Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto.
[Judaica]. Cahan, A. Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. New York: Appleton, 1896.
8vo.; printed on thick, rough-cut paper; occasionally foxed; 12-page publisher’s catalogue tipped in at rear; tan cloth, stamped in red, black, and gilt, front cover with elaborate city skylight design; covers lightly rubbed; spine cocked.
First edition of the first book by Abraham Cahan, founder of the Jewish Daily Forward. Yekl, a novel set in New York’s insular Yiddish-speaking community, won the enthusiastic support of William Dean Howells, among others. In it Cahan exhibited the gritty, realistic treatment of Jewish immigrant experience for which he would become known. Critic Irving Howe would comment many decades later:
No Yiddish writer was as acute as he in grasping the desires of the Jews for spiritual gratification, material easement, and a way of life that might yoke the two. But what was remarkable about Cahan was that this intuitive penetration of immigrant feelings depended not on any closeness to the masses, but rather on maintaining a psychic distance from them–for that matter, from the intelligencia too. It seemed at times as if having been granted a dour vision of the final outcome of the whole Yiddish enterprise, Cahan took it as his special burden to carry through that vision to the end. Helping to lay the foundations for the immigrant Jewish culture, he worked mightily to undermine them: as if creation and disintegration were for him equally terms of fate. (World Of Our Fathers, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, p. 525)
Yekl indeed betrays Cahan’s ambiguous attitude toward the immigrant culture of which he was a part. Yet its pages also reflect the author’s remarkable ability to capture the multifaceted nature of 20th-century Jewish immigrant life in New York City; consider, for instance, this description of a street corner:
Suffolk Street is in the very thick of the battle for breath. For it lies in the heart of that part of the East Side which has within the last two or three decades become the Ghetto of the American metropolis, and indeed the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world. It is one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth–a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centres of Europe. Hardly a block but shelters Jews from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galacia, Hungary, Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews, Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the ‘pale of Jewish settlement’; Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or Saratoff; Jewish runaways from justice; Jewish refugees from crying political and economical injustice; people torn from a hard-gained foothold in life and from deep-rooted attachments by the caprice of intolerance or the wiles of demagoguery–innocent scapegoats of a guilty Government for its outraged populace to misspend its blind fury upon; students shut out of the Russian universities, and come to these shores in a quest of learning; artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis, artists, beggars–all come in search of fortune. Nor is there a tenement house but harbours in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of today. You find there Jews born to plenty, whom the new conditions have delivered up to the clutches of penury; Jews reared in the straits of need, who have risen here to prosperity; good people morally degraded in the struggle for success amid an unwanted environment; moral outcasts lifted from the mire, purified, and imbued with self-respect; educated men and women with their intellectual polish tarnished in the inclement weather of adversity; ignorant sons of toil grown enlightened–in fine, people with all sorts of antecedents, tastes, habits, inclinations, and speaking all sorts of subdialects
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