Jews Without Money, by Michael Gold

Dear Readers,

I just read a fantastic book for school that you might enjoy. It's called Jews Without Money. Here's a response paper I wrote for it. Enjoy.

Response to Jews Without Money.

This response will be more emotional than my previous responses. I absolutely loved Jews Without Money.

Maybe I loved it so much because I’m interested in Communism and I’m interested in Judaism, and I also enjoy autobiographies or semi-autobiographies. And this book had all three of those things in it!

It’s been my favorite book I’ve read for school so far this semester, and that’s saying a lot because I’m taking three literature classes. I’ve been recommending Jews Without Money to people and talking about it more than I usually talk about books I read for school. I liked the writing style. I liked the subject matter. I liked the straight-forward, chronological narrative style. I liked the honesty of the book, and I loved Gold’s description of his mother, especially in chapter 13, Jews and Christians. His mother was such a realistic and interesting character. I feel like I know her personally.

I thought that Gold had a nice balance of particular stuff and universal stuff. In other words, while he did use a lot of Jewish jargon or references to Judaica, he didn’t use so much that modern non-Jewish readers like me couldn’t understand what he was talking about.

Currently I’m trying to become a high school English teacher, and I liked the book so much, that I think that I would like to teach Jews Without Money. Hopefully no parents would accuse me of being a communist, if I did teach it. (I’ll make students memorize the preamble to the Constitution, just to prove my patriotism. Ha ha ha. Or in some other way, if I taught Jews Without Money, I’d probably need to assure students, parents and administrators somehow that I’m not a communist, or even a communist sympathizer.) But I think that high school students in the suburbs of Phoenix would enjoy reading about a world rougher than their own.

The book brings up so many hot-button issues, too, that would be good to talk about in a high school English class, like race, class, gender, religion, socio-economic status, economic systems, the justification of strikes, government, nurture vs. nature, and the list goes on and on.

I cried while I read the last chapter, The Job Hunt. Right now I’m looking for a job, and my wife is pregnant, so I’m starting to feel some of the pressures of being responsible and bringing home the bacon. I’ve never enjoyed looking for jobs. The whole process is very uncomfortable. I don’t know of anyone who enjoys begging for work. But reading The Job Hunt made me think that I don’t have it as bad as some people do, and it also made me think, “What a sad world this is we live in.”

I just read an article that really relates to this book. (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2009/03/08/a1a_homedepot_0309.html?imw=Y) It’s about how undocumented workers are standing outside of Home Depots looking for construction guys to give them work, and Home Depot really doesn’t like them standing out there, because it bothers the customers, but these people are desperate for jobs and money.

I’d also like to teach Gold’s book because Jews Without Money is very relevant to today’s economic crises. With all the talk of bail-outs and nationalizing of banks, I feel like we are getting closer to a socialist economic system.

The books also got me thinking about communism. Personally, I don’t think that Communism was the Messiah that Michael Gold was looking for. Maybe Gold would have been better off becoming more faithfully Jewish, and just trying to work and go to school, to work himself out of poverty, rather than waiting for the worker’s revolution to come. At the same time, though, I think the system or “the man” or big greedy people and businesses were exploiting the lower classes, and keeping them in poverty.

Again, Jews Without Money affected me very emotionally, more so than the other books we’ve read. It reminded me of some of my personal experiences. One time I worked under the table for three weeks as a plumber’s helper in Tucson, Arizona. I hated it. My bosses were mean and I’m horrible at fixing things and using tools. I was also worried that my mean bosses wouldn’t pay me the cash they promised me. Because if they didn’t pay me, there was nothing I could really do besides threaten them with violence or something vigilante like that. I couldn’t have called the Better Business Bureau or sued them, because I was working for cash, and they could have denied ever knowing me.

The last day I worked with that plumbing company, one of my co-workers said, “It’s a good thing you never called in sick, because if you call in sick, you get fired.” He also told me, “You know what happens if you get hurt on the job? You get fired. Maybe if you're hurt really bad, and the boss is feeling nice, you’ll get a ride to the Emergency Room, but that’s it.”

I worked around people I suspected might have been undocumented workers, so I can understand their plight a little bit. But I know that I’ve been much more privileged than undocumented workers, and I know I’ve been much more privileged than Michael Gold and the people who lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1900s.

Thank you for assigning this book. It will definitely be one that I won’t sell back at the end of the semester.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa