Michael Gold

Patrick Chura

Description

Jewish American Communist writer and cultural figure Michael Gold (1893–1967) was a key progressive author of his generation, yet today his work is too often forgotten. A novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, journalist, and editor, Gold was the leading advocate of leftist, proletarian literature in the United States between the two world wars. His acclaimed autobiographical novel Jews without Money (1930) is a vivid account of early twentieth-century immigrant life in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. In this authoritative biography, Patrick Chura traces Gold's story from his impoverished youth, through the period of his fame during the "red decade" of the 1930s, and into the McCarthy era, when he was blacklisted and forced to work menial jobs to support his family. In his time as a radical writer-activist, Gold courageously helped strikes, protested against war and fascism, worked for the Unemployed Councils, walked in hunger marches and May Day parades, got arrested in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, raised money for workers' cooperatives and leftist journalism, and demonstrated against nuclear weapons and in support of fair housing, the Rosenbergs, and civil rights. This biography welcomes Gold back into cultural conversations about art, literature, politics, social change, and Jewish American life in the twentieth century.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The People's Writer

1. Tributes

2. Itzhok/Irwin Granich (1893–1914)

3. Becoming Michael Gold (1914–1920)

4. From the Liberator to the New Masses (1921–1929)

5. Art for Humanity's Sake (1929–1935)

6. A New Kind of Song (1935–1941)

7. War and Family Matters (1941–1950)

8. McCarthyism (1950–1955)

9. "One Brave Hello" (1956–1967)

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• États-Unis
• History of the Americas
• 20th century
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438480992
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

MICHAEL
GOLD
SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY J EWISH L ITERATURE AND C ULTURE
EZRA CAPPELL, EDITOR

