Abraham Cahan’s English-language novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, published in 1896, is a work of realistic fiction that draws attention to Jewish immigrants’ complicated negotiations of personal and cultural identity in New York at the turn of the century. It does so with humor, criticism, and compassion. The novel’s plot centers on Yekl, known as Jake, a Jewish immigrant sweatshop worker. He is proudly charting a path toward Americanization through consumption of popular culture, acquirement of rudimentary English, and flirtations with assimilating Jewish women in the more sexually liberated environment of the American city. When Jake's wife, Gitl, and their son arrive in America, Jake is ashamed of her East European Jewish ways of speech and dress and sees her as everything he has been trying not to be. Although she tries to please him, he ultimately divorces her. He comes to regret the loss of this wife—the idea of her had connected him to the person he used to be.
This kit presents historical materials, images, excerpts from related literary sources, and even a thematically relevant song, to give context and richness to lessons about the novella.
Teachers' guide
Reading and Background
- Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto is in the public domain, and you can read it in full online.
- There have been several biographies and studies of Abraham Cahan and his writing. Of these, Ronald Sanders’s The Downtown Jews (1969) offers a portrait of Cahan’s career and the politics of his community, and Seth Lipsky’s The Rise of Abraham Cahan (2013) describes Cahan’s transformation from a small-town Russian Jew into an ambitious and influential journalist, strident political activist, and major literary figure.
- Teachers may wish to read other works in Abraham Cahan’s oeuvre. Here are some places to start: The White Terror and the Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia, available in its entirety on this page at archive.org; his novel set amidst New York's garment industry, The Rise of David Levinsky, available in its entirety on this page at gutenberg.org; and Grandma Never Lived in America (a collection of his short fiction and English-language journalism).
- Those wishing to read literary criticism or historical criticism about Yekl may enjoy Aviva Taubenfeld’s "'Only an 'L': Linguistic Borders and the Immigrant Author in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and Yekl der Yankee," published in Multilingual America (1998), in which the author compares the Yiddish and English versions of the text, and Hana Wirth Nesher’s Call it English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (2008), which focuses on issues of language and dialect. Daliya Kandioti’s chapter on Yekl in Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literature (2009) discusses the novel through the lens of the late nineteenth-century style of imbuing literary works with "local color." This essay by Andrew R. Heinze, published by Forward in 2004, focuses on teaching Yekl to contemporary American undergraduates, and may offer insights on how readers unfamiliar with Jewish immigrant history can relate to the work.
- For more information on other writers excerpted in this kit: to learn more about Hamlin Garland, teachers may consult Keith Newlin’s Hamlin Garland: A Life (2008); and to read up on William Dean Howells, see Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson's William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (2005). For perspectives on local color writing, see Stephanie Foote's Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2001) or Philip Joseph's American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age (2007).
- Teachers interested in drawing further comparisons between Yekl and contemporaneous American literature may appreciate this lesson from the National Humanities Center, which compares Yekl to Cleveland-born black author Charles W. Chestnutt’s short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1900).
- The wonderful 1975 film Hester Street, adapted for the screen and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, is based on Yekl.
- The Great Jewish Books Teacher Resources kit by Feygi Zylberman Philips, "Divorce in Modern Jewish Culture," includes a discussion of the divorce scene at the end of Yekl.