Word: yiddishisms
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...Whose father, the late Jacob Adler, was a pillar of the Yiddish theater...
Died. Abraham Cahan, 91, author (The Rise of David Levinsky), co-founder and editor (1897-1950) of Manhattan's Jewish Daily Forward (circ. 150,000), one of the most influential foreign-language (Yiddish) papers in the U.S. At 21, because of his radical political sympathies, he left Czarist Russia for Manhattan's lower East Side. Through the columns of the Forward, he presented democratic socialism as well as lighter reading in terms that ill-educated immigrants could understand, fought to ameliorate sweatshop conditions in the garment trades, became a leading anti-Communist in the Jewish world...
...edge of a fertile valley, Rachel Brill, a Rumanian woman, complained about the treatment given her son-in-law, Michael. Michael had degraded himself, was earning his living by building a house. (She omitted to say that his family would get the house.) "Imagine," she wailed in singsong Yiddish, "Michael, a shopkeeper, working with his hands! It would never happen in Rumania. What a country this is! There is nothing to be had, and nothing works properly. People have no respect. Why, in Rumania, now, if there should be trouble getting a shopkeeper's license, you just...
...angry roar subsided; the tailors broke into cheers. They and their children and grandchildren have been cheering the paper ever since. For Ab Cahan's Forward, biggest U.S. Yiddish-language daily, has been the most influential single institution in helping many immigrants adjust to American life. Last week at a dinner in Manhattan's Hotel Commodore, 1,500 admirers paid tribute to Ab Cahan (rhymes with Don) in celebration of his 90th birthday and his 48th year as editor of the Forward. From President Truman, Britain's Herbert Morrison, Israel's Prime Minister Ben-Gurion...
Shrinking Success. By 1922, the Forward was selling 225,000 copies a day, its circulation peak. But Cahan's own measurement of success was the rapidity with which Jewish immigrants were absorbed into American life and turned to non-Yiddish papers. In effect, the paper's success could be measured by its drop in circulation. How well Cahan has succeeded may be gauged by the fact that the Forward, though still the biggest Yiddish daily, has dwindled to 83,226 daily and 94,390 Sunday. One of Cahan's favorite jokes is that for every $4 made...