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During Manhattan's bitter, bloody garment strike of 1913, a crowd of angry strikers hurled bricks through the windows of the Jewish Daily Forward, which was urging a settlement. Nervy, frail Editor Abraham ("Ab") Cahan, who had done as much as any man to stir the workers' rebellion against the sweatshops, came out to face the crowd. "Whose windows do tailors come to break?" he demanded. "It's just like a husband who comes home angry and fretful ... whacks the kids around and smashes dishes . . . Will he go into any other house to smash the dishes? No, he goes to his own home. This is your home, for the Forward is your paper."

The angry roar subsided; the tailors broke into cheers. They and their children and grandchildren have been cheering the paper ever since. For Ab Cahan's Forward, biggest U.S. Yiddish-language daily, has been the most influential single institution in helping many immigrants adjust to American life. Last week at a dinner in Manhattan's Hotel Commodore, 1,500 admirers paid tribute to Ab Cahan (rhymes with Don) in celebration of his 90th birthday and his 48th year as editor of the Forward. From President Truman, Britain's Herbert Morrison, Israel's Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and many another notable came well-wishes and praise for the impressive journalistic achievements of Cahan and his paper.

Young Teacher. Ab Cahan was a young teacher in Vilna, and a Marxian Socialist, when the Czar's police began shadowing him. He fled to New York, got work in a cigar factory. To learn English well, 22-year-old Ab Cahan unashamedly went to grade school with children, working nights so that he could do so. He devoted his spare time to the Socialist and labor movements, by 1885 was editing the Socialist weekly Arbeiter Zeitung and writing perceptive short stories about East Side Jews. His novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, written in 1917, is still regarded as a minor American classic.

After a spell as a reporter for City Editor Lincoln Steffens of the Commercial Advertiser and for the New York Sun, Cahan in 1902 became editor of the then struggling Forward, which he had helped found five years before. Cahan found a paper with a picayunish circulation of 6,000, full of tedious, dust-dry Socialist polemics, written in jabberwocky that few garment workers could understand.

Cahan substituted lively feature stories. To make his writers stop using long words, Ab would call in the elevator operator to see if he could understand their stories. He gave his readers such homely advice as urging mothers to see that their children carried handkerchiefs. When his sponsors protested such trivialities, Ab asked: "Since when is Socialism opposed to clean noses?"

With his famed Bintel Brief (Bundle of Letters), he started a lovelorn column. Circulation zoomed. The Forward became such a power that by 1918 it was able to break Tammany's hold on Manhattan's lower East Side, elect Socialist Meyer London to Congress.

Shrinking Success. By 1922, the Forward was selling 225,000 copies a day, its circulation peak. But Cahan's own measurement of success was the rapidity with which Jewish immigrants were absorbed into American life and turned to non-Yiddish papers. In effect, the paper's success could be measured by its drop in circulation. How well Cahan has succeeded may be gauged by the fact that the Forward, though still the biggest Yiddish daily, has dwindled to 83,226 daily and 94,390 Sunday. One of Cahan's favorite jokes is that for every $4 made on a paid obituary announcement the Forward drops $12 a year in the permanent loss of a reader. But the Forward still has daily local editions in Boston, Chicago and New York, owns its ten-story headquarters in Manhattan, has piled up $2,000,000 in reserves, and given away $3,000,000 to causes it supported (e.g., the garment workers and other unions). The Forward, run by an association of 160 Jewish leaders chosen at yearly elections, was never organized for profit, now has an editorial staff of 40. Since a reporter, after a six months' trial, is hired for life, 25 staffers have worked there more than 30 years, including Acting Editor Harry Rogoff, 67. As Editor Cahan has become less active, Rogoff has taken over more & more of his duties. Business boss is General Manager Alexander Kahn, a genial lawyer whose friends describe him as "the East Side's ambassador to the uptown Jews."

Editor Cahan, whose Socialism long ago simmered down to a British type of gradualism, fought the Soviet system and the U.S. Communist Party from the start, got read out of the Socialist Party for good in 1933 for supporting Roosevelt. At Cahan's celebration last week, Union Boss David Dubinsky and others praised him as the man who had done more than anyone else to keep the garment workers' union free of Communist influence. When everyone else had finished, old Ab rose to respond, murmured: "I am happier than I ever was in my life. Brothers and sisters, I thank you millions of times." Words failing, he finished by reaching out his arms in a gesture of embrace.

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