How did this feisty and ferocious Jewish-American writer fall so far into obscurity?
Mike Gold, author of ‘Jews Without Money.’
By Benjamin Ivry December 22, 2023
Mike Gold sometimes erased the line between ardent social advocacy and just being a bullvan. The subject of a new anthology of his writings from SUNY Press, Gold was the author of the semi-autobiographical 1930 novel Jews Without Money, and frequently displayed what Americanist Rachel Lee Rubin has described as “decidedly obnoxious masculinism.”
Jews Without Money depicts the upbringing of Gold, born Itzok Isaac Granich, on the Lower East Side to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents. His father is a schlimazel repeatedly swindled in business deals by fellow Jews. Like the contemporary novelist Irène Némirovsky, Gold created several despicable Jewish villains to oppose his few virtuous protagonists.
Among the latter was his mother Gittel, evoked in his novel in terms that paraphrase the idealistic portrait of Jewish maternity in the 1925 tear-jerking song “My Yiddishe Momme.”
Despite this maudlin tenderness, Jews Without Money rationalizes and partly excuses gang rape as a “popular sport wherever men live in brutal poverty,” and so to be expected among Lower East Side Jews.
Such opinions are leavened by vignettes, like a street scene where a “fat important little business Jew, bursting like a plum with heat, mops his face, and admires the children.” And details about a Jewish wine cellar where images of President Theodore Roosevelt and Theodor Herzl are displayed as examples of vigorous overachievers.
Gold’s own energetic charm was undeniable. In 1976, the screenwriter Albert Maltz, who was jailed in 1950 for refusing to testify before a McCarthy era congressional committee, recalled that Gold epitomized the proletarian writer, and was “very handsome in a craggy way.”
Yet in literary achievement, Maltz opined, Gold betrayed his talent by refusing rewrites, instead sending first drafts to magazines, saying: “If they want to print it, let them; if not, to hell with it.”
Another Jewish friend and colleague, journalist Joseph Freeman, wrote in a 1936 memoir long overdue for reprint, that Gold could be sympathetic, delighting in fressing baked apples with cream at Childs chain restaurants in Manhattan. Fueled with energy, Gold ferociously defended workers’ rights, reporting for a series of leftist periodicals on labor conflicts and other humanitarian issues.
This advocacy was accompanied by theatrical panache. Freeman recalled that Gold wore soiled shirts and a sombrero, and smoked “stinking, twisted, Italian three-cent cigars, and spat frequently and vigorously on the floor,” whether in the office or carpeted apartments of wealthy sponsors.
Gold might have seen spitting as a prerogative of the working class. During a 1926 voyage to Moscow, as he delighted in telling friends later, a young woman was horrified when he spat in the streets. She inquired if he did the same in New York and he replied: “Sure.”
The costumed persona Gold created was innately bellicose, recognizing pugnacity as essential for the class struggle. His very pen name, Michael Gold, was taken from a Jewish combatant of a previous generation — that Michael Gold was a Union corporal in the Civil War who died in a Veterans Affairs hospital in the Bronx.
Gold’s fighting machismo was especially intolerant of any leftist who, he felt, failed to descend to the street to oppose injustice. One such editorial colleague of more delicate sensibilities was the Jamaican American poet Claude McKay, an erstwhile co-editor at one journal.
As the political activist Max Eastman would later recall, McKay was dismayed by Gold’s “tobacco-stained teeth” and fractious arguments “bordering on physical violence” about his insistence on publishing literary effusions by laborers. Gold would publicly decry McKay and other leftists as “effete aesthetes” who prized art over the proletariat, with a vehemence that might have been slightly homophobic, as McKay’s bisexuality was known to his social circle.
In a later autobiography, McKay would note that Gold’s social revolutionary passion was “electrified with personal feeling” and “sometimes as acid as lime-juice.” McKay added: “When he attacked, it was with rabbinical zeal, and often his attacks were spiteful and petty.”
Similarly, Gold combined gay bashing with outing when he dismissed the work of Thornton Wilder as a “daydream of homosexual figures in graceful gowns moving archaically among the lilies,” in a 1930 essay included in the SUNY Press volume.
In some ways, Gold’s sensibilities never evolved. A hard-line Stalinist, he held fast to his faith in spite of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, murderous antisemitic purges, and other USSR atrocities.
Still, admirers like the American Jewish film critic Jim Hoberman uses the term “personal gulag” to evoke the relative obscurity into which Gold’s works have fallen. The editor of the SUNY Press volume, Patrick Chura, has also written a sympathetic biography of Gold.
Arguably even more empathetic was his onetime fiancée, the social activist Dorothy Day, who is on track to being canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic church for her good deeds on behalf of impoverished people.
When Gold died in 1967, Day published a reminiscence of her time on the Lower East Side: “I knew the Jews and their life there, I bathed with the women in those little bath houses (there were no baths or hot water in the tenements).”
When she visited the Gold family home on Chrystie Street, Day described the mother of Irwin Granich, as Gold signed his first works, as a “stern and beautiful woman who wore the wig and observed the dietary laws, offered me food, even though I was a shiksa, but she did not speak to me.”
According to Day’s granddaughter, Gold’s mother Gittel, who disapproved of the match, “smashed the plates used by their Gentile guest” after the “tense family dinner.” With more forbearance, Day even forgave Gold when he later attacked her Catholic Worker movement for supposedly siding with the Fascist General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
As Day informed readers in her posthumous tribute to Gold, the Catholic Worker charitable movement was “not, of course, pro-Franco but pacifists, followers of Gandhi in our struggle to build a spirit of nonviolence.”
Unmentioned in Day’s article was a romantic episode from 1917 during their courtship, when the engaged couple went to the St. Mark’s Place offices of Novy Mir (New World), a Russian literary magazine. There they interviewed a contributor, the Russian Jewish revolutionary Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein).
Mike Gold’s life and work contained a series of such intriguing scenes. Unsurprisingly, perhaps the most understanding portrait of him so far focuses on comparable details. A 1994 poem by the Pennsylvania-born Jewish writer Enid Dame, “Mike Gold and the Classics” juxtaposes a Yiddish theater production of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with images from Jews Without Money.
Dame details Gold’s life and bookish dreams: “He wanted to sit in his mother’s kitchen forever.[…]/ But what would he do with his family?/ It was too much! No wonder that boy broke down./(His mother comforted him with a sour pickle.)”
If to date Mike Gold’s posterity has been something of a sour pickle, this new SUNY Press anthology should go far to win over readers to his valiant efforts inspired by Yiddishkeit.
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