Dan Shiffman, College Bound: The Pursuit of Education in Jewish American Literature, 1896–1944
Eric J. Sundquist, editor, Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader
Noam Pines, The Infrahuman: Animality in Modern Jewish Literature
Oded Nir, Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction
Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry
Richard J. Fein, translator, The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever
Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky, editors, New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching
Jennifer Cazenave, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
Ruthie Abeliovich, Possessed Voices: Aural Remains from Modernist Hebrew Theater
Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith, editors, The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel’s Literary Works
Ezra Cappell and Jessica Lang, editors, Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism
Nancy E. Berg and Naomi B. Sokoloff, editors, Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making
Patrick Chura, Michael Gold: The People’s Writer
MICHAEL
GOLD
The People’s Writer
PATRICK CHURA
Cover image: Photograph of Michael Gold among a Large Group of Attendees after a Lecture, July 16, 1939. © Aaron Granich. Source: Granich family.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Chura, Patrick, 1964– author.
Title: Michael Gold : the people’s writer / Patrick Chura.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Jewish literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009142 | ISBN 9781438480978 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438480992 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Gold, Michael, 1893–1967. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3513.O29 Z64 2020 | DDC 818/.5209 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009142
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The People’s Writer
Chapter One Tributes
Chapter Two Itzhok/Irwin Granich (1893–1914)
Chapter Three Becoming Michael Gold (1914–1920)
Chapter Four From the Liberator to the New Masses (1921–1929)
Chapter Five Art for Humanity’s Sake (1929–1935)
Chapter Six A New Kind of Song (1935–1941)
Chapter Seven War and Family Matters (1941–1950)
Chapter Eight McCarthyism (1950–1955)
Chapter Nine “One Brave Hello” (1956–1967)
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1. Michael Gold with son Carl, c. 1942. 2.1. Gittel (Katie) Granich. 2.2. Chaim (Charles) Granich and his sons, Itzhok (left), Emmanuel (right), and George, c. 1901. 2.3. Itzhok (Irwin) Granich, c. 1906. 2.4. Chaim (Charles) Granich in his long illness. 2.5. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “rebel girl,” in the 1910s. 3.1. Boston Journal , page one, October 19, 1914. 3.2 Irwin Granich in the 1910s. 3.3 Dorothy Day in the 1910s. 3.4. Granich worked for a time in the “wild and rich” oil country near Tampico. 4.1. First trip to Russia, 1924–1925. 4.2. On Hemingway’s boat, 1929. 4.3. While sportfishing, Gold reminded Hemingway that the working people fished out of economic necessity. 5.1. Gold in 1930. 5.2. Speaking on May Day, early 1930s. 5.3. With Andre Gide in Paris, 1935. 5.4. With Liz and Nicky at Free Acres, summer 1937. 6.1. Daily Worker , January 2, 1936. 6.2. New Masses , October 22, 1940. 7.1. Nicky and Carl, early 1940s. 7.2. From left: Manny, George, and Mike, c. 1945. 8.1. Higley Hill, early 1950s. 8.2. Mike and Elizabeth worship the sun at Camp Unity, 1953. 9.1. Mike and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn celebrate Flynn’s birthday.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Nicholas and Carl Granich for sharing their personal recollections in multiple phone interviews. I owe double thanks to Nick Granich for welcoming me into his San Francisco home in June 2017, a visit I will always remember. I am also indebted to Aaron Granich and Reuben Granich for their friendly support and advice.
For immeasurable help including erudite advice and assistance, I would like to thank Alan Wald at the University of Michigan. For interviews, extended correspondence, and encouragement, I owe a debt of gratitude to Marcia Folsom.
Thanks go to Professors Robbie Lieberman and David Roessel for sharing their knowledge.
I am grateful also to the many who provided research assistance, including, most of all, Julie Herrada at the Labadie Special Collections Library at Michigan and Don Appleby with Caitlin Noussas at the University of Akron Bierce Library. My students at the University of Akron challenged my thinking and contributed many insights about Michael Gold. I would also like to thank production editor Jenn Bennett-Genthner and acquisitions editor Rafael Chaiken at SUNY Press.
Introduction
The People’s Writer
A s a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, journalist, and editor, Michael Gold was the leading advocate of leftist, “proletarian” literature in the United States between the world wars. His acclaimed autobiographical novel of 1930, Jews without Money , is a vivid and historically important account of early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrant life in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Jews without Money earned enthusiastic reviews and reached a wide audience, going through eleven printings in 1930 alone. In that year, Sinclair Lewis praised the novel in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, crediting Gold with revealing “the new frontier of the Jewish East Side.” 1
During the 1930s Michael Gold became a national figure—the most famous Communist writer in America—as editor of the radical journal New Masses and columnist for the American Communist Party’s Daily Worker . In a decade when many American artists explored poverty and took Marxist-influenced positions, Gold was the acknowledged leader among class-conscious writers. With his fiction, poems, and plays, along with hundreds of impassioned columns under the title Change the World , he staked a claim to being the originating force of the once-mighty movement for a workers’ literature.
While the context of the “red decade” elevated Michael Gold, a second historical factor—the end of the Depression and the onset of World War II—had the opposite effect, marginalizing him as a cultural figure and destabilizing his career. After Stalin’s murderous show trials of 1936–1938 and the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, leftist writers and critics began to repudiate their Communist ties, but Gold remained firmly in the Soviet camp, becoming by default a “critical hatchet man”: the unofficial gatekeeper of the American Communist Party’s rigid artistic standards.
The consequences of this role were apparent in The Hollow Men , a collection of Daily Worker columns that Gold expanded for publication in 1941. Never one to suppress his political passions, Gold excoriated the literary establishment and a cadre of famous writers who had once been his friends. Though these “literary renegades” had become critical of the Party and the USSR due to specific acts of Joseph Stalin, Gold equated their defection with a general abandonment of the exploited working classes.
Underneath it all, there was another factor that angered Gold. The proletarian spirit of the Depression decade, a spirit deeply infused with Marxism and impossible without it, was by 1940 being disparaged in literary circles. As major writers disavowed their allegiances, they rejected also the great people’s culture of the 1930s, which Gold, arguably more than anyone, had helped create. In his view, the bourgeois apostates were denying democratic principles and preparing the way for fascism as World War II approached.
When McCarthyism took hold of the United States in 1950, Gold was living in France, where he had relocated in part because he foresaw the persecutions of the Cold War. But he returned to the United States in time to face the worst of the anti-Communist hysteria. With the Party under relentless attack, Gold was blacklisted, eventually losing even his low-paid newspaper work. Living on the brink of poverty, he took on menial jobs to support his family. Early in his career, the roster of Gold’s professional allies had included Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Eugene O’Neill, but in the McCarthy era he embraced and drew strength from a different circle, which included figures like Richard Wright, W. E. B. DuBois, Dorothy Day, Pete Seeger, and Paul Robeson. Everyone in the first group had abandoned the Left to the tune of Nobel Prizes or election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Everyone in the second group had remained radical and experienced arrest, blacklisting, exile, harassment, and in some cases indictment.
An unsuccessful national speaking tour in 1954 made it clear that the audience for Gold’s work was dwindling, though he was now followed closely