Looking Back to the 'Forward'
TYLER, GUS
Perspectives LOOKING BACK TO THE 'FORWARD' BY GUS TYLER Fifteen years ago, in the year of 5732, I wrote a long piece for New york magazineonthe75th anniversary of the Jewish Daily...
...They were not German, not Sephardic...
...Like a magid, he was going to talk to the people in their mother-tongue, mama-loshen, tobring them together in a shared heritage and a shared faith...
...He was a folks-mensch—earthy, sometimes even vulgar, full of wit, who by his wanderings brought the wandering Jews closer together with gossip, a touch of ritual and, when the occasion called for it, with invented passages from the Talmud or the midrash...
...And since the tradition was there, since it was indeed impossible to take the Book out of the People of the Book, he simply decided to use it to inspire workers in the class struggle...
...Gus Tyler, a frequent contributor, is Assistant President of the ugwu...
...Many of Cahan's old comrades, who had made a religion of their atheism, were shocked by his references to the Talmud...
...nor was he a darshan, who was paid to deliver highbrow sermons, often in Hebrew, on fine points of Jewish law...
...Its fundamental belief was: We are all children of one God—even if we are not sure that He is there...
...That made it natural for its voice, the Forward, to be Socialist and internationalist...
...Cahan was a magid, not a priest...
...they came from Eastern Europe—from Tsarist Russia to the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...When I tell it to you, you'll understand the reason...
...the masses had the right to revolt against all pharaohs...
...The magid was a little less and a little more than both: he knew less law and talked less theology, but he got around, watched the ways in which communities managed to stay alive, and took what he knew from people to people...
...To the boyehs, and to millions of hardworking Jews throughout the United States during the first quarter of this century, the Forward was the keeper of the word, the conscience of the shtet/ia America...
...Afterward, all kinds of people and publications kept asking me to tell them more...
...The Forward took the old tradition, dusted it off, dressed it up in a pair of overalls, and sent it out on the picket line...
...The point is: They came to the Forward...
...Shortly after Hitler, y'makh sh'mo, came to power, some boyehs from Manhattan's Lower East Side and Brooklyn's East New York asked to speak with Abe Cahan, oluv hasholem, the revered editor of the Forward...
...This time his name would be The Proletariat...
...Why should I advertise that there were Jewish gangsters and that they were also assassins...
...they were workers...
...No rich, no poor, we're all one station...
...Reflecting its editor, it was the magid for the immigrant from Eastern Europe...
...In my translation, it doesn't come out so good...
...Cahan said, "No...
...It was all about what that Yiddish newspaper has meant to me, to unsere, to New York City and to America...
...They were Jews, of course...
...Because without the "k" the word sounded too German...
...Business was business, and you didn't consult with Abe Cahan about such personal matters...
...In America, the Forward took that language, called Yiddish, and added to it, mainly by listening, by hearing what the people said and how they said it, and then putting it down in the aleph-beth of long ago...
...They were too religious, too settled, too far away from the Lower East Side and the East New York where the boyehs grew up in families that read the Forward twice a day— in the morning, by mama, and in the evening, by papa...
...They had a bond that was written many thousands of years before the Forward first appeared on the morning of April 22, 1897, a book that had made them the People of the Book...
...The proletarishker magid is alive and well in their poopik...
...Now you know why Abe Cahan called himself "the proletarishker magid," when he wrote his first columns for Der Arbeiter Zeitung, the father of the Forward, almost 100 years ago...
...they lived in ghettos—by choice...
...he simply disliked Jewish writers who tried to show off their education by making Yiddish sound German...
...They could have gone to Schiff, Lehman, Warburg, even a Belmont, but they didn't...
...Where the issue was buckses, the word that Dopey Benny used to use when he talked about money, the boyehshad no problem...
...Except one thing...
...We're equal at the core...
...That word "proletarishker" means more than you think...
...In the spirit of the magidim, Cahan wanted to talk to the people in their daily language and as they were—not as some intellectuals thought they were, or would like them to be.To do this, the Forward developed its own language, based on the living language spoken by a people whose mama-loshen had grown richer as they grew poorer—wandering from Israel (where they spoke a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) to Spain, Italy and France, and then through Germany into the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe...
...A circuit rider...
...they were too rich, too fancy, too German...
...Cahan therefore took the stories from the Bible and gave them fresh meaning for his times...
...How could they all sing a song with a line in it that said, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us, " and then proceed to quote from the Holy Book...
