Jews Without Money by Michael Gold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Routinely Miraculous

Certainly not a great stylist but well worth reading to understand the grit of immigrant life.

Life on Hester Street: Coming off the boat from Ellis Island in the Battery with a tag on your jacket. No friends. An incomprehensible language. Not a dime in your pocket. Prey to hucksters, con men and all manner of exploitation. And yet you survive.

You create a life through sheer toil, luck, and acute attention to everything that happens around you. There is Yiddish theatre, Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish-speaking unions, and if not a rabbi from your own shtetl, certainly there is one who knew him.

Within a generation you have walked into a new house in Brooklyn or perhaps the remoteness of the Bronx. Meanwhile you suffer the usual heartaches, disappointments, and family tragedies.

Nothing unusual in any of it really, but only in the sense that it happened millions of times. New York City not as a melting pot but a gigantic anvil annealing a certain toughness, an indestructibility, in these former peasants who knew nothing of the world before they were thrown into it.

A miracle actually. Why no commemorative statue to the courage and daring it took?

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