How the Other Half Sounds: Obstructed Rhythm and Urban Mobility in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl

Abstract

American turn-of-the-century writers portrayed New York as a city in ceaseless motion. In New York in Slices, George Foster writes “thousands of footsteps patter upon the pavement, and the hum of mingling voices comes over the ledge of our far-up window like the music of the night.” On the other hand, in How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis describes the market in the Jewish quarter with its “crowds that jostle each other at the wagons and about the side-walk shops” while they are “panting, struggling, babbling and shouting in foreign tongues.” In both cases, sound accompanies urban mobility; indeed, urban noise translates urban mobility into sounds, and forms the city’s rhythmic pattern. This rhythm is equally relevant to Abraham Cahan’s depiction of ghetto life in Yekl (1896). Yekl tells the story of Jake, a Jewish-Russian émigré, who starts a new life in New York while saving money for his wife’s and son’s travel expenses to the United States. From immigration to class mobility, walking in the city to dancing, sports to working, Yekl presents all characters in motion. However, Cahan’s specific location of the ghetto excludes what can be called the progressive sounds of the city, like the clattering of wheels, the constant ticking of the clock, or the sounds from the railway. Conversely, the forms of obstructed rhythm in the novel (such as Jake’s obstructed steps on the sidewalk, his wife’s belated arrival and her struggle to adapt to New York), show the immigrants’ hampered attempts for acculturation. Deploying a neo-formalist perspective and drawing on Caroline Levine’s concept of “the affordances of form,” through which social forms carry their potential uses into the literary text, this paper will explore how urban mobility enters Cahan’s Yekl in the form of obstructed rhythm.