. The boys who wore them were the haintige (modems), who no longer called their parents tateh and mameh but, high-tonedly, papasha and mamasha, like all good little Russians. Never did he envy their uniforms so much as on the day he went out near the Botanical Garden to watch a German tightrope-walker perform. Running into a friend in this Gentile neighborhood decked out in his school outfit, he was ashamed of his own long, drab brown, wrinkled kapotke. We can measure the depth of his feeling by the fact that he was surprised at his friend’s deigning to speak to him.

His traditional garb was to embarrass him even more acutely. Cahan was fifteen years old before he realized there was a public library in Vilna where he could read all the Russian books he wanted and not pay a kopeck for the privilege. The library stood opposite the Governor-General’s home (the one whose fountain he admired). He had often passed the gilt-lettered sign, “Public Library,” but had not thought of himself, a yeshiva bochur, as one of the public. Even after some of his more modem friends told him that it was as easy to get into the library as to join a Hasidic circle, it took him a whole year to summon up the courage to see if this miraculous thing were so. When he finally ventured in, he walked in timid awe through the quiet room and looked up the catalogue for a volume of Turgeniev. So far true—no one told him to get out. The librarian brought him his book. True again. But now the man said he would have to remove his overcoat before he could use the reading room. The boy explained that it was not an overcoat he was wearing but a kapote, with nothing under it but underwear. Still the librarian held on to the book, and the boy walked out, humiliated. But he was not going to have his education curtailed by a mere article of clothing. At home he clamored for a short jacket, perhaps unaware at the time that to his parents it was something more than an article of clothing—a symbol of Europeanism, of near-heresy. Yet they could not hold out against his persistence; they finally got hold of the cast-off jacket of a pharmacist relative and cut it down to his size. Thereafter the boy was a steady reader at the library. The event so impressed itself upon him that half a century later he vividly recalled the smell of the room, the look of the bindings, the taste of the brass cloakroom check—and how proudly he had consulted the thickest dictionary in the place.

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Cahan now thought of going from the Folkschule to the Teachers’ Institute. In 1873 this school had taken the place of the quarter-century-old Rabbinerschule : it was to train teachers for the government’s Jewish primary schools. Lacking a birth certificate (an exotic thing in Podberezhie which cost from fifteen to twenty rubles to have forged), it seemed a hopeless notion. On his own, he began an intensive study of Ivan Krylov’s fables, then in great vogue. He got to know them so well that, collaborating with a friend, he was able to translate several into Yiddish. But when he was encouraged by one of his teachers to perfect his Russian, he lost all interest in both Yiddish and Hebrew.

He was still trying to get into a higher school. Medicine and law were closed to him; the course of study was too long, the entrance requirements too rigid. The mathematics, Greek, and Latin that one needed could only be learned at the Gymnasium, which admitted very few Jews. What other professions might be taken up? He heard about a surveyors’ school in Pskov, and an agricultural school somewhere in Kiev Province. A district school in Trok[i] would prepare him for entrance into either of these two institutions and not make a fuss about a birth certificate and suchlike official papers. To Trok[i] he went and was put up in the home of a family friend, already overcrowded with a married daughter and a son-in-law who plied his tinsmith trade on the premises. But the school was more demanding than he had thought and did not find him qualified—he returned to Vilna.

Again he studied by himself, at the same time being afforded an opportunity to broaden his experience by his family’s moving into a small room in Horsemarket Square. The square was a hangout for petty grain-traders and the boy often heard Koenigsberg mentioned as a point of export—what was but a name in a geography book took on three dimensions. He also learned about the smalltime pickpockets that infested the market place, and he associated with the son of a Jewish soldier discharged from the army after long service—a class then rated lowest in the Jewish social scale. Cahan gave Russian lessons at the home of a fur-dyer to be able to buy the maps and geographies which expanded the world for him. In these he learned about the succession of the seasons, the movement of the planets, the phenomena of wind and rain—everywhere in the universe there was order, cause and effect: were not these the true miracles, rather than the ones recorded in the so-called holy books? And in this manifold revelation of law, what need, what room was there for God? Obviously, none whatever. He experienced a deep sense of liberation. If there was no God to fear, neither was there a Gehenna in which one was supposed to burn and broil. In an exultation of disbelief he even dared to curse the Name . . . until it occurred to him that there was no sense in vilifying God if he did not exist. But he continued to champion atheism, especially in discussion with the innocents of the yeshivas.

