1893-1967
Michael Gold was the eldest of three sons born to Jewish immigrants living on New York's Lower East Side. Gold went through several name changes before he settled on Michael Gold. His father's surname was actually Granich. Gold was given the name Yitzhak Granich, which the family anglicized to Isaac. Gold chose to change Isaac to Irwin so it would sound more American. Between 1919 and 1920, he took the name Michael Gold in honor of a Jewish Civil War veteran he admired for having fought to "free the slaves."
Gold's father was a fairly successful capitalist who owned his own small suspenders store and factory. His health, however, began to fade, and by the age of 12, Gold was forced to work to help support the family. The bitterness of having to live in poverty after being raised to expect better was the beginning of his anger against capitalism, which would eventually become evident in his writing.
In August, 1914, his first poem was published. It was about three anarchists who had died in a bomb explosion. Following the publication of this poem, Gold left the Lower East Side, and Judaism, to move to Greenwich Village where he became a Marxist and joined a leftist litereary cirlcle. In 1921, Gold became teh editor of a Communist Party journal entitled The Liberator. When that became completely political in the mid-Twenties, he left and created his own publication entitled The New Masses which was devoted to works by workers, rather than by literary leftists with working-class sympathies. In 1928, he became its editor-in-chief.
In February, 1930, Gold published his book Jews Without Money. The book was an immediate success because of the descriptions of poverty, disease, death, crime, and filth found in the ghetto, and how capitalism was the seed that all this sprung up from.
Gold became a national figure because of this book. He was the "cultural commissar" of the Communist Party and ariter of artistic value according to that party's beliefs. In 1933, he became a daily columnist for a mass circulation Communist Party newspaper. By 1935, Jews Without Money had been translated into at least 14 different languages and was being used against Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.
from Jews Without Money: the Soul of a Landlord
This is a fantastic example of the ghetto descriptions that made Gold's Jews Without Money so popular so quickly. In this section, Gold describes a family whose father is unable to work, so the mother has to go out to work to support the family, and she ends up having to take on the role of protector as well when it comes to facing crooked landlord.
The poverty is inescapable for the people in this section, however, they band together and survive. That is the one ray of light in this otherwise very dark piece of literature. The mother, the main character of the story, fights the landlord and wins not once, but twice. A strength is shown in the midst of the hunger and poverty.
The view of America that Gold gives is a very cynical one, where the majority group thinks it can control everyone else. It is also very proud of the Jewish heritage, which Gold supposedly left behind him.
Back to: American Literature page
Yellowdrake's home page
