The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-05-31
Colds Book
OF East Side
Senses Revolt
Mike Gold: Jews Without Money.
Horace Liveright, New York; So.
Reviewed by G. HANON


Reviewed by G. HANON
THIS volume consists of a series
of fragments out of the authors
life woven into a connected auto
biographical narrative. Dragge
rather than brought up in the very
center of Manhattan's former red
light district, surrounded by all the
vices of a poverty stricken and Of
ten illiterate immigrant population,
the author has produced a coherent
and animated picture of the East
Side of several decades ago. Gold
was reared in semi-proletarian
family, passing through various
stages from comparative comfort to
extreme need. He early learned all
that this type of life could teach
him of sex, prostitution, perversion
and gangsterism. 1t is without
doubt this aspect of the book that
accounts for the fact that it has al
ready gone through four editions
(even at SO peri.
But it is not the romance" of
this "maelstrom of wagons, men,
pushcarts, street cars, dogs and
East Side garbage" which is of es-
sential interest or appeal to the
class-conscious worker. 1t is not
the "sweet nostalgia" the delicious
yearning evoked in petty-bourgeois
"art-loving" souls by this pestilen-
tial swamp of a capitalist metrop-
oils, this existence of superstition
and misery, this enslavement to ele-
mental filth, this wholesale equat-
ing of human beings to the bloated
bed bugs injecting the structures,
the walls, the very life of the East
Side that constitutes the art appeal
of Colds book. On the contrary,
what makes this book worth read
ing by worker is the fact that
it conveys deep-going sense of re-
vulsion against this system of filth
and slavery, that it crystallizes an
active recognition of the necessity of
destroying it, that it succeeds by
means of a simple art form in stir
ring up an emotional yet distinctly
conscious determination to wage a
revolutionary struggle of annihila-
ton against the capitalist system.
This does not mean, however, that
Colds volume is necessarily pow
erful novel. 1t is hardly that. AS
a matter of fact, the book is not
even free of moments of romanticiz-
ing.
Gold knows his own environment
types. But his own environment
types. But his "internationalism,"
his knowledge of the Irish or other
non-Jewish East Side residents, is
artistically amateurish and second
hand. When he finds himself out
side of his Gown Jewish land" he is
just as much isolated as he was
when as child he ventured out Of
his neighborhood into the territory
of an enemy gang. This volume
certainly does not guarantee that
Gold could write the story Of a ma
tive American working class fam
lily. In addition, Mike Gold as sub
ject of his book-not as its author
appears, to this reviewer at least,
a little too much the artist" chat
ing against the restrictions which
capitalism places upon his individ-
uality and looking forward to the
revolution which will remove the
letters from his personal genius. 1t
is not always possible to draw
sharp line of demarcation between
personal and class revolt. For OBJ
viously the working class consists
of separate individuals who suffer
the slavery of their class in their
own individual bodies, emotions,
thought, etc. Nevertheless, in this
case, the suspicion of pure artist"
creeps up on one out of Colds pages.
The total objective result of Colds
book, however, is not petty-bour-
geois. His volume definitely helps
toawaken the class consciousness of
the worker leaving him with a faith
in himself and his class:
30 Revolution, that forced me to
think, to struggle and to live.
80 great Beginning"