Abraham Cahan, journalist, novelist, socialist activist, and union organizer, is a commanding figure in the history of Jewish-American culture and a persuasive witness on the key American issues of immigration and acculturation. He was born on 6 July 1860 in the town of Podberezy, near Vilna, Lithuania, and he came to America in 1882 at the start of the mass immigration of East European Jews. Touched off by the Russian pogroms of 1881-1882, this great migration lasted over four decades and brought some two million souls to America. It abruptly brought a people from an essentially pre-modern way of life--pietistic, unchanging, oriented more to the Word than the world--to the most willfully modern of modern societies.

In his stories Cahan is the chronicler of this wrenching history as it was made and suffered by his fellow immigrants, the Jews of New York's Lower East Side. The fidelity of Cahan's fiction to...