Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York

by Abraham Cahan

"No American fiction of the year merits recognition more than this Russian's stories of Yiddish life. … [Mr. Cahan] is a humorist, and his humor does not spare the sordid and uncouth aspects of the character whose pathos he so tenderly reveals." — William Dean Howells


In Yekl, the central problem derives from a social condition: the urgent desire of the hero to become a real American, to be less a "greenhorn"; but the play of events is around an emotional crisis; Yekl no longer loves the wife he left behind, who has now rejoined him in the new land, and who seems to him shockingly European.
In The Imported Bridegroom, the issue is apparently religious, a clash between traditional faith and secularism; but we are left wondering whether philosophy has not become commingled with sociology. Other stories deal with sweatshop life, romance in the slums, a wedding in the ghetto.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Jewish, School, Historical Fiction, American, Classics

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1970

About the author

Abraham "Abe" Cahan was a Lithuanian-born Jewish-American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.

Source: Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Deborah Feingold · Rating 5 out of 5]

So happy I had to read this book for a class. Somehow I thought these stories of the lives of Jewish immigrants in the US at the beginning of the 20th century would be saccharine but quite the opposite. We see characters whose lives are transformed in unexpected and sometimes shocking ways. The last story is the happiest and one in which we see the type of cheerful resilience I always thought to expect from these types of tales. In other stories we see Terrible disappointment and even betrayal. Wonderful details of Eastern European life as well as life in the Jewish "ghetto." The challenges, risks, and opportunities ring true in general for all immigrants as well as for Jewish immigrants in this particular time and place.

[claudia]

uh oh...what's that? it's the boring alarm 🚨

[Jacob Lietz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read Yekl! But it was wacky and a little shallow and very productive for conversation in a grad class.

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite a spate of antisemitism on the very first page and the struggle to make my way through a rendering of dialect in the first story which like most such contrivances is quite tedious to read - despite these flaws, I was much surprised and entertained by this collection. All the stories revolve around marriage: the yearnings, the matchmakers, the communities, the ceremonies, the formalities, and the wedding gifts, the successful connections and the failures. Highly recommend to those interested in the culture of the Lower East Side before the turn of the century.

[Irving Koppel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abraham Cahan, author of "Yekl" and other stories, was the editor and
founder of the "Jewish Daily Forward". In these stories of life among
the turn of the century immigrants in New York, he gives us many insights
into the problems these newcomers faced as they were torn between two
very different cultures. The ways they adjusted and faced their new lives
make for fascinating reading and insightful analyses.

[Shari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Yekl" and "The Imported Bridegroom," but that makes up well over half the book, so I'm calling the book "read." I enjoyed these stories but I wonder if it's because the characters reminded me very much of my grandparents at times...

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off don't hate me I only read Yekl and I'm counting it, because I've made this huge private reading goal that I'm trying to complete so I'm counting this. So let's talk about it, because I'm pretty conflicted. I loved it while also finding it very tedious. And I mostly really didn't like the ending. It struck me with the Graduate vibes where it's melancholy and comes into question what freedom really means. Whether you can really be free while tying yourself to another human being. Obviously that wasn't the main theme of this one (though it was a theme), it was about Yekl who changes his name to Jake and about his American lifestyle coming up against his wife's traditional Jewish Russian lifestyle that he has come to hate. His meanness towards her really just boils down to his negativity about himself, and how he feels his past is holding him back. So then it is all unfairly put on her and talks more about the issues of ideals versus reality. It does an incredible job at talking about the immigrant experience and the pressures to fit in, in order to advance in America. The disgust he has towards her, is the foreigner he sees in himself. Overall I really did enjoy it and felt like I learned a lot in the phrasing, the use of Yiddish, and the exploration of Jake's experience.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this, mostly because of the way it portrays the Lower East Side at the turn of the century. You really get a sense of how it was. I also liked the themes it explored - tradition vs modernity.

The endings of these short stories are all tragic, and they all revolve around romance. In general, I thought the women are portrayed as kinda one sided and simple, while the men were more complex characters.

The writing isn't amazing I don't think, but the stories are good and the setting is unique and fantastic. Great read.

[carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

another book for class. I actually enjoyed reading these. I think the depictions of immigration and the complexities of assimilation was more contemporary and easier for me to understand and care about.

[Sylvia J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

So poignant! Each story reminded me of the old Jewish saying about us making plans and G-d laughing.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trade Pb Dover 1970.

[g · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOT MOST NA BOOKS HAVING A HIGHER RATING THAN THIS?? GR USERS ARE SEVERELY ILL...

[Joseph Spence Sr · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an awesome book regarding the Jewish experience. It's very intriguing, inspiring, and uplifting. It's based on New York East Side. You will love the stories and the narration. Gret Job!

[Creolecat]

Hester Street (1975)

[Bella Burcsak · Rating 3 out of 5]

He’s an amazing writer and the stories are great but I just kept zoning out and it took me a while to read it

[Silas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expertly crafted and an intimate lens into sociality of new immigrants in an ethnic enclave. The Imported Bridegroom was my favorite story and A Ghetto Wedding was my next favorite.

[Toad Soup · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yekl didn’t know a baddie when he had one, that’s all I’m gonna say

[Briann Shear · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt like I was visiting with my young immigrant grandparents.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

if i were to describe this book with a pussycat dolls lyric it would be "be careful what you wish for or you just might get it"

[Shea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially hesitated to give this book four stars, for the simple reason that Abraham Cahan's prose is rather stiff -- understandably, given that Cahan learned English in his twenties and, even then, wrote primarily in Yiddish. Perhaps this explains why his works of fiction, including the short novel Yekl (1896) and the short story collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories (1898), presented here in one volume, have not enjoyed quite the same level of acclaim as those by other realist writers of his time, such as Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells. But if Cahan's prose falls short of the more graceful writing of his contemporaries, his stories more than make up for it with their intelligence, gentle humor, and wonderful insider's perspective on the experience of the Jewish immigrant in late 19th-century New York.

