Sam B's blog on "Jews without money"

A link to a biography of Michael Gold: http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4174/Michael-Gold-pseudonym-Itzok-Granich.html

Five biographical facts about Gold that readers of Jews Without Money should know:

· He was born to a poor immigrant Russian-Jewish family.

· He was educated at New York and Harvard Universities.

· He was brought up in the Lower East side of New York but became politically active from an early age and through his work met the likes of Eugene O’Neill so therefore kept himself partially outside this bottom rung of society enabling him to understand its intricacies better.

· His Anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935) was an important source-book for radical writing in the USA in the inter-war years.

· He co-founded the New Masses and was its editor; through this journal Gold promoted a proletarian, neo-Stalinist view of the place of literature in society. He remained one of the most influential members of this left wing intellectual group between 1916 and 1930.

I chose paragraph 17 titled “Two Doctors”

This chapter has examples of people who have the same advantages as each other when younger showing one more successful than the other, it also has an example of how quickly a man’s work can change either for better or for worse. The chapter starts off by talking about the two doctors and how a job like that holds them as some of the most important people in the area, “In the old country the Jews worshiped their Rabbis. In this country the doctor was the community idol”. This helps to indirectly show how disease ridden the streets within the novel are, with many people falling ill, for example the father of the house is currently ill from the lead in the paint. Both doctors are mentioned at the start but one of them, even as highly valued as a doctor seems to struggle labelled as growing “thinner” and that “his eyes were sunk for want of sleep” over the winter.

The doctor and the father then speak about when they were younger and how they both used to go to the same school in “Roumania”, the doctor comments on numerous occasions about how the father could be the doctor if he hadn’t acted in such a way when he was younger. This shows an example of how people could get out of their difficulties if only they had realized what state they would be in when they had a chance to change it. This is supported by the father’s “But I am a man in a trap” quote after he attempts to go back to work, fails and then discusses how if he could buy a shop he would be fine although he needs $300 to buy that shop.