Book Review: Jews without Money

Cover of Jews Without Money

The Jewish-American literature from the beginning of the last century is having a strong social profile. Running the pogroms of Eastern Europe they arrived on the shores of the new World feeling dislocated, alienated and fighting poverty and another forms of anti-Semitism.

Jews without money, by Michael Gold - the pen name of Itzok Isaac Ganish, after the name of the Jewish veteran of the US civil war - is one of the best social fresco I've read lately. The fictionalized autobiography is describing with a deep realism the hard life of the Jewish immigrants in the 20s, their poverty, broken dreams and daily life of survival and aspirations and sacrifices for the well-being of their children.

Gold's family moved in the United States from Romania (in the book, his father is given the name Hermann, a name rarely used by the Romanian Jews) and he will became one of the representative proletarian writer. The last lines of the book are announcing a Marxist revolution as the hope for a new world to come for the poor Jewish crowds. This revolution didn't occur in the terms predicted by the Marxists, and the Nord-American Jews succeeded in living a better world. But we will never forget those hard beginnings.