Jews Without Money is a 1930 semi-autobiographical novel by American critic Mike Gold.
Jews Without Money is a 1930 semi-autobiographical novel by American critic Mike Gold.
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 was reprinted 25 times by 1950. It was translated into 16 languages. [3] It became a prototype for the American proletarian novel. [4]
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 mother 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 authorial 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."
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).
The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.
Israel Zangwill was a British author at the forefront of cultural Zionism during the 19th century, and was a close associate of Theodor Herzl. He later rejected the search for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and became the prime thinker behind the territorial movement.
Irena Stanisława Sendler, also referred to as Irena Sendlerowa in Poland, nom de guerreJolanta, was a Polish humanitarian, social worker, and nurse who served in the Polish Underground Resistance during World War II in German-occupied Warsaw. From October 1943 she was head of the children's section of Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews.
The Kishinev pogrom or Kishinev massacre was an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev, then the capital of the Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire, on 19–21 April [O.S. 6–8 April] 1903. A second pogrom erupted in the city in October 1905. In the pogrom of 1903, which began on Easter Day, 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, a number of Jewish women were raped, over 500 were lightly injured and 1,500 homes were damaged. American Jews began large-scale organized financial help, and assisted in emigration. The incident focused worldwide attention on the persecution of Jews in Russia and led Theodor Herzl to propose the Uganda Scheme as a temporary refuge for the Jews.
Samuel Roth (1893–1974) was an American publisher and writer. Described as an "all-around schemer", he was the plaintiff in Roth v. United States (1957). The case was a Supreme Court ruling on freedom of sexual expression and whose minority opinion, regarding redeeming social value as a criterion in obscenity prosecutions, became a template for the liberalizing First Amendment decisions in the 1960s.
Sarah Gertrude Millin, née Liebson, was a South African author.
New Masses (1926–1948) was an American Marxist magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA. It succeeded both The Masses (1912–1917) and The Liberator (1918-1924). New Masses was later merged into Masses & Mainstream (1948–1963). With the coming of the Great Depression in 1929 America became more receptive to ideas from the political Left and New Masses became highly influential in intellectual circles. The magazine has been called “the principal organ of the American cultural left from 1926 onwards."
Michael Gold 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.
The John Reed Clubs (1929–1935), often referred to as John Reed Club (JRC), were an American federation of local organizations targeted towards Marxist writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist and activist John Reed. Established in the fall of 1929, the John Reed Clubs were a mass organization of the Communist Party USA which sought to expand its influence among radical and liberal intellectuals. The organization was terminated in 1935.
The social novel, also known as the social problemnovel, is a "work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel". More specific examples of social problems that are addressed in such works include poverty, conditions in factories and mines, the plight of child labor, violence against women, rising criminality, and epidemics because of over-crowding and poor sanitation in cities.
Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-conscious proletariat. Though the Encyclopædia Britannica states that because it "is essentially an intended device of revolution", it is therefore often published by the Communist Party or left wing sympathizers, the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda". This different emphasis may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain. The British tradition was not especially inspired by the Communist Party, but had its roots in the Chartist movement, and socialism, amongst others. Furthermore, writing about the British working-class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (1982) suggested that "the once current [term] 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working-class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence".
Horace Brisbin Liveright was an American publisher and stage producer. With Albert Boni, he founded the Modern Library and Boni & Liveright publishers. He published the books of numerous influential American and British authors. Turning to theatre, he produced the successful 1927 Broadway play Dracula, with Béla Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan in the roles they would make famous in the 1931 film by the same name.
Daughter of Earth (1929) is an autobiographical novel by the American author and journalist Agnes Smedley. The novel chronicles the years of Marie Rogers's tumultuous childhood, struggles in relationships with men, time working with the Socialist Party, and involvement in the Indian independence movement.
Morgen Freiheit was a New York City-based daily Yiddish language newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, USA, founded by Moissaye Olgin in 1922. After the end of World War II the paper's pro-Israel views brought it into disfavor with the Communist Party and its editor Paul Novick was expelled from the organization. The paper closed in 1988.
Boni & Liveright is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk.
Proletarian poetry is a political poetry movement that developed in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s that expresses the class-conscious perspectives of the working-class. Such poems are either explicitly Marxist or at least socialist, though they are often aesthetically disparate. As a literature that emphasized working-class voices, the poetic form of works range from those emulating African-American slave work songs to modernist poetry. Major poets of the movement include Langston Hughes, Kenneth Fearing, Edwin Rolfe, Horace Gregory, and Mike Gold.
The working class comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce.
Jacob Gens was the head of the Vilnius Ghetto government. Originally from a merchant family, he joined the Lithuanian Army shortly after the independence of Lithuania, rising to the rank of captain while also securing a college degree in law and economics. He married a non-Jew and worked at several jobs, including as a teacher, accountant, and administrator.
Les Chiens et les Loups (The Dogs and the Wolves) is a novel by Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942), published at the end of 1939 as a serial in the weekly magazine Gringoire, then by Albin Michel in 1940. Overshadowed by the phoney war, it was the last work by Irène Némirovsky to be published in volume under her own name during her lifetime, before she was banned from the profession and deported to Auschwitz, where she died after one month.