Cahan's stories revolve around the trials and triumphs of various fictional inhabitants of the Lower East Side (referred to in the book as the "New York Ghetto"), all of them Jewish immigrants who fled from poverty or persecution in Europe to find freedom and fortune -- or to sink even further -- in America. An immigrant and socialist leader, who for a time supported himself by working in a factory, Cahan transports the reader back in time and into the tenements, sweatshops, and synagogues which still fascinate New Yorkers and visitors alike. For anyone with a particular interest in this chapter of American history, the first-hand experiences reflected in Cahan's stories make them mandatory reading.

However, these stories are much more than historical documents, especially at a time when immigration is still a major political issue and a key part of the national conversation. The experiences of Cahan's fictional immigrants still resonate, especially those depicted in the novel which opens the collection, Yekl. The title character finds himself caught between the kind of man that he has been and the kind of man that he wants to be: an assimilated American, one who has melted into the pot. His wife Gitl and their boarder Bernstein are a different type of immigrant -- they are squares in a patchwork quilt, who slowly become accustomed to American ways while retaining Jewish cultural traditions -- and Yekl (or Jake, as he prefers to be known) finds himself in conflict not with the larger American society, but with Gitl and Bernstein, the "greenhorns" who he feels are holding back his own assimilation into that society. Jake's dislike of unassimilated immigrants and his pride in his own Americanization are ironic, given his heavily accented English, his sweatshop job, and the fact that he rarely ventures beyond the borders of the Lower East Side. He considers himself a "true Yankee" and looks down on those who are not, but his position in society and his anxiety about assimilation are reflective of the flimsy nature of the definition of a real American. Is Jake a "true Yankee"? Are Gitl and Bernstein? Or neither, or both? And when Jake makes the fateful decision to put a large part of his immigrant past behind him, does he really stand to gain more than he loses?

A similar unease about the pace of acculturation and the difficulty of holding on to Jewish values -- or of letting them go -- disrupts the lives of the characters in "The Imported Bridegroom," in which a devout man struggles with the new ideas and changed behavior of his intended son-in-law, while his daughter, who encourages the young man in his endeavors, finds herself, like Jake, losing her grip on her vision of an ideal American life. The central figure of "A Providential Match" runs the risk of getting his hopes dashed in a romantic situation after both he and the family of his beloved experience drastic and rapid changes in their respective circumstances as a result of either immigrating to America or remaining in Europe. In these situations, and in those experienced by the heroes of Cahan's other stories, assimilation is desired by immigrants and is often a source of intense pride, but it is also accompanied by unexpected tensions and pitfalls which the immigrants find themselves forced to navigate, with their varying levels of success often dictated by factors beyond their control. The stories of these characters remind the present-day reader, living in a society which seems to demand rapid assimilation from its newest waves of immigrants, that the process of "becoming American" has rarely been simple and straightforward.

[Arielle Masters · Rating 2 out of 5]

Everyday life of new and recent immigrants in NYC around a hundred years ago. I read it to get an insight into what my great-grandparents' lives might have been like - most of my family came from Eastern Europe to NYC between the late 1890s and the early 1920s.

There were a lot of great details about clothes, furnishings, workdays, working pay, sending money back to the old country, finding a spouse in the old country, after-work entertainment, and living arrangements (both with and without boarders). The dialects were hard to follow in some places (I speak neither Yiddish nor Hebrew, although I know a few words of Yiddish slang). The stories don't necessarily have predictable, happy, or surprise endings - some of them just seem to end.

The stories were very similar to those I read recently in another book of stories about poor NYC Jews around that same time, though with a lot more romantic rearrangements. I didn't realize it was so common back then for couples to split up, or that so many became more or less secular so quickly after immigrating. It was fun to read about approaches to romance back then - in the workplace, at home, and via matchmakers.

I didn't dislike the book, but I can't really say that I liked it either, so two to three stars would be my rating.

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yekl is a well written story about the Jewish Ghettos of New York. The frustrating main character, Yekl, is the epitome of an unsuccessful immigration. He comes to America and the more comfortable he becomes, the better he thinks he is. When he finally sends for his wife, he can't even stand her presence. She is too foreign, not enough American for him. Its a great read to understand immigration to American.

[Traci · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just discovered this realist writer, and as a Jewish immigrant himself, he has a true perspective to give. His stories are of Jewish immigrants in New York tenements (late 19th century) dealing with a life that is often harsh and destructive of dreams. I loved the realistic portrayal of the characters, the way Cahan didn't idealize anything. It was full of pathos and some humor, but mostly it revealed the realities of life. And all humans can understand that.

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back around the time that the torch-bearing arm of the Statue of Liberty was assembled in Madison Square (as a way of raising funds to erect the rest of the statue), these stories were written. These are "slice of life" tales, beautifully elucidating the foreignness of life in New York for freshly landed Russian immigrants.

Well written, and definitely worth reading.

[Jenna Los · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very enjoyable collection showcasing a subset of historic New York that I was unfamiliar with. They are short, easy reads for a drowsy Saturday afternoon.

[Heidi-Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't remember much from the story I had to read for class, except for the impression that the guy was a jerk.

[Ian Parfrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

outside of "yekl" i have a hard time telling the other stories apart.

[Ivette · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is only interesting when viewed in its historical context, the backdrop of immigrant NY. I would NEVER read it outside of a mandatory class read.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really cool! An awesome way to get a picture of what America was like for early immigrants!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

(The Ghetto Wedding.) Meh.