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The Old Bunch
The Old Bunch
The Old Bunch
Ebook1,080 pages

The Old Bunch

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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The acclaimed novel of growing up in Chicago’s Jewish ghetto in the shadow of WWI: “A landmark in the development of the realistic novel” (Harold Strauss, The New York Times).

Chicago reporter and author of Compulsion, Meyer Levin won critical acclaim with this debut novel based on his own coming of age in the west side of Chicago. It follows the lives of nineteen teenagers—eleven boys and eight girls—who grow up together in the same working class Jewish Chicago neighborhood. The children of immigrants, these young people strive to forge their own paths in the aftermath of World War I and the struggles of the Great Depression.

With compassion, intimacy, and photographic detail, Levin captures not only the lives of this unique “bunch,” but also the life of a generation from the Roaring Twenties through the New Deal and the Chicago World’s Fair. First published in 1937, The Old Bunch “brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived” (The New York Times).

“Written in good hard-driving colloquial prose, full of sharp characterizations . . . A very fine novel.” —New Republic
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 10, 2014
ISBN9781625670878
The Old Bunch

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    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.

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The Old Bunch - Meyer Levin

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