Jews without Money
Jews without Money is a 1930 semi-autobiographical novel by American critic Mike Gold. Description. Published by Horace Liveright shortly after the onset of the Great Depression, the novel is a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side, beginning in the 1890s. "Jews without Money" was an immediate success and went through many print-runs in its first years and was translated into over 14 languages. It became a prototype for the American proletarian novel. "Jews without Money" is set in a slum populated mainly by Jewish immigrants from Eastern  Europe. The father of the hero is a painter who suffers from lead poisoning. When he falls from a scaffold, he is disabled and can no longer work. His business fails and the family is pushed into poverty. The mother has to seek work in a restaurant. Although he is a bright boy, young Michael decides he must leave school. On the final page of the book, the poor Jewish boy prays for the arrival of a Marxist worker's revolution that will emancipate the working class. In his authorial note to the novel, Gold wrote, "I have told in  my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto."