Jews Without Money is a 1930 semi-autobiographical novel by American critic Mike Gold.
Published by Horace Liveright shortly after the onset of the Great Depression,[1] the novel is a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side, beginning in the 1890s.[2] Jews without Money was an immediate success and was reprinted 25 times by 1950. It was translated into 16 languages.[3] It became a prototype for the American proletarian novel.[4]
Jews without Money is set in a slum populated mainly by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The father of the hero is a Romanian-born 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.
The novel depicts a Zionist entrepreneur's fatal extortion of a poor Jew, which has been read as a proletarian critique of both American capitalism and of Zionism as a "bourgeois" movement that does not serve the interests of working-class American Jews.[a][5]
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."