Powerful, passionate, and pulsing - one of the best books I've ever read

"Is there any gangster who is as cruel and heartless as the present legal State?"

In the pounding, passionate, instinctive musicality of his words, the working class boy - who became the working class people's columnist and writer - tells his tale of Jewish poverty in the ghetto on the lower east side of Manhattan in the early twentieth century. In vibrant, descriptive bursts, activist, dean of proletarian literature Michael Gold introduces us to prostitutes, pimps, hoodlums, thieves, mensches, bearded rabbis, (some good, some not), idolized and inept doctors, witch doctors, and everyday heroes, along with his hard working, skilled storyteller father, who had and lost success due to betrayal and bad luck, and his rock, his heroine mother who had a warm bosom for everyone to cry on, including weepy prostitutes.

Author and activist Michael Gold, who reinvented himself from Itzok Issac Granich, was a communist in the days when people were red because workers were treated like abused cattle and the world was raw and rough, unless you were one of the few fortunate enough to catch a break. Hard work means nothing if you fall off a ladder and end up languishing in bed, powerless, and melancholy like Michael's father. Here in his semi-autobiographical novel, (originally published in 1930, and republished 25 times since in 16 languages), is the classic I never knew about until now.

To young Michael, a first generation Romanian Jew, it is a hurry up world, when does the fun start world. He writes, "America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants."

I have, in just the last several weeks, (this is 2023), come across several people I thought were fairly educated who believe the propaganda that all Jewish people are rich and powerful. We have never needed the book "Jews Without Money" as much as we do now. The only part of this brilliant book that I hated, yes hated, is Alfred Kazin’s contemptuous introduction that tries to undermine Gold as an injured soul who was not that bright. I am so enthralled by Gold's ardent writing that I'm now reading a biography about him, "Michael Gold, The People's Writer."

It is a rare book indeed that so moves me both due to the author's style and subject. Gold writes with heartbreaking honesty about the lives of the oppressed from the eyes of a child. --- "It is said that the Dawn is beautiful, but where? On the roof nobody loved that hour when the feverglow appeared on the pale sky, as on a consumptive cheek. Then the swarms of bloodsucking flies arrived, and sleep was intolerable, and the humid day was here, and reality, and poverty." ( )

La infancia en un duro barrio de inmigrantes, el Lower East Side de principios del XX, poco tiene que ver con las idealizaciones que el cine ha realizado posteriormente en películas como “El padrino”. Judíos sin Dinero, novela autobiográfica, narra la cotidianeidad de la lucha de clases desde el hueco de la escalera de vecinos, desde las callejuelas en las que la vida se disputa el pan con la explotación y la miseria. Su lectura constituye un documento importante para abordar la memoria política de aquellos barrios bajos que en su día alojaron al proletariado más explosivo y que hoy están siendo desdibujados por los procesos de gentrificación galopante. Las historias que se nos cuentan en Judíos sin Dinero bien podrían haber trascurrido en el Raval de Barcelona o en la Alameda de Hércules de Sevilla.
Mike Gold (1894-1967) es el seudónimo de Itzok Isaac Granich. Nacido en el East Side de Nueva York, en una familia de inmigrantes rumanos judíos, su novela autobiográfica “Judíos sin Dinero” llegó a convertirse en un bestseller durante los años 30 siendo considerada por la crítica como una de las más preeminentes obras de la denominada “literatura proletaria” – en España fue editada casi inmediatamente después de su publicación en Estados Unidos por la mítica editorial Cénit. Desde su primera obra impresa “Three whose hatred killed them”, un poema dedicado a tres anarquistas que murieron mientras preparaban una bomba contra John D. Rockefeller, Gold fue un impetuoso defensor de las causas radicales del proletariado norteamericano. Amigo del escritor John Reed y fuertemente influenciado por la escritura de Walt Whitman, militó en el Partido Comunista de los Estados Unidos hasta su muerte. ( )

The East Side masterpiece. ( )

Depression poverty in NY among Jews

This is a partly autobiographical novel of life in the tenements of New York's Lower East Side in the early part of this century. It's a day-in-the-life tale of thieves, gangsters, and honest folks just trying to get by in a new country. Gold's father, whose desire to run his own business is greater than his ability to actually run the business, is injured at work and confined to bed for a year. Different ethnic groups congregate on different city blocks; finding someone from a different block on "your" street is taken very seriously by the children and adolescents. Feeling that their worship isn't complete without a rabbi from the old country, the neighborhood Orthodox Jews, very poor themselves, pay the sea passage for a young rabbi to come to America. He turns out to be a jerk, and, at the first opportunity, splits for a larger congregation.
Gold does a wonderful job at putting the reader right in the middle of the sights, smells and sounds of people who may be materially poor, but very rich emotionally. This has been called the urban version of John Steinbeck's great agricultural protest novel,The Grapes of Wrath. This book is that good. It's a very passionate piece of writing, and is highly recommended. ( )