Jews Without Money
Michael Gold
Carroll and Graf, Second edition, 1996
What does America’s great green lady do with “your tired, your poor?” Michael Gold, who grew up in the lean and hungry East Village around the turn of the century, provides an answer: “America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.” Gold as a child narrates Jews Without Money, this morose autobiographical novel first published in 1930.
Despite his occasional drubbings by Irish toughs, it is not Jews vs. Christians, but rich vs. poor, the gentry who landed years ago vs. the fresh-off-the-boat immigrants, faintly smelling of stowage.
The story is Gold’s childhood, the characters are the Jews and others who inhabit the East Village, the action is his daily life. And in the benighted rainbow of Lower East Side tenements, races flow and diverge: the head of Michael’s gang of youths is a poor Jewish boy named Nigger, who head-butts a teacher’s nose after she calls him “Little Kike.”
The work abounds with descriptions of poverty: the stink of dirt, a woman poisoned by misery, his father’s foray into peddling, standing on the street with stacks of bananas, watching the other workers trudge home without a glance. More absurd are his descriptions of fetid, sparkling, wealth: the prostitute with “at least a million dollars worth of paste diamond glittering from her fat fingers,” a woman laying on the sofa, who “glittered like an ice-cream parlor.”
Despite his socialist viewpoint, his lack of stylistic variation and his hard-spoken anger, Gold manages to separate the assumption of wealth from Judaism, and maintains Judaism’s cultural flavor.
As American Jews rise in prominence and class, the literary genre that illustrated their genre has faded almost into non-existence.As such, Gold’s novel is worth reading over 75 years later for a view of immigrant Jews as something other than diamond merchants. The book provides a world where Jews are just like every other refugee group: downtrodden, with pockets of wealth and sprinkles of pessimism, reviled by their neighbors and unsure of America.
Gold describes an old beggar named Barney, who sat alone on a stoop wearing fifteen pounds of rags in the hot summer. Asked what he was doing, he replied, “I am waiting for the Messiah, my children.” “And what will the Messiah bring you, Barney?” they asked. ”A glass of cream soda.”
Countless cream sodas and three-quarters of a century later, Jews Without Money, though still not a literary breakthrough, deserves a prominent place on our collective bookshelf.
