The life of a poor jewish boy living in the tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1900’s. This book is credited with being one of the earliest examples of working class literature, but I have my doubts about that. I bought this book, along with “Call it Sleep” (Henry Roth, 1934), on a trip to New York two years ago, because I was interested in that time period, and of Jewish life in the Lower East Side at the time. I also read Jacob Riis’ “How the other Half Lives”, from 1890, a journalistic take on life in the tenements for poor people, and the mix of all kinds of immigrants. This book captures some of the same things, but in memoirs form, from the perspective of a young jewish boy. It is filled with horrific stories of violence, injustice, sadness and lurid goings-on, all told in a quite matter-of-factly childish point of view. I learned half-way through reading the book that it isn’t author Michael Gold’s actual memoirs, but rather a novel inspired by his childhood, a fact which instantly changed the reading experience, and lowered the satisfaction of my “reality hunger” (to introduce a concept by writer David Shields). It got me to thinking about my attitude towards memoirs and fiction, and how I as a reader usually value a real life testimony more than a novel, which seems cheaper, or not as real. This is an old discussion in literary circles, no doubt, but it was unusually sharply actualized for me this time, when I for half of the book thought it was the author’s verbatim recollections.
Reading about Jewish customs and family histories in Romanian and Hungarian Jewry, I was also struck by heritage-related feeling – as I am wont to do with this kind of material; “what if my grandparents went to America instead”, “what would life have been if they had been able to stay in their home town” and similar questions. I like a lot of the stories collected in this book, and I recognize a lot of the observations from my own life. I liked being in company of the Jews of the lower east side, and realize that I miss a Jewish component in my own life.
One point of conjecture with this book is that it sometimes feels a bit preachy about how the working class is exploited. At least I thought it was a bit too transparent once I learned that Michael Gold was a lifelong working class activist. I have had this discussion in relation to Berthold Brecht too, but as I am often on the fence about these things, I’m not sure.
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Kinship of all Species 