Abraham Cahan
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Abraham Cahan (July 7, 1860 - 1951) was a leading writer and lecturer for socialist and labor movements in New York City. He was the founder and editor of the Yiddish paper Forverts, and his novel The Rise of David Levinsky was particularly revered. By 1924, Forverts had over a quarter of a million readers, making it the most successful non-English language newspaper in the U.S. and the leading Yiddish paper in the world.
He was born in Vilna, Lithuania into a Jewish Orthodox family. He emigrated to the United States in 1881 in order to escape the massive roundup of revolutionaries after the assassination of Alexander II of Russia.
He published his first novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto in 1896. Many years after his death, it was made into the movie Hester Street (1975). In 1898 he published a collection of short stories entitled The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto.