Sam W's post on Michael Gold

sam123 said...


Biography of Michael Gold –

http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/modern/gold_mi.html

Five interesting facts about Michael Gold –

1. Took his pseudonym from a Jewish civil war veteran he admired

2. Jews without money was published around just after the wall-street crash, during a time of economic turmoil; Barry Gross argues that had it been published a few years earlier it would have gone unnoticed, and had it been published later it would have seemed old – hat

3. in 1933 he became a columnist for the daily worker – a communist newspaper

4. Jews without money was circulated by German radicals as propaganda against the “Nazi anti-semetic lies”

5. Gold was a life-long Marxist; he never changed his views to go with the times throughout his life

Chapter 2 is a very significant chapter that looks at the attitudes towards work in Jews without money. Gold talks about the prostitutes and pimps that were so prevalent in the lower east side of New York City, and shows the darker side of life within the city. The chapter examines how people made money through the sex industry; although an amoral means to an end, the characters still became better off than people who worked in industries such as factories. Although Gold as a child found the act of sex disgusting and was horrified when it was pointed out to him that it was a part of life and “where babies come from”, he later accepts this. Whilst realising that sex is something that happens in life, he also recognises that selling sex is something which happens on a regular basis, symbolising an acceptance that pimps and prostitutes are big business in a metropolis such as New York; a part of the darker and seedier part of life.