Jews without Money

It tells of a boy growing up in the impoverished Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Published by Horace Liveright in February 1930—soon after the October 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression—the book's gritty depiction of tenement life resonated with readers and catapulted Gold to literary fame.

[3] Mikey's father, the Romanian-born Herman Gold, is an avid storyteller who believes in the American Dream of upward mobility.

He enjoys some modest early business success, but then his livelihood is stolen by his cousin Sam Kravitz who cheats Herman out of partial ownership of a suspender factory.

[4] Although Mikey is a bright student and "valedictory orator",[5] he decides he must, as the eldest child, drop out of high school to assist his mother in contributing wages to the household.

Living in close quarters in a tenement filled with crime and vice, Mikey comes into daily contact with hustlers, prostitutes, con artists, and dangerous gangsters like upstairs neighbor Louis "One Eye".

He was a foul smelling, emaciated beggar who had never read anything, or seen anything, who knew absolutely nothing but this sterile memory course in dead Hebrew which he whipped into the heads and backsides of little boys.

For example, it depicts a Zionist entrepreneur's cynical swindling of Herman, which has been interpreted as a left-wing critique of both American capitalism and of Zionism as a "bourgeois" movement that does not serve the interests of working-class Jews.

[a] Patrick Chura notes how Jews Without Money—in contrast to Horatio Alger-type "rags-to-riches" stories—"reverses the trajectory of the American narrative of upward mobility, recasting the national myth as a family tragedy.

"[7] Herman starts out with heady dreams of business riches but then "descends into ever deeper poverty and ends his career as pushcart peddler [of bananas], the very job with which the greenest of Jewish immigrants often began life in the New World.

The broad outline of the novel parallels the author's own childhood, in which his father also became ill and bedridden and could no longer earn wages.

[9] Benjamin Balthaser claims that Gold's portrait of working-class Jewish life "inaugurated an entire cycle of novels about a racialized US working class, from Richard Wright's Lawd Today!