| Michael Gold | |
|---|---|
Mike Gold before New York crowd (1930s) |
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| Born | Itzok Isaac Granich April 12, 1894 Lower East Side, New York City |
| Died | May 14, 1967 (aged 73) Terra Linda, California |
| Occupation | editor, author, literary critic |
| Nationality | American |
| Literary movement | Proletarian literature |
| Notable work(s) | Jews Without Money |
| Relative(s) | Max Granich (brother), George Granich (brother), Grace Granich (sister-in-law) |
Michael "Mike" Gold (April 12, 1894 – May 14, 1967) is the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic, his semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money from 1930 was a bestseller.
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Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich on April 12, 1894[1] on the Lower East Side of New York City to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents - Chaim Granich and Gittel Schwartz Granich.[2] He had two brothers. Mike Gold signed his first published writings Irwin Granich. He reportedly took the pseudonym Michael Gold at the time of the Palmer Raids on radicals in 1919-20 from a Jewish Civil War veteran he admired for having fought to "free the slaves."[3][4][5] During the 1930s and 1940s Gold was considered the Dean of U.S. Proletarian Literature.
The Masses, a socialist journal edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, published his first pieces in August, 1914. "Three Whose Hatred Killed Them" is a poem about anarchists killed in a Lexington Avenue tenement by their own bomb. Gold praised their pure intentions. Until his death he was an ardent supporter of the Communist Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet Union in all its phases. In 1921-22 Gold and Claude McKay became Executive Editors of Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator. In 1925 Gold visited Moscow. In 1926 he was a founding editor of The New Masses, which published leftist works and also set up radical theater groups. Gold was editor-in-chief from 1928 to 1934. As he had at The Liberator, he liked to publish letters, poems and fiction by ordinary workers more than those of literary leftists.
One of the articles he wrote for The New Masses was "Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot", in which he assaults her works as appearing "to resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums ... The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values. It is part of the signs of doom that are written largely everywhere on the walls of bourgeois society."
In "Proletarian Realism" (1930), Gold said of Marcel Proust: "The worst example and the best of what we do not want to do is the spectacle of Proust, master-masturbator of the bourgeois literature."[6]
Gold had been working on his one novel, Jews Without Money,[7] a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side, throughout the 1920s.[3] Published in the midst of the 1928 Great Depression, in 1930, it was an immediate success and went through many print-runs in its first years and was translated into over 14 languages. It also became a prototype for the American Proletarian novel. On the last page of the book, the poor Jewish boy prays for the arrival of a Marxist worker's revolution that will emancipate the working class.
Jews without Money is set in a slum populated mainly by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The father of the hero is a painter, who suffers from lead poisoning. When he falls from a scaffold, he is disabled and can no longer work. His business fails and the family is pushed into poverty. The wife has to seek work in a restaurant. Although he is a bright boy, young Michael decides he must leave school.
In his Author's Note to the novel, Gold wrote, "I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto."
Gold himself was fond of repeating a quote from the novel: "O workers' Revolution!... You are the true Messiah!"[8]
The popularity of the novel made Gold a national figure and cultural commissar of the Communist Party. He was a daily columnist for its paper, the Daily Worker, until his death.
As a critic, Gold fiercely denounced left wing authors who he held deviated from the Communist Party line. Among those he denounced were Albert Maltz and "renegade" Ernest Hemingway, who responded with "Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself." [9]
Gold died in Terra Linda, California, on May 14, 1967 from complications following a stroke. He was 73 years old.[10]
Gold's papers reside at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University in New York City.