The Cahan-Zhitlovsky Polemic (1910) and the Politics of Popularization

• In Event: New Approaches to Yiddish Music & Writing

Abstract

Abraham Cahan is known for writing what he called PLEYNE (plain) Yiddish. As editor of the FORVERTS, he famously expunged vocabulary he considered esoteric or unfamiliar to immigrant readers. During the 1890s, the self-educated Cahan experimented with writing for newly literate readers of the American Yiddish press. A co-founder of the socialist weekly ARBETER TSAYTUNG, he tested in its pages the idea that readers could be enticed to buy a socialist newspaper if it presented complex content in simplified, entertaining form. Among Cahan's experiments with popularization was his 1894 novella HOW RAFOL NAARITSOKH BECAME A SOCIALIST. Rafol, a talented cabinetmaker from Lithuania, works in a furniture factory in New York. Alienated by routinized factory labor, he joins a socialist circle. Realizing that capitalism both exploits his body and deadens his spirit, he embraces socialism in order to reclaim the pride he once took in productive labor. The novella appeared in pamphlet form in 1896 and was recast as a full-length novel in 1907.

On the assumption that readers of the ARBETER TSAYTUNG lacked the background to comprehend writings by key thinkers like Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, Cahan published Yiddish synopses and popularizations of important works in the social and natural sciences in order to make new ideas and cultural developments comprehensible to them. He continued to print such material in the pages of the FORVERTS, founded in 1897.

Popularization became an IDÉE FIXE to which Cahan clung for many years, and for which he was attacked by socialist intellectuals. Chaim Zhitlovsky initiated a bitter polemic with Cahan in 1910, charging him with impeding the development of the Yiddish reading audience by simplifying ideas to an unnecessary degree.

At the heart of this seminal polemic, which persisted over decades, was leftist intellectuals' deep displeasure with the commercial success and sensationalistic journalism of the FORVERTS. They felt that Cahan had undermined the paper's raison d’être - raising the educational level of its reading audience. With circulation soaring, however, Cahan saw no reason to give ground, accusing Zhitlovsky and his cohort of writing an "artificial" Yiddish, unintelligible to both workers and intellectuals.

Author

• Ellen Kellman, Brandeis University