Between 1887 and 1914, more than 2 million Jews, most of them
desperately poor, emigrated to the United States and Canada from what
later became the Soviet Bloc. Preceding them slightly was Abraham
Cahan, who arrived in New York in 1882. (A convinced Socialist, he was
forced to immigrate in order to avoid the roundup of dissidents that
followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia.) He settled
on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and concerned himself with the
welfare of the growing Jewish population. Cahan was the founding editor
of The Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper that first
appeared in 1897. (Now known simply as The Forward, it is still
published each week, though with primarily English copy.) He was also a
writer of fiction, and that is what brought him his widest audience:
his stories and novels won the praise of the leading literary critics
of the day.
