Jews Without Money
Jews Without Money Jews Without Money is based on its author’s own childhood, Michael Gold. It re-creates the Jewish immigrant Lower East Side in Manhattan in which he lived, and it provides insight into the life of first- and second-generation Jewish Americans around the turn of the twentieth century. Gold does a wonderful job at putting the reader right in the middle of the sights, smells and sounds of people who may be materially poor, but very rich emotionally. The book paints for the most part a bleak picture of Jewish immigrant life in America, a picture that will remain bleak, the book’s ending implies, until the workers’ revolution occurs. In this paper I will discuss few issues that come up in the book and in the documents that we have read over the past month, along with a brief summary of the book as well. As the central character and narrator, Mike grows and learns more and more about the struggles that his parents and their neighbors undergo to earn a living. Mike’s father had been a housepainter, but he is disabled by a fall and by lead poisoning. At one point in the book, Mike finds him trying to earn money selling half-rotten bananas. We find out Mike’s mother is the central figure in the family. She supports them by working in a cafeteria and cleaning various apartments. After and before work, she takes care of her ill husband and children. On a terribly snowy winter day, Mike’s younger sister, Esther, goes out into the streets to collect wood for the stove where she is run over by a truck and dies. A lawyer comes to their home and says that if the mother and father sign a paper, he will get them a thousand dollars from Adams Express, the company that operated the truck. Herman wants to sign the lawyer’s paper, but Katie throws him out of the house. It is, she says, “blood money.” Repeatedly, Mike learns how terrible life is for people in America without money, especially Jews. They need to cope not only with poverty but also with