Amazing Abe, an illustrated book that’s more than niche history

Not Lincoln, Abraham Cahan, nonetheless amazing, but not as well known as the stovepipe-hat-wearing President of the United States. Amazing Abe: How Abraham Cahan’s Newspaper Gave a Voice to Jewish Immigrants could be a tough sell to elementary age audiences. It could be, but it overcomes the non-fiction, biography resistance to unknown figures that those ages have by making the book accessible in its brief text that highlights enough of Cahan’s interesting life to make kids want to care. Amazing Abe also detailed art, but not so much so that it looks real, it’s right in the area encompassing the kind that clever kids want to see in their illustrated books.

I maintain that kids want to know about interesting historical figures that they don’t yet know. Sure, those early to mid-elementary ages will gobble up silly stories about unicorns, farts or animals all day long. However, the non-fiction stories that they have read to them during story time don’t need to be literary Brussels sprouts. They can be the ones that understand, care about the characters, are able to empathize with their story and even talk about the real-life story. The fact that Amazing Abe can do that is all the more surprising because it’s about an immigrant to the United States who published a newspaper in a language that’s spoken by a tiny minority of people.

Amazing Abe: How Abraham Cahan’s Newspaper Gave a Voice to Jewish Immigrants tracks Cahan’s life from growing up in the Pale of Settlement in Lithuania, which was being controlled by Russia, to being a newspaper magnate in New York City. As a kid he loved reading and went to college to become a teacher. This is unusual for guys today and was even more uncommon for men in the late 1800s. The politics of the day came to the forefront because the Czars of Russia didn’t treat people, especially the populace of the workers, well at all. This bothered Cahan tremendously and he started to make anti-government speeches that put him on the radar of the police.

One day the police went to his school to question his rallies and he realized that his life and freedom were in jeopardy. This caused him to immigrate to the United States, and despite the influx of Jewish people, Yiddish was not spoken that widely. Upon arrival, In his upper teens he mastered English by convincing a middle school to allow him to attend classes with students who had just entered seventh grade. His newfound mastery of English allowed him to write and report about the plight of Jewish immigrants to the United States.  

Cahan loved telling people from his culture about the best practices of navigating life in America, but he was still very proud of communicating in Yiddish. It was this pride that made him found The Jewish Daily Forward, which was in Yiddish and became the largest foreign-language newspaper in America. The newspaper served as a means for them to find work, ask questions that were germane to immigration, reunited familes and more. The paper also developed columns that were written in English designed to introduce Americans to their new neighbors.

As I was reading and consequently writing this review another teacher sat beside me. “Are you Jewish?”, they asked. I said “No, I’m simply reading this book to see if it’s one that elementary-age students would be interested in reading.” He then went on to say that he was Jewish, knew a couple of Yiddish words and basic phrases, but that was it. We both had the same takeaway from Amazing Abe: How Abraham Cahan’s Newspaper Gave a Voice to Jewish Immigrants. The book tackles a wide swath of history that encompassed change on a global level, but manages to make it personal and identifiable to any culture. Those young ages probably don’t know any Yiddish and there might only be a handful of Jewish kids in the class, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not a Jewish book. Amazing Abe is more about an entrepreneur who saw a need, overcame his personal or societal struggles and succeeded. The book is also short enough to hold the attention span of those young readers, yet detail enough to provide facts that they’ve never heard before.

Amazing Abe: How Abraham Cahan’s Newspaper Gave a Voice to Jewish Immigrants is by Norman H. Finkelstein with illustrations by Vesper Stamper and is available on Holiday House Publishing.

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