SOURCE: Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “‘Shpeaking Plain’ and Writing Foreign: Abraham Cahan's Yekl.” Poetics Today 22, no. 1 (spring 2001): 41-63.

In the following essay, Wirth-Nesher explores the intermingling of Yiddish literary tradition and American influences on Cahan's writing in his first English-language novel, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto.

In 1896, fourteen years after immigrating to America from Lithuania at the age of twenty-two, Abraham Cahan published his first novel in English, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. Despite his active career as a Yiddish journalist for the Socialist Yiddish weeklies Neuetseit and Arbeiter Tseitung, it was his reading of English and American novels that inspired him to write fiction in English. Yekl is a story about Americanization. A Russian Jew named Yekl leaves his wife and son in the Old World and immigrates to the United States where he becomes Jake, a sweatshop worker so enamored of the...