The Kahans from Baku: A Family Saga

The Kahans from Baku is the saga of a Russian Jewish family. Their story provides an insight into the history of Jews in the Imperial Russian economy, especially in the oil industry. The entrepreneur and family patriarch, Chaim Kahan, was a pious and enlightened man and a Zionist. His children followed in his footsteps in business as well as in politics, philanthropy, and love of books. The book takes us through their forced migration in times of war, revolution, and the twentieth century's totalitarian regimes, telling the story of fortune and misfortune of one cohesive family over four generations through Russia, Germany, Denmark, and France, and finally on to Palestine and the United States of America.

About the Author :
Verena Dohrn was Professor of Modern Jewish History in Eastern Europe at Göttingen University. She is the author of Jüdische Eliten im Russischen Reich. Aufklärung und Integration im 19. Jahrhundert, and editor of Simon Dubnow's Buch des Lebens. Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Materialien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit 1860-1933.

Review :
"Verena Dohrn's book presents a complex transnational story of Jewish oil merchants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contributing to the growing scope of research on Jewish family businesses in East and Central Europe. ... This book will be an interesting read for a broad audience, providing an intimate insight into the private life of oil magnates in turbulent historical times. It may also introduce a new perspective on Jewish business elites to academic readers. The Kahan story transcends the stereotypical divisions between East and West, showing the example of the well-managed business family corporation, which managed to integrate into a few imperial and national contexts of different countries and adapt to the new situations while preserving their complex cultural integrity." -- Vladyslava Moskalets, Business History "Jewish entrepreneurs played a major role in economic development in late Imperial Russia, and the oil barons of the Kahan family were among the most important. And the least studied--until 2018, when Verena Dohrn published her pioneering monograph in German, now being made available in English translation. The research is massive: the book uses family archives (with thousands of documents) as well as state repositories in fourteen countries, complemented by oral history and the contemporary press. All this allows Dohrn to provide a detailed narrative that explains how the family was able to thrive before the 1917 revolution and then to survive after its emigration to the West. Not only specialists but general readers will discover a rich narrative of this family's everyday life and successful business activities." --Gregory L. Freeze, Raymond Ginger Professor of History, Brandeis University "This fascinating family history takes the reader across countries and continents during the turbulent period of European wars and revolutions, from a small Belarusian shtetl to Baku, Moscow, Petrograd, Berlin, and then on to Tel Aviv and New York. The Kahans were successful entrepreneurs, generous philanthropists and cultural activists who left their mark on modern Jewish life and culture. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written by Verena Dohrn, a prominent German historian of Russian Jewry, this study is not only an important contribution to Jewish history and transnational diaspora studies, but also a captivating reading in its own right." --Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan