Letter from Lhasa, number 199. (Gold 1965): Jews without Money
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Gold, M., Jews without Money, An Avon Library Book, New York, N.Y., U.S.A., 1965.
(Gold 1965).
Michael Gold
The first copyright of this book is of the year 1930.
It is a book about poverty in New York, in the proletarian and sub-proletarian New York, specifically within immigrants. It is about the poverty’s trap in certain Jews milieux. The author talks about his direct experience. The work is actually about the poverty’s trap in New York and in the USA in general. Do you know what poverty is? The poverty’s trap is when one tries to go out from poverty and one is not successful, it is a permanently frustrated desire or hope, what is perhaps worse than being hopeless.
It is a book also about spiritual misery, what is another poverty’s trap. It is when one goes out material poverty and is spiritually annihilated or one remains anyway spiritually miserable, not only miserable, really unhappy and with the same conditioned reflexes one had when one was materially poor.
It is a work also about human greatness, greatness in poverty, naturally. It happens. Poverty and greatness coexist.
It is a vivid and genuine, or such it seems, portrait of human life. What makes the narration really variegated and enjoyable.
There is, finally, a perhaps odd afterword from Michael Harrington. It tries to give some political, or cultural political, meaning to this work. Sometimes writers, for one reason or another, align with political parties. The book seems really genuine without any real political or cultural political goal. It may be the afterword will seduce the reader liking some political and that specific political interpretation, while it will repel the reader not liking politics or that specific politics. In my opinion, such works, pure and genuine (or appearing as such), would not need any political or para-political pushing, or promotion, or justification. Perhaps, for Michael Harrington, the book is not sufficiently “proletarian literature”. In fact, I have not understood why it be “a work of modest, but unquestionable aesthetic value.” (Gold 1965, p. 234). I have not understood that “modest”. The modesty or apparent modesty of the author, combined with a not pompous aesthetic, has created a great literary masterpiece.
Gold, M., Jews without Money, An Avon Library Book, New York, N.Y., U.S.A., 1965.
