Jews Without Money

If you’ve read all 783 pages of World of Our Fathers and are still looking for more about early Jewish-American life in New York—or just something more immediate—this is the book for you.

An autobiographical fever-dream of a novel, Jews Without Money is a vivid, violent, look at the life of the Jewish slum kids whose parents emigrated to America. A lifelong communist, Gold only wrote one novel, but it anticipates the hallucinatory fiction of writers like Denis Johnson by half a century.

At once entirely Jewish and entirely American, Jews Without Money gives an unvarnished first-person glimpse into the… show more.

This 1930 novel (but really, it’s a memoir) takes the reader back to the Lower East Side at the beginning of the 20th century. The shit-poor, packed neighborhood was the first stop for the thousands of Jews then debarking daily from immigrant ships. One of them was my grandfather, who found himself eating out of a garbage can one day and nearly decided to go back to Russia. Michael Gold grew up in this brutal world, became a card-carrying Communist, and wrote this, his only book, as a cri de coeur against the exploitation of immigrant Jewish workers under… show more.

This is a beautifully told tale about what the first generation of Jews endured on their way to making a new life in the United State told from the sensibility of a young boy whose father becomes disabled trying to make a living as a worker. The book is semi-autobiographical and can be applied to any first-generation whether they be Irish, Japanese, Mexican, or Ukrainian.  Life in the ghetto is hard and yet the immigrant endures.