...They gave the orders to the goyishe families of the underworld mishpokha...
...So what's a magid...
...They came to find out, "Would it be good for the Jews...
...It means "proletarian," of course, because Cahan was a Socialist talking to workers about the enslavement and exploitation of their class and why they should rise up and get rid of the capitalists...
...Not that Cahan disliked German Jews...
...The Word soaked into the blood, bones and brains of its adherents and, naturally, was passed on to their children and children's children, who hear echoes of it inside them —even if they never read Yiddish and never heard of the Forward...
...Cahan gave the word a special taste, however, by putting in the letter "k," so that it ends with a "ker...
...Every time the Jews were driven from an old home to a strange soil, they left a few words behind and picked up a few, like a language maven who had the whole world from which to pick exactly the right sounds to say what he meant and what he felt...
...Cahan had another view: A Jew without tradition wasn't exactly a Jew...
...So you're asking, "Why did they come to Cahan and not to somebody elsewhowas Jewish...
...But he was not any old kind of a magid: He wanted to make it very clear that he was a proletarishker magid...
...But that only tells you what he is from the outside, not from the inside...
...Now you know why I preferred not to tell that story...
...But Cahan understood that the new Jewish immigrants had something more in common...
...The boyehs were the bosses of New York's gangsters in those days...
...But this was a tribe whose dream was that someday there would be no tribes —at least, no tribes making war on other tribes...
...A long time ago, a Jewish boy by the name of John wrote a book that says: "In the beginning was The Word...
...Was it the right thing to do...
...To the boyehs, those gevirrim weren't exactly Jews...
...So, I told them more...
...They were a sort of shtetl inside America, with New York as the market place and with 17 5 East Broadway, the address of the Forward until 1972, as their temple...
...Why...
...Looking back on the 90 years that the Forward has been in existence, you could say it began as a newspaper for a very special tribe of people...
...A humble, often untidy, shabbily clothed 'country preacher,' he wandered about on foot, by cart, by wagon from shletl to shtetl—teaching, preaching, comforting, an evangelist concerned with the poorest among the tribes of Israel.' The magid was not a rebbe, who was officially in charge of teaching and interpreting the Torah...
...Because it makes a point...
...Exodus was a general strike...
...Perspectives LOOKING BACK TO THE 'FORWARD' BY GUS TYLER Fifteen years ago, in the year of 5732, I wrote a long piece for New york magazineonthe75th anniversary of the Jewish Daily Forward...
...This philosophy was put into a song by the beloved composer and lyricist Joseph Rumshinsky, whose very popular number, "The Morning Star," used to stop the show called Dem Rebbin's Nigen ("The Rabbi's Tune...
...In Yiddish, it comes out in waltz time, music and words for a tribe that hoped one day the tribes would "love forevermore...
...they were recent arrivals...
...they spoke and read Yiddish...
...There is a story I never told...
...Before they went ahead with their plans, they wanted to consult with Cahan...
...they killed every day, sometimes twice a day, without going to anybody to get a brokha...
...In the American-Jewish community of immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Forward was, and for some still is, The Word—the voice of a very special tribe that, in the messianic tradition, insisted there would eventually be peace and love among all peoples...
...Besides, since I did not hear the story firsthand from Cahan, a man I knew a little, and I didn't hear it from the boyehs, people I knew a little better, I wasn't sure the whole thing happened like I heard...
...Its passages had soaked into their blood and bones...
...The "k" was Cahan's way of letting the world know that he was speaking mainly to Jews who came from Slavic countries, to the recent immigrants from Eastern Europe...
...It has a flavor, a special tahm, as well as a meaning...
...It wasn't that they needed permission to kill...
...And his coming would be announced on a horn blown by the Forward...
...Later I'll tell you what is a "magid...
...Now, on the 90th Anniversary of the Forward, I have nothing more to say...
...How about some prominent rabbi, especially one of the highly respected Sephardim...
...Once again a Jewish tribe was praying for the mesheeakh...
...No duke or king, just one relation, We're humans, nothing more...
...Why did I finally decide to tell the story...
...But a particular kind...
...The chorus told about the times to come: Just one religion and one nation It's love forevermore...
...a day of rest in every seven was a labor demand...
...The committee of boyehs, all of them 100 per cent Jewish, had an idea in mind: to kill Hitler— gang-style...
...Once Leo Rosten crept inside a magid and described what he saw: "The magid played a significant role in holding together the religious and cultural strands of life in the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 6
