Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto

Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a Russian-American novelist and labor leader. His family, which was devoutly Orthodox, moved in 1866 to Wilna; there young Cahan received the usual Jewish preparatory education for the rabbinate. He, however, was attracted by secular knowledge and clandestinely studied the Russian language, ultimately prevailing on his parents to allow him to enter the Teachers Institute of Wilna, from which he was graduated in 1881. He was appointed teacher in a Jewish government school in Velizh, Vitebsk, in the same year; but a domiciliary visit by the police, resulting from his connection with the revolutionary movement, caused him to flee the country. In 1882 he emigrated to the United States to escape the mass roundups of revolutionaries following the assassination of Russia's Tsar Alexander II. He was the founder-editor of the Yiddish newspaper, Forverts. A Providential Match was the first of Cahan's tales to be published, in 1895. His first novel was Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896). His next work of fiction was, The Imported Bridegroom, and Other Stories (1898). Another important work, The Rise of David Levinsky was published in 1917.