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the other. The narrator’s father, Herman, is a Romanian immigrant who finds himself screwed out of job after job, first by a corrupt partner, then by lead poisoning and a tumble from scaffolding. He winds up, to his shame, peddling bananas for pennies from a pushcart. Meanwhile, his wife, the narrator’s mother, is a paragon of virtue—not only slaving long hours at a restaurant and running a clean home but also reaching out to her neighbors, Jewish and gentile, and fighting for the rights of the poor against landlords and bosses. That every plot development reminds the reader of the tragedies made inevitable by the capitalist system and Tammany Hall should be no surprise; Gold introduces a sweet younger sister for his protagonist, for example, only to have her run over and killed by a delivery truck. Gold was a communist first, and a writer second. He published just this single novel, compared to the hundreds of essays and polemics against capitalism and corruption he churned out at rapid speed; his most lasting impact on American culture may have been as the editor of The New Masses, the premiere communist journal of its day. Jews without Money was a major success, though, and was translated into more than a dozen languages, including Chinese, Swedish, and Esperanto. Part of its international appeal was, of course, the call to revolution in its final pages (“O workers’ Revolution . . . You are the true Messiah” reads about the same in any language) and its status as one of the first major proletarian novels to be published in America. If only a series of vignettes, Gold’s novel is still among the most sympathetic and textured tales of the Lower East Side, and as an expression of communist thought, it reflects a major trend in the politics and ideology of early Jewish life in the United States. Further reading: Gold’s life was fascinating: poverty forced him out of school at 12, but as a young man he briefly attended Harvard; he knew many of the literary eminences of his day and was praised in Sinclair Lewis’s Nobel Prize address. Some biographical coverage of Gold can be found in books on left-wing writing in America, such as Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left (1961) and Alan Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time (2002). His essays are collected in two somewhat hard-to-find volumes, The Mike Gold Reader (1954) and Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (1972). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22pBy the Waters of Manhattan By Charles Reznikoff CHARLES BONI BOOKS, 1930. 255 PAGES. Charles Reznikoff’s first and most famous novel, By the Waters of Manhattan, tells a familiar tale of American Jewish life, starting with Eastern European origins and hardships and immigration, and climaxing with uneasy acculturation to the United States. What distinguishes the book is the oddness and singularity of its narration, which might be less startling to readers who know that Reznikoff 39 Titles American Jewish Fiction is primarily remembered as a poet and as a primary force in the small but influential group dubbed the Objectivists. (Not to be confused with followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, these Objectivists were influenced by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.) The first half of the narrative focuses on the Volsky family of Elizavetgrad, Russia, and relates detail after detail of their struggle to earn a living and dodge persecution. They move, change jobs, and farm out their kids to friends and relatives so often that it becomes hard to keep track of them; more than once, the birth of a child flies by in a single sentence. In this way, Reznikoff creates a sense of the inexorable press of time and the necessary intricacy of family dependencies caused by poverty and political instability. Gradually, the narrative focuses on Sarah Yetta, the Volsky’s eldest and most willful daughter, who happens to have the same name as Reznikoff’s own mother. Smart and hardworking, she is too poor to spend time reading, but she builds up a business with four sewing machines and eight employees. Refusing to be deluded by religious optimism, and yet unwilling to forego tradition entirely, Sarah Yetta sees no future for herself in Russia. In New York, she marries and continues the struggle to put food on the table, and the narrative turns to her cerebral son, named Ezekiel after her father. Living off the labor of his parents and siblings, and having made “the Forty-second...

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