The Old Bunch

By Meyer Levin

The Old Bunch chronicles the lives of nineteen Jewish men and women on Chicago’s west side, a spawling-yet-intimate portrait of American life during the Great Depression, by an author the LA Times hailed as “the most significant American Jewish writer of his time.”

Among the various lives depicted so vividly are those of Joe Feeman, a wayward artist who loses the love of his life to a doctor whose future path is as clear as Joe’s is uncertain. Sam Eisen appears to be following a stable path into law, but in actuality his contempt for the conformist lifestyles of his friends is second only to the distain he feels for the very life he has chosen. Sol Meisel starts out pursuing his dreams of becoming a professional athlete, before settling down to join his father’s business. Interweaving storylines of rebellion and growing up, Levin unsentimentally generates a worldview that is striking in its pre-World War II innocence, while also clearly delineating the old world from the new.

The Old Bunch is one of the great novels of and about the interwar period. Both of its time and remarkably fresh, it is an outstanding achievement by a preeminent American writer.

Norman Mailer referred to Levin as “one of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition.” Ernest Hemingway called his book Citizens “a fine American novel – one of the best I ever read.” In 1957, Levin won the Special Edgar Award for his book Compulsion, the renowned account of the Leopold and Loeb murders and the basis for the 20th Century Fox motion picture.

This edition has been authorized by the Estate of Meyer Levin.
REVIEWS
“The Old Bunch is written in good hard-driving colloquial prose, and is full of sharp characterizations... A very fine novel with the speed and lustiness and brawling of the world’s fourth largest city.” --New Republic
“A landmark in the development of the realistic novel... incident by incident it makes vivid and exciting reading... it brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the “old bunch” lived.” --NY Timesbrbr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625670878

Meyer Levin

Meyer Levin (1905-1981) was called by the Los Angeles Times "the most significant American Jewish writer of his times." Norman Mailer referred to him as "one of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition." Throughout his 60 years of professional work, Levin was a constant innovator, reinventing himself and stretching his literary style with remarkable versatility. When he died, he left behind an extraordinary, diverse body of work that not only reflected the incredible life he led, but chronicled the development of Jewish history and culture in the 20th century.

Reviews for The Old Bunch

[turtleboy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This period piece is set in the "modern times" of the 1920s and '30s. It's a decade-long bildungsroman detailing the adolescence and young adulthood of a dozen or so young Jews as they come of age in depression-era Chicago. Some go east, some go west, all struggle with self-doubt, loss of identity, loss of livelihood, loss of life. Some marry, some divorce, some just sleep around. Some find what they're looking for, others don't.The book is refreshingly sharp for its time and pulls no punches. I have to admit that the first few hundred pages dragged a bit (it's about 970 pages long), but the next few hundred made up for the poor pace of the opening chapters. By page 600 I'd come to appreciate that Levin had considerable skill in characterization: though his characters were slow to take shape, they aged subtly and suitably, and by the time I'd spent several hundred pages with them, they all made sense.In fact, I was at the top of page 565 in the edition I've now read when I mused about how wonderful it was I'd come to know well all of the novel's characters, how their lives, once fully fictitious, now seemed very real. I thought about how it is that our own friends and family develop like the characters in the novel: a new friendship is rarely made overnight, but instead takes shape over the course of years. New friends tell stories, share secrets, reveal themselves to one another in fits and starts, and after several years have passed the new friends have become old friends.Of the "old bunch" I identified most closely with Joe Freedman (the wanderlust-stricken artist) and Sam Eisen (the idealist attorney). These two characters seemed to me the most real; in their searches for self I sense a sort of universal searching, a truly human enterprise.For instance, Joe travels the world over in trying to find his muse. More than once he finds his inspiration, only to let it go again each time. At the novel's end one senses he's no closer to his goal than where he began. His struggle through the novel's nearly thousand pages could stand for that of anyone who's ever felt lost, betrayed, confused, at sea.Levin writes well. He lacks Potok's style and Singer's simply incomparable knack for storytelling, but his characterizations are deft and strong, and his plot is engaging.