Wed 28 Feb 2024
Reviewed by TONY BAER:
MICHAEL GOLD – Jews Without Money. Horace Liveright, hardcover, 1930. Reprinted numerous times.
This one is about life on the lower east side at the turn of the 20th century. Episodic. Short chapters, with shorter paragraphs, each describing an incident in the tenements or the streets: gang fights, prostitution, disease, love, and death, each in equal doses. Meanwhile, thru the incidents, Michael Gold grows up, radicalized by the elements.
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It was pretty good. Gold’s only ‘novel’ and it’s easy to see why. He gives you the recollections of his youth. And an author can only give you this once. No matter how many times they try.
February 28th, 2024 at 10:33 pm
From Gold’s Wikipedia page:
“Michael Gold (April 12, 1894 – May 14, 1967) was the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews without Money (1930) was a bestseller. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gold was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gold