To kick off Season 6, we are joined by comrade, friend-of-the-pod, and Indiana University South Bend associate professor of English Benjamin Balthaser to talk about Mike Gold’s amazing proletarian lit masterpiece, Jews Without Money (1930). If you haven’t heard of this semi-autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century, it’s because US reactionaries tried very hard to bury the history of 1930s communist literature – and succeeded for a long time. We talk about left efforts to recover that history, plus Gold’s moving, hilarious, sad, and often shocking portrait of life in a Jewish tenement.
We read the 1996 Carrol & Graf edition with an introduction by ultra-lib Alfred Kazin. You must read this introduction to, like us, get very mad and so you will understand why we dunk so hard on it. Ah, the end-of-history ‘90s, folks.
For more on Gold, you should definitely check out Benjamin’s outstanding essay in Jacobin, “Mike Gold, the Writer Who Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves” https://jacobin.com/2021/07/mike-gold-literature-jewish-american-proletariat-red-left. And you should also check out Benjamin’s fantastic book, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War from University of Michigan Press.
Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Benjamin on Twitter @BL_Balthaser, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.