SOURCE: "Fiction in English by Abraham Cahan," in The Image of the Jew in American Literature, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974, pp. 485-524.

In the following essay, Harap surveys Cahan's influence on American literature.

Abraham Cahan began to publish short stories, novellas, and novels in the 1890s. The themes and character types adumbrated through Cahan's fiction reached their mature development in 1917 in The Rise of David Levinsky, the most important fictional work about American Jewry up to that time by any American writer, Jewish or non-Jewish.

The depth of Cahan's fiction, both as social drama and as a personal statement, raises complex questions and invites interpretation on several levels. Part of these complexities and subtleties arise from the fact that Cahan was personally involved in and helped effect the transformation of the immigrant Jewish community from a poverty-stricken, densely packed mass in the ghetto to a highly...