Unit Overview: The capital of Jewish America at the turn of the 20th century was New York’s Lower East Side. This tighly packed district of tenements, factories, and run-down brownstones had long been a starting point for immigrants, and hundreds of thousands of the new arrivals from Eastern Europe settled there upon passing through Ellis island. When a Jewish immigrant arrived on the Lower East Side, s/he stepped into a Jewish world complete synagogues, mutual-aid societies, libraries, and Jewish-owned stores. This may have been comforting to new arrivals, but the Lower East Side was still a very difficult place to live–and a crowded one. By 1900 – my own father and my grandmother arrived there in 1902 – the district was packed with more than 700 people per acre, making it the most crowded neighborhood on the planet. The activist reformer Jacob Riis described a visit to a tenement in the area occupied by Eastern European Jewish families “I have found in three rooms father, mother, twelve children, and six boarders. They sleep on the half-made clothing for beds. I found that several people slept in a subcellar four feet by six, on a pile of clothing that was being made.”
And over the years, things didn’t get any better. And so, by the time Mike Gold wrote Jews Without Money, many lower east side Jews had reached the breaking point.
Essay question:
2.As we’ve seen in this class, immigration is a political issue and many immigrant novels are political. Certainly that is true of Jews Without Money. What are the novel’s politics and how do they drive the narrative? Or do they? Show how and why.
***You HAVE to take look the power point first, and do research about “Jews Without Money” then do this essay, otherwise you won’t know what this unit about. ***
