Hapke & Bernstein on Gold

The problems that Hapke suggests Gold encountered with proletarian fiction:
a) A lack of models of this sort of writing - in the 1920s there were only a few texts which had been translated from Russian to English and virtually nothing in modernist American magazines
b) 'Liberator' colleagues colleagues Kreymbourg and Williams work of the 1920s retained the progressive era's "trope of bestial, wordless worker" - hardly inspiring.
c) A question of authenticity - were artists providing this type of work genuinely working class?

According to Hapke, Gold was unsure how to articulate his writing. So far, his work showed the joyless defeatism of the Jewish garment workers. It was bleak, pessimistic and oppressive which provided no alternative to making money. 'On a section gang' - as a combination of short story and reportage - was witty even when being political (for instance the comment about pay being the opium of the masses and "the gang spent most of it by the next morning"). Gold also learnt not to try and adhere American worker art to concepts of Russian cultural production, since they were culturally different and it didn't work in America. Instead, he decided on more American populist and sentimental models.

Hapke sees Gold as individualising and humanising Jewish worker culture. Mikey's father story of his labour (and failure to succeed) and his bourgeious psychology is a rememberance which is put to and assessed by his son who then ultimately has his own political awakening in realising collectivism is the answer. Both Hapke and Bernstein demonstrate a certain retaliation in the text, a small 'revolution' if you will, with Hapke highlighting Mikey's 'argument with God' and a realisation of the victims of competitive individualism, and the Christie Street gang retaliating against parental bourgeious dreams for them and, to a certain extent, 'society.' Bernstein revises Hapke by linking class oppression with racial oppression - more collective then individual. The boy gang identifies with black masculinity as personified by the heroic 'Nigger.' Rather tellingly Bernstein says, "Rather than African Americans being 'one of us' the Avengers of Christie Street want to be 'one of them.' " In performing blackness they reject the hopes of upward mobility that their parents have for them and 'thumb their nose' at authority, demonstrating their oppoisition to class expolitation and anti-semitism. They also 'colonise' the Italians as identifying them as Indians to protect their own Jewish collectivism. According to Gold, socialism would be the answer to both class and race problems. As he wrote to Dreiser, "In the working class movement there is no race problem; that is a problem made by capitalism."