Lanterna Rally

Author: Abraham Cahan

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2013-11

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 9781493675616

Nineteenth century Russia: a land of terror for Jews. Large mobs with blood-boiling rage in their minds raid and murder innocent Jews, ruining their lives and instilling in them a sense of hopelessness; brooding on the situation, the Jews realize what is really happening to them. The government's striking indifference to the situation persuades them to believe that the Russian Empire is condoning crimes against their race. Jews everywhere in Russia begin to reconsider their placement in the Russian hierarchy of citizenship, a hierarchy which places them in the lower masses of society, despite their efforts to assimilate into Russian culture. A young Jewish boy experiences life growing up in this era. He strives, more so than his friends, to assimilate into the Russian identity. Despite his constant efforts, the anti-Jewish pogroms indirectly affect his father's workshop, leaving too many mouths to feed at the table. Strangled by these conditions, the young man's family asks him to leave for America, where he may earn more money and eventually send for his wife and child. The young man is Abraham Cahan's fictional Yekl, set in an 1896 novella by the same name, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. While there were many more that experienced the same conditions as he did, Jake, Yekl's assimilated self, dealt with his circumstances with subtle irony, trying to compensate for the tragedy of being uprooted from his family - as an indirect product of the pogroms - by trying to "Americanize" as much as possible, and later by becoming hostile toward other immigrants. Assimilation and Jake's attempts to completely rid himself of his Jewish culture cause him to victimize other, less assimilated immigrant Jews; Jake's attempts at ridding himself of his Jewish culture are also futile, according to the philosopher Michael Walzer, author of What It Means to Be an American, because he will always retain part of his Jewish culture.