Making It New: 1900–1945 455Throughout the 1920s, Gold had been working on a fictionalized autobiography.
It was published in 1930 as Jews Without Money, just at the right time for such a
fiercely political novel, and was an immediate success. Based on the author’s early
life in a Jewish ghetto, it describes in detail the deprivation and degradation of
poverty. It also offers a ferocious arraignment of capitalism, a system in which
“ kindness is a form of suicide.” The father of a family is overwhelmed by the
depression and dispossession he sees all around him. “People are turning into
wolves!” he despairs. “They will soon eat each other!” It is the mother, Katie Gold,
who is the cornerstone of the family and the heroic center of the book. “I have time
and strength for everything,” she boasts, and her endless funds of optimism and
energy make that boast a reality. Standing up to the landlords and other class
enemies, struggling to survive and support her family, she offers a paradigm for the
revolution of the proletariat. She also offers an example to her son, the protagonist.
The story ends with his conversion to the cause of communist revolution. Witnessing
the demonstration at Union Square in 1914, and knocked down by a policeman,
he experiences an epiphany in which he realizes that the “worker’s Revolution” is
“the true Messiah”: “O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to live,” the
novel concludes, “O great Beginning!” Stylistically, Jews Without Money moves
between expansive, exclamatory prose like this, which recalls the fact that Whitman
was the American writer Gold admired most, and a more journalistic idiom, with
short, punchy sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, snappy vignettes, and dramatic
moments. And thematically it blends its revolutionary message, just as the plays of
Odets do (Gold, in fact, also wrote several one-act plays for the Provincetown
Players), with a vivid account of Jewish family life, its conflicts and squabbles,
its moments of pettiness, pathos, or self-pity – and, too, its warmth, courage, and
affection. Gold remained a loyal communist throughout his life, despite the manifest
brutality of Stalinism. He became a daily columnist for the mass circulation
communist newspaper The Daily Worker in 1933; and in 1941 he published the
anti-Trotskyite The Hollow Men, a collection of his newspaper articles attacking the
political errors of such former allies as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway,
and Archibald MacLeish. He is perhaps the archetypal twentieth-century American
literary radical. He is, however, also a writer who had an instinctive understanding,
not just of the generalized plight of the workers, but of the needs and passions of
individuals, specific members of the dispossessed. As Gold himself realized – when,
in 1935, he described his novel as a useful response to the “anti-Semitic demagogues”
sweeping to power at the time – a work like Jews Without Money is a vivid testament
to community, the sense of kinship among its subjects. To that extent, its revolutionary
spirit is inseparable from its humanity of feeling.
That is also true of the fiction of Albert Maltz who, he once said, wanted to write
proletarian literature that did not betray “the great humanistic tradition of culture”
by serving “an individual political purpose.” That aim got him into some trouble.
When, for instance, he questioned whether art was to be used as a weapon in the
class war in “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (1946), he was so severely criticized by
his political allies that he felt compelled to publish a retraction in The New Masses.GGray_c04.indd 455ray_c 04 .indd 455 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM