Jews Without Money

Mike Gold (1930s), author of Jews Without Money

Jews Without Money is a 1930 semi-autobiographical novel by American critic Mike Gold.

Description

Published by Horace Liveright shortly after the onset of the Great Depression,[1] the novel is a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side, beginning in the 1890s.[2] Jews Without Money was an immediate success and went through many print-runs in its first years and was translated into over 14 languages. It became a prototype for the American proletarian novel.

Jews without Money is set in a slum populated mainly by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The father of the hero is a painter who suffers from lead poisoning. When he falls from a scaffold, he is disabled and can no longer work. His business fails and the family is pushed into poverty. The wife has to seek work in a restaurant. Although he is a bright boy, young Michael decides he must leave school. On the final page of the book, the poor Jewish boy prays for the arrival of a Marxist worker's revolution that will emancipate the working class.

In his Author's Note to the novel, Gold wrote, "I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto."

Scholar Alan M. Wald has written about Gold in several studies.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Jews Without Money, New York: Horace Liveright, 1930. Reprinted by Carol & Graf, 2004.
  2. ↑ Barry Gross, "Michael Gold (1893–1967)", The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter, 5th edition. http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/modern/gold_mi.html
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