Never Forgetting the East Side: Michael Gold's Jews Without Money

Abstract

This essay identifies the 1965 mass market reprint of Michael Gold’s 1930 novel Jews Without Money within the politics of ethnic literary revival and argues that the publisher Avon Books sought to capitalize on the book’s East Side setting. Focusing on the emergence of the East Side as a site of ethnic heritage for Jewish Americans, I argue that this symbolic reclamation of the neighborhood turns the economic condition of poverty into an object of sentimental attachment and ideologically affirms national ideals of upward mobility. Discussing the dissident elements of Jews Without Money , I pry the text away from its ethnic nationalist appropriation and attend to how Jews Without Money reverses the conventions and tropes of up-from-the-ghetto narratives in order to imagine a revolutionary working-class form of Jewish identity.