Jews Without Money by Michael Gold

First published: 1930

Type of plot: Autobiographical

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Mike Gold, the protagonist and narrator
• Katie Gold, his mother
• Herman Gold, his father
• Esther Gold, his sister
• Reb Samuel Ashkenazi, his neighbor

The Novel

Jews Without Money is based on its author’s own childhood. It re-creates the Jewish immigrant Lower East Side in Manhattan in which he lived, and it provides insight into the life of first-and second-generation Jewish Americans around the turn of the twentieth century.

As the central character and narrator, Mike grows; he learns more and more about the struggles that his parents and their neighbors undergo to earn a living. Mike’s father had been a housepainter, but he is disabled by a fall and by lead poisoning. At one point in the book, Mike finds him trying to earn money selling half-rotten bananas. Mike’s mother is the central figure in the family; she supports them by working in a cafeteria. After and before work, she takes care of her husband and children. On a terribly snowy winter day, Mike’s younger sister, Esther, goes out into the streets to collect wood for the stove; she is run over by a truck and dies. A lawyer comes to their home and says that if the mother and father will sign a paper, he will get them a thousand dollars from Adams Express, the company that operated the truck, as damages. Herman wants to sign the lawyer’s paper, but Katie throws him out of the house. It is, she says, “blood money.”

Repeatedly, Mike learns how terrible life is for people in America without money, especially Jews. They need to cope not only with poverty but also with anti-Semitism. Because six-year-old Mike uses a dirty word, his teacher washes out his mouth with soap. The teacher also calls him “Little Kike.” Herman and Katie are furious because the soap the teacher uses is not kosher. When a politician sends them a Thanksgiving meal, Katie asks Mike to tell her the story of Thanksgiving. After he narrates the tale of the Pilgrims, his mother decides that Thanksgiving is “an American holiday . . . and not for Jews.” The family cannot even eat the beautiful, fat turkey because it is not kosher. When Herman seems to be doing well in the housepainting business and thinks he will begin to earn more money, he falls from a ladder and cannot work. After Esther dies, the mother also is unable to work. When the family is nearly starving, a man from the United Charities visits them and asks all kinds of personal questions, including whether Herman beats Katie. Herman throws the man out of the house. Mike concludes that “starvation was kinder” than organized charity.

Mike keeps hearing from those around him that the Messiah will come and lead the Jews to the Promised Land. He asks his neighbor, Reb Samuel, a very religious man, about the Messiah. Reb Samuel, who teaches Mike about Judaism, describes a “pale, young and peaceful” Messiah, but Mike prefers one who looks like Buffalo Bill and “could annihilate our enemies.”

At age twelve, Mike quits school to go to work. He finds a variety of unpleasant, sometimes hellish jobs and discovers anti-Semitism in employment. Even some businesses owned by Jews, he discovers, refuse to hire Jews. One night, he hears a man on a soapbox declare that a world movement is coming to end poverty. Listening to him, Mike learns about the workers’ revolution, which he calls “the true Messiah.” The revolution, he says, forced him to think, struggle, and live. The book then ends with the words, “O great Beginning!”

The Characters

The characters in Jews Without Money contribute to the growth of Mike. He runs wild in the slums of the Lower East Side, playing with his “Gang of Little Yids.” He describes the bums, horse drivers, prostitutes, and workers who live in his neighborhood. His father becomes a figure of despair. For Herman, nothing goes right. All of his get-rich-quick schemes go awry. Cruelly conscious of the need for money in America, he bitterly rejects the New World in which he suffers so much, at one point uttering, “A curse on Columbus! A curse on America, the thief!”

The most admirable character in the book is Katie. Many critics see the book as being primarily in praise of Gold’s own mother, on whom Katie is based. Several years after the book appeared, Gold himself called Katie the book’s heroine. She shows kindness to all, even the prostitutes who live near their apartment. When she works in the cafeteria, the other workers come to her with their problems. She remains gentle and concerned with doing the right thing, even though life for her is a constant round of work. The one time Mike sees her truly happy is when the family goes to Bronx Park and Katie takes the children to gather mushrooms in the woods. She accepts hardship and tragedy with dignity and grace. Only the death of her daughter Esther is too much for her. After Esther dies, Katie is defeated.

Many of Mike’s neighbors are highly religious. Mike theorizes that the more persecuted a minority is, the more religious its members become. Yet beneath the religion, Mike sees hypocrisy in many, especially in the fat Chassidic rabbi imported from Europe at great cost to his relatively poor congregation. When the Chassids celebrate the coming of the rabbi, Mike sees the rabbi stuffing himself and thinks the rabbi will eat all the food at the celebration before the children get a chance to eat anything. He mentions that possibility to Reb Samuel, who sends Mike home without having eaten any of the feast; but, Mike says, Reb Samuel should have listened to the wisdom of the little child. After a while, the rabbi accepts a better paying job at a wealthy congregation. The rabbi’s leaving crushes Reb Samuel. Reb Samuel, a truly pious, gentle man, cannot understand America and the effect it has on people.

Critical Context

Jews Without Money is, Gold felt, an example of the proletarian novel, the novel by a member of the working class and about members of the working class. In this kind of novel, truth is supposed to be more important than art. Yet Gold was a professional writer and editor and seems to have expended much energy on making the book an artistic success. In part as a result, many communist reviewers attacked the book, pointing out that Herman is a would-be capitalist (he was partners in a suspender shop and is bitter because it failed; he feels his cousin cheated him out of the shop while Herman was on his honeymoon). Thus, the communist reviewers argued, the novel is not a proletarian work at all. Gold defended it, arguing that Herman is an example of the way capitalism destroys workers. As several critics indicate, the book fits Gold’s definition of proletarian realism, the novel by the worker about the things a worker knows best.

Jews Without Money proved very popular. It became a best seller and was reissued many times in several languages, including Esperanto. It produced enough money for Gold to buy a home in the country. In spite of his income from the book, however, Gold remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death. Throughout the 1930’s, he helped to edit the New Masses, a communist periodical, and into the 1940’s he wrote a daily column entitled “Change the World” for the Daily Worker, a New York-based communist newspaper. In 1935, an edition of Jews Without Money appeared with a short introduction by Gold. In it, he wrote that Adolf Hitler should read the book and discover that all Jews are not rich capitalists. Thus even after the book’s publication, Gold, perhaps naïvely, believed that his book could serve additional propagandistic purposes.

Bibliography

Bloom, James D. Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Places Jews Without Money in the context of the debate over proletarian art and in the context of Gold’s and Freeman’s efforts as spokespersons for radical literature.

Fiedler, Leslie A. To the Gentiles. New York: Stein and Day, 1972. A largely negative treatment of Gold and Jews Without Money in the context of Jewish American literature.

Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Sees Gold’s book as communicating the spirit of the ghetto but lacking a plot in any usual sense of the term.

Klein, Marcus. Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Treats Gold as a central character in the making of modern American literature. Gives a very sympathetic reading of Jews Without Money.

Sherman, Bernard. The Invention of the Jew: Jewish-American Education Novels, 1916-1964. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969. Treats Jews Without Money as a Marxist education novel as well as a representation of a simplistic view of life.