His social life widened when a friend introduced him to a “modern” home, where the floor was covered, not with sand, like his own, but with carpets, and where all the books were Russian, including translations of the exciting pioneer and Indian stories of Mayne Reid that “endeared him to millions of boys.” His friend had a talent for drawing which so impressed Cahan that, in emulation, he joined the same art class. Drawing tenaciously, erasing ceaselessly, doing geometric figures when he failed to realize more complexly contoured objects, he persisted until he was able to achieve a rigid sort of likeness. It was an act of will and intellect, not of art. The price of his persistence was an increasingly severe eye strain; in the end he became—literally, agonizingly—cross-eyed.

The drawing class also brought him into contact with Gentiles, who were in the majority. It seemed to him that they had a gift for gaiety his Jewish classmates lacked. One dismaying source of their laughter was the way the Jewish boys spoke Russian. To correct characteristic mispronunciations, and to learn the “sh” sound which flowed from the Vilna Litvak’s tongue as a sibilant “s,” became the concern of a group of Jewish boys with whom Cahan studied informally—all intent on getting into one kind of Russian school or another. Through tutoring, they made enough money to acquire an apartment of their own in a remote part of town. By way of relaxation from their arduous studies, they applied themselves just as arduously to learning ballroom dancing. On a Saturday afternoon (when, on the other side of the tracks, good Jews were digesting their tcholent) , they danced the quadrille and the lancers, with ladies present, some of them perhaps of dubious reputation.

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Cahan’s passion for a formal education finally brought him back to the city’s Teachers’ Institute when he was seventeen years old. It took a bit of finagling to obtain a birth certificate. Two of his uncles had to swear before the state rabbi and the captain of police that they “remembered exactly” when he was born. Helped along by two rubles, that statement produced the document. It had still to be witnessed, confirmed, and ratified by several governmental departments which knew nothing about the matter and so required something for their pains. All this took time—time enough for Cahan to have passed his seventeenth birthday, the maximum age for admission to the Institute. He then had to bribe the school director’s tailor to exert his influence to have the few extra months overlooked. (All these little gifts presumably added up to less than the price of a forged certificate.) Meanwhile, still doubtful that his Russian accent was good enough, he and two other applicants hired a student of the Institute as tutor. The day at last came when he went from room to room at the Institute for a series of oral exams. He passed them all and was accepted.

No longer need he walk as a stranger past that building, between the Realschule and the Roman Catholic Theological Seminary, standing in its small green park, from which a spacious tree-lined boulevard led to Cathedral Square. No longer need he envy its students their black cloth uniforms with wide shining visors on their caps, nor stand outside listening to the singing of lovely Russian folk songs in the dining room giving out onto the street. He actually lived there. It was clean and orderly beyond anything he had known. There were sheets on the beds, changed every week, and counterpanes for the quilts (quilts, not barbaric featherbeds). There was a parquet floor in the auditorium, and waxed red floors in the corridors lined with cases of minerals, anatomical models, statuary, and maps. There was gymnastic apparatus indoors and out. There was even, Cahan reported proudly on his first visit home, a fortepian. The food was kosher and far better than most of the boys knew at home: meat every day, and pot roast at that, not the boiled beef mama always cooked when she had any meat at all. Students were also exempt from military service; and to complete their blessings they were even given pocket money by the school.

Permission to go to town from Friday night through Saturday was granted those who had had a satisfactory report card for the week. Doffing their plain cotton weekday uniforms, they proudly put on the black dress uniforms which made them feel like “officers.” Those who could afford it bought collars to attach to their undershirts, converting them to dress shirts (which were not provided by the authorities); the others had to make do with the official black satin scarf wound about the neck. “Going to town” usually meant going home, but every two weeks “going to town” also meant a march to the town bath—part of the government’s plan, with the rest of the stimulating school environment, to “humanize” the Jews.

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Taking pleasure in all the good things of the school (a special tax on the Jewish community paid for them), young Cahan nevertheless very soon came to feel that its method of instruction was fundamentally wrong. It was too formal and mechanical—a Russian adaptation of what he called the German Junker system, but lacking the cultural elements included in the original. Everything had to be learned by heart—paraphrase was not even allowed for mathematical demonstrations. Apparently it was considered a first step toward thinking for oneself, and thinking for oneself was taboo—it might be the first step toward becoming a revolutionist. (To one high educational official of Vilna, even a wing collar smacked of revolution: he dubbed it “the collar with ideas” and threatened “to cut off the ideas.”) The twelve teachers on the staff, always dressed in handsome blue uniforms, the imperial eagle embossed on their brass buttons, and wearing starched white cuffs, stood aloof from the students. All but three were as mechanical in their approach to knowledge as the students, except that they had memorized their lessons from more advanced textbooks.

