In a preface to his autobiographical novel, Jews Without Money, published five years after the book’s initial release, Mike Gold relates an anecdote about a German radical friend of his who was translating a chapter from Gold’s book when she was interrupted by a Nazi. The title amuses the soldier: “How could there be Jews without money, when as every good Nazi knew with Hitler, Jews were all international bankers?” As a staunch Communist, the notion of all Jews being capitalists turned Gold’s stomach; to him, Jewish bankers—like bankers of any other religion or race—were fascists, pure and simple. But poor Jews in America, exploited in sweatshops and struggling to eke out a meager living, could be exemplary proletarians.

The novel describes the childhood of one such worker, modeled closely on Gold himself, and given his name (though the author’s birth name was actually Irwin Granich). This precocious child grows up on a Lower East Side choked with prostitution and gangsters, on the one hand, and naïvely religious peasants, on the other. The narrator’s father, Herman, is a Romanian immigrant who finds himself screwed out of job after job, first by a corrupt partner, then by lead-poisoning and a tumble from a scaffolding. He winds up, to his shame, peddling bananas for pennies from a pushcart. Meanwhile his wife, the narrator’s mother, is a paragon of virtue—not only slaving long hours at a restaurant and running a clean home, but also reaching out to her neighbors, Jewish and gentile, and fighting for the rights of the poor against rich landlords and bosses. That every plot development reminds the reader of the tragedies made inevitable by the capitalist system and Tammany Hall should be no surprise; Gold introduces a sweet younger sister for his protagonist, for example, only to have her run over and killed by a delivery truck.

Gold was a Communist first, and a writer second. He published only this single novel, compared to the hundreds of essays and polemics against capitalism and corruption he churned out at rapid speed; his most lasting impact on American culture may have been as editor of The New Masses, the premiere Communist journal of its day. Jews Without Money was a major success, though, and was translated into more than a dozen languages, including Chinese, Swedish, and Esperanto. Part of its international appeal was, of course, the call to revolution in its final pages (“O workers’ Revolution … You are the true Messiah” reads about the same in any language), and its status as one of the first major proletarian novels to be published in America. If only a series of vignettes, Gold’s novel is still among the most sympathetic and textured tales of the Lower East Side, and as an expression of Communist thought, it reflects a major trend in the politics and ideology of early Jewish life in the U.S.