David Herman
Abraham Cahan and The Great Swarming
Summary
Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was one of the first great Jewish-American writers. He came to America in 1881, edited the famous Yiddish newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward, for almost fifty years, and wrote several novels and short stories about the immigrant world of the Lower East Side, including The Rise of David Levinsky (1917).
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.
No, although there is the “Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature,” which was published, oh, back in the ‘90s? Maybe the '80s? If you look that up on Amazon, it is a fantastic anthology of Jewish American writing with really interesting footnotes and introductions to the individual writers, but also to the larger history of Jewish American literature. So I strongly recommend it. It is in hardback, it is almost a thousand pages, it is quite expensive, but that would be, I think, the best way to start.
Wow. There is a question. There is a question. Let’s say it was not un-antisemitic, both in the way that non-Jews wrote about Jews, most famously Dickens on “Oliver Twist,” on Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” most famously T.S. Eliot, most famously Henry James, who was as much part of the British literary world as he was part of the American literary world. Pound, who was part of the British literary world, as well as part of the American literary world, also antisemitic. So, and plus what I was referring to was not so much the writers as the world of publishing, the world of reviewing, and you know, that matters. When people like Alexander Baron later in his career found it harder to get published, when Clive Sinclair found it hard to get published, when various other Anglo Jewish writers of the 1950s found it hard to get published, that was not so much because of other antisemitic writers, it was because of antisemitic, possibly, question mark, antisemitic publishers. Were they antisemitic not to be more interested than they might have been in some of these Jewish writers? After all, Alexander Baron, as I say, half a million copies of “From the City, from the Plough,” it was one of the great novels about the Second World War and his publishers asked him to check to Anglicise his name and lied about why. That’s the terrible thing.