One of the exceptions was the prolific author (in Russian, Hebrew, and German) Yehoshua Steinberg, whom the authorities regarded so highly that they also made him censor for all Jewish publications. Author of the standard Russian work on Hebrew grammar and philology, and of a Russian-Hebrew dictionary, Steinberg impressed Cahan as a truly creative teacher of Hebrew grammar and the Bible. But the irony of it was that no one in the class had any interest in Hebrew; they were even ashamed of it; and they were satisfied just to get by, fooling their absent-minded and near-sighted teacher by cribbing from his own published translations from Russian into Hebrew, or from the corrected exercises of their companions. Nor were they more interested in another course—conducted, like Steinberg’s, in Russian—devoted to Jewish history, the Psalms, the Hebrew catechism, and the Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides did not have the answers they were looking for.

A third Jew on the staff, Eban by name, taught Russian songs, both patriotic and folk, and also trained a good choir. He condescended to teach at the Institute only as a favor to the head of the state’s education department, for he was not a pedagogue but a personage. His prestige, as conductor of the orchestra of the Vilna National Theater, was of the highest, and he lived like a lord. When Cahan, taken for the first time to this theater by a visiting rich uncle from St. Petersburg, saw Eban masterful in the pit, ringed around by the city’s officialdom and elegantsia, he seemed to the youth nothing less than the ruler of Vilna. Puffed out in a dress shirt lent him by his uncle, the boy sat stiffly through the performance of Lecocq’s Giroflé, Girofla, as much interested in the audience as in the operetta. (Later, he paid his own way to the gallery to see everything from tearjerker melodramas to Gogol’s The Inspector General.)

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All through his four years at the Institute Cahan was a mediocre student, just managing to squeeze by in all his courses. He was called lazy, but he was merely bored. When experiments were performed, however, he came to life; and when a subject aroused his curiosity, as did physics and crystallography, he studied them by himself. Reasoning, the give-and-take of free discussion—these were not in the curriculum, and he prized them most. He found himself scribbling verses occasionally, and more often reading the germinal—or at least the most talked of—books of the time, none of which of course were on the required reading list. Probably the most satisfying three days he spent at the school resulted from an act of insubordination. “Sadites! (Sit down!)” the teachers used to say when a boy’s memory failed during a recitation. No hint to get him started again—only sadites, and a bad mark in the little black book. One day the cumulative effect of the constant repetition of the obnoxious word was too much for Cahan and he cried out against it. He was sentenced to three days’ solitary confinement, bread and water, the floor for a bed. His prison was not a dungeon, though—it was the bathroom of the infirmary. There, for three whole days, without a dull moment, he luxuriated in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Cahan might have been able to tolerate the dull instruction if he had found stimulating companionship among his fellow students. But unlike those attending the Gymnasium, who were free to go where they pleased after school hours, the boys at the Institute were confined to its grounds except for the short weekend leaves, and their constant association frayed their tempers. They poked malicious fun at each other and played practical jokes. The would-be fops and ladies’ men were special butts. This frivolous spirit was no doubt a reaction to the school’s regimentation. Perhaps, too, it was engendered by the students’ anticipation of the dreary careers which awaited them; before they were accepted at the Institute, they had to pledge themselves to work at a government grade school for eight years after graduation, or else reimburse the Institute for the total cost of their training. Cahan wanted very much to study Latin and Greek to fulfill the entrance requirements for a university, but was deterred by the thought that, once he left the Institute, he would automatically be subject to conscription. He could see nothing ahead but a teaching job in some miserable village.

More stimulating were his outside associations, especially with girls. These were modern Jewish girls, from Westernized homes, who attended the Gymnasium, rattled on in Russian, and minded their manners, insisting on formal introductions: I have the honor to introduce Fraulein. .. . Although they loved to discuss lofty intellectual topics—one boy Cahan knew boned up several evenings on the subject of fetishes to cope with his girl friend on Saturday—they loved even more to have their cavaliers dance attendance upon them—carry their books, take them to the café, even write their themes for them. “Brown dresses,” these girls were called, from the color of their school uniform. Cahan was apparently ill at ease with the more elegant among them, as he was ill at ease with the more worldly gentlemen. Seeing a couple from this refined sphere taking their ease at a café, delicately spooning up ice cream—green ice cream—he felt so lowly and inferior that he did not venture to enter the place. Even for the bolder boys, these relationships with the brown dresses were of an entirely platonic kind.

