Abraham Cahan was a founder of the great Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward in 1897 and its senior editor from 1903 until his death in 1951. In this role he played a crucial part in the acculturation of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant through the paper's persistent use of an Americanized Yiddish and with the popularizing and instructive features he introduced into its pages (such as the "Bintel Brief"--letters to the editor). He also produced a considerable body of fiction, mostly written in English from the 1890s until 1917. These stories and novels deal largely with the themes of accommodation and acculturation of the immigrant. As an imaginative writer and journalist Cahan was unique, mediating among several languages and cultures: Yiddish-Jewish, American-English, Russian. At the very beginning of the development of a significant American-Jewish literature, Cahan was a pioneer explorer of the duality of Jewishness and Americanism--a subject that has...