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During the summers Cahan used to visit a classmate living at a nearby resort who gave private lessons so that he could buy himself proper clothes—linen suit, parasol, and the rest. He noticed that a number of students liked to stroll about together near the railroad tracks. It was not until the summer of 1880, when he was twenty years old and friends gave him some forbidden pamphlets, that he really learned for the first time What was going on in underground circles—of terroristic acts against the police and military officials, of the blowing up of the dining room in the very palace of the Czar. Then he realized that the students hanging around the railroad tracks were a band of revolutionaries. He envied them their intimacy, their sense of dedication, their willingness to sacrifice themselves for a social ideal; he began to emerge from his concentration on self. Cahan avidly read all the copies of the socialist periodicals, Earth and Liberty and The Will of the People, he could lay hands on, and began to be stirred by his friends’ ideals. In the home of a Christian boy named Socolow, which was the secret meeting place of a “circle,” he witnessed for the first time Jew and Gentile meeting man to man, sharing their sleeping quarters, their bread and tea, the occasional luxury of lump sugar. For the first time in his life he was able without self-consciousness to say du to a Christian, even to greet his charming host by his nickname, Volodka (Vladimir). The heady ideas and generous personal relations exerted a powerful influence on a young man who had begun to flounder about without any notion of where he was going. As the revolution became a holy cause with him, he became estranged from his father; he could no longer discuss God and religion with him. Though he did not declare his allegiance, his mother suspected him of being a member of a radical circle when she saw him riding in a droshky with a non-Jewish student. On March 1, 1881, Alexander II was killed by a bomb while on his way to a riding academy. At the Institute the students were merely told that the Czar had died, and then were taken to another school to hear a eulogy pronounced on him. Cahan slipped through a window to get more news at his circle’s headquarters. But nobody there had any special information. It seemed to be the end of the matter so far as he was concerned.

Cahan passed the final examinations at the Institute, though not brilliantly, thereby earning a diploma, sixty rubles, and two pairs of underwear. A job was waiting for him, too, at some sort of place called Velisz. Anticipating the worst, he decided to take a bit of a holiday before burying himself in the provinces, and returned the visit of the uncle from St. Petersburg who had called on him at the school. His cousins, whom he envied for mingling in the most intellectual Russian circles—and for being unable to speak a word of Yiddish—took him about town, dining at the best restaurants, Jewish and Russian. He rode on double-decker trams, the likes of which were unknown in provincial Vilna, and visited the places where the Czar had been killed and five of the conspirators hanged. On his departure his uncle gave him enough money to tide him over till his first pay day, together with an elegant frock coat with brass buttons.

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It was just what he needed in Velisz, a muddy little village, fanatically Hasidic, where a man dared not walk in public with his own wife. In the beginning, out of loneliness and to avoid suspicion as a heretic and revolutionist, Cahan attended the synagogue. He was offered the honor of maftir, and made a botch of it. But before long he found companionship among his own kind. Some months after his arrival he had a letter from his mother in which she alluded in veiled terms to the fact that the headquarters of his old circle in Vilna had been raided. Two of his friends had been locked up in a notorious prison, and his own name was known to the police. They soon sought him out in Velisz, searching his room three times. Though he had carried off all the incriminating literature in his room to the home of a Gentile friend, he had overlooked one volume—Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. What is this? said the officials. Oh, a book about business, Cahan replied. But he was ordered to be ready to appear for questioning in Vitebsk. Without losing a moment, Cahan dressed up in the clothes of a yeshiva bochur (payot and all) and made his dangerous way by rowboat down the Dvina to Vitebsk itself, and thence by diligence and steamer to Mogilev. At the inn where he spent Passover he posed as an army deserter—whom any decent human being would sympathize with. He inquired around for the town usurer and tax collector, on the assumption that this would be the very man to provide him with a forged passport; he was not mistaken. The passport described him accurately, even to his cross-eyes, but under a new name. The first pioneers of modern Zionism were then migrating to Palestine after the infamous pogroms of 1882. Cahan considered that way out, but not too seriously. In America, he was persuaded, he could take part in a more universal movement, the movement to usher in the age of socialism. He took ship for Kiev and at Kiev entrained for the Austrian border. With many other refugees Cahan was smuggled across to Brod, where he stayed a considerable time, in the agreeable company of idealistic intellectuals who were enthusiastic about establishing farm cooperatives in the States. The Alliance Israelite Universelle supported and provided transportation for all these people. There were further stops in Cracow, Lemberg, Berlin, and Hamburg, before they took ship to Liverpool; from there Cahan finally sailed on the British Queen, bound for Philadelphia. So ends the first volume of his memoirs. Body and mind, he was now a man of the Western world. Yet, ironically enough, he was to wield his influence not in the language which had brought him so far, but in his mother-tongue, Yiddish, which he had come to despise.

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1 Pages of My Life was first published serially in the Forward. It appeared in book form between the years 1926 and 1931. It has not yet been translated from the Yiddish because Cahan was too busy a journalist and politician to do it himself, and too vain or too tenacious of his authority to entrust the job to anyone else.

2 The Orthodox derisively used this diminutive of buch as the collective name of all works of Western culture, reserving the word sefer for the sacred texts and glosses.

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