Jews Without Money

“Mr. Zunzer was a pillar of the synagogue.”

Mr. Zunzer owns the tenement building where many poor families live alongside the prostitutes and criminals. Even though he permits crimes and vice on his property, he is still seen as a pillar of the community and a moral, pious man. The respect given to Mr. Zunzer illustrates the way in which the practical reality of poverty triumphs over morality. Everyone understands the need to live and to make money. Mr. Zunzer is complicit in the crimes and the sins that take place inside the building he owns, but everyone accepts that he is simply being practical. Money is more important than morals, especially when the characters have so little of either. 

“But it is America that has taught the sons of tubercular Jewish tailors how to kill.”

The Jewish immigrants to America were mostly professional and bookish, according to Mike Gold. However, the poverty they faced in their new home forced them to turn to more violent means of survival. The material conditions of life in the poor neighborhood creates the social conditions in which crime becomes an essential part of life, though the American critics believe that the opposite is true. The Americans blame the immigrants for bringing crime to the country, while the immigrants blame America for forcing them to turn to crime. All of the participants are caught in a vicious cycle of violence and poverty. 

“Their world was still the same, though ours had forever changed.”

Mike’s friend Joey is sexually assaulted by a strange man who is then nearly beaten to death by a crowd of angry people. The incident changes the boys forever, bringing them into the same world as the members of the angry mob. They lose their innocence when they realize that adults may want to exploit and harm them. The anger of the crowd is anger not just at the crime that has been committed, but at the irreversible destruction of the childlike perspective on society that Joey and Mike have lost. They now know that the world is filled with monsters waiting to hurt them. 

“But we had read them all, we were tired of weaving romances around these ruins of America.”

The tenement building is built on the remains of an American graveyard, and the children entertain themselves by inventing stories for the names on the tombstones in their backyard. However, these stories can only entertain them for so long. Like the grave themselves, crumbling and fading from memory, the children’s attention is destroyed by the lack of resources around them. Society’s poor are treated like the graves: forgotten and built on top of one another in the search for more money. The children tire of telling the stories of the people buried in the backyard because they slowly realize that they will one day be forgotten by society, just like the graves. 

“Every tenement home was a Plymouth Rock like ours.”

The story of the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is a foundational myth of the United States. For the inhabitants of the tenement buildings, each one of the buildings is an individual foundational myth. The buildings are cramped, dirty, and filled with people trying to improve their lives by fleeing Europe. Like the Pilgrims on the ship, they invest their hopes and ambitions into the buildings, and the buildings become part of the mythology of their people’s arrival in America. To Mike’s Jewish community, enduring the harsh living conditions of the tenement buildings is an important part of the history of Jewish people in America. Just as the story of Plymouth Rock is repeated when discussing how Europeans arrived in America, the tenement buildings become discrete stories for each group of immigrants, forming part of the distinct cultural mythologies for how Jews, Italians, Irish, and other ethnic groups came to live in America. 

“Always I have been too late.”

Herman feels as though life has passed him by. He strives to make money and succeed in America, but all of his endeavors are flawed in some way. He views his problem as one of timing. Herman’s lateness works on a number of levels. He is explicitly late to arrive in certain places, costing himself money, but he is also late to realize that his business partners are untrustworthy, late to arrive in America after the boom of success enjoyed by his forebears, and late to bring his beloved European theater to the United States. Herman becomes defined by his lateness, which illustrates his struggle to keep up with a fast-paced, unforgiving society. 

“Go, infidel, and eat the bread of sorrow and shame in America.”

The “bread of sorrow and shame” that Herman eats in America is the scraps of food that he is forced to endure by his impoverished status. He feels as though he has been cursed by his family to a low socioeconomic status in which bread is an important source of nutrition and a constant reminder of his poverty. Each time Herman eats bread with dinner, he is reminded of how poor he is, and he is reminded of his family’s curse. Even a simple meal contains his regrets and amplifies his misery. 

“I am not my own master now. I am a man in a trap.”

To Herman, America represents independence and success. He travels to America to become an independent, successful man, and he attributes his lack of success to a lack of independence. These two ideas are so closely linked in his mind that he blames his poverty on the fact that he works for someone else. Herman’s vision of success is not purely financial; it is also one in which he is free of the oppression of having to follow someone else’s orders. Working for another person makes him feel weak, inadequate, unsuccessful, and trapped. He passes down these beliefs to his son and makes Mike promise that he will not be as “trapped” when he grows old. 

“One day he grew dizzy with the painter’s disease—lead poisoning.”

Herman can only find a job as a painter. He needs a job to feed his family, but the job slowly kills him. The ironic predicament facing the poor people of New York is that they must work to survive, even though this work is often dangerous. The same job that puts food on the family’s table is slowly poisoning Herman and ensuring that he will remain caught in the trap of poverty forever. The people of the Lower East Side are caught in their perpetual cycle of inescapable poverty, in which the jobs they need to survive also prevent them from ever achieving anything more than the most basic kind of survival. Poverty can kill slowly or quickly, but it always kills in the end. 

“There the State ‘reformed’ him by carefully teaching him to be a criminal, and by robbing him of his eye.”

Louis One Eye is one of the most explicit examples of the way in which the institutions of the country create the violence that plagues poor communities. Louis was not a sadistic murderer when he was first placed in the government’s care as an orphan. The abuse inflicted on him by society, however, turned him evil. Every attack, every rape, and every murder he carries out can be traced back to the abuse he suffered at the hands of the institutions that are trusted to run the country. Louis One Eye is not an anomaly in the society; he is a product of it. 

“My mother had the peasant’s aversion to travel.”

Katie views travel with a suspicion that Mike attributes to her economic status. She is a poor woman who grew up in a small town in Hungary, someone who was not used to traveling very far in her youth. Nevertheless, she made the journey all the way to America. Katie views travel as a necessary evil. She is too poor to afford a vacation, and her only experience of a long trip was traumatic. As someone who is poor, she cannot afford to enjoy travel, so she views it with a “peasant’s aversion.” Her personality, her tastes, and her ambitions are shaped by her wealth, illustrating how a person’s economic status affects every part of their character. 

“Such gifts are worthy to be treasured; they are knitted in love.”

The families in the tenement building are poor, so the true value of the gifts they share is rarely measured in dollars and cents. The quilt is such a treasured gift because it took so much time and effort to make. The quilt was knitted over many long, difficult hours and represents a great deal of effort and a great deal of sacrifice. Katie appreciates the gift because she recognizes the sacrifice that has been made on her behalf. The sentimental value of the quilt is treasured more than a gift of money. 

“The red Indians once inhabited the East Side; then came the Dutch, the English, the Irish, then the Germans, Italians and Jews. Each group left its deposits as in geology.”

The physical environment of New York is an accumulation of all the people who have passed through it. Many of these ethnic groups have been made to suffer, from the Native Americans who originally inhabited the land to the Jewish and Irish who now inhabit the poor neighborhoods. The broad range of ethnic groups that have lived in the area illustrates the way in which mistreatment and suffering transcend race and time. Everyone is made to suffer equally, except those who can afford to escape the constant grind of violence and poverty. The actual geography of New York becomes a reflection of this cross-cultural suffering. 

“He was a spectator, a ghost watching our crazy world.”

Reb Samuel is reduced to the role of a spectator by his illness. The irony of his situation is that a once-revered member of the community can now only engage with the community by watching it from afar. His value and worth were tied to the advice and insight he could provide to others, but now he cannot even engage with people face-to-face. The true suffering of Reb Samuel is that he is unable to be a part of the world over which he once had an influence. Like a ghost, he is essentially nothing more than the memory of a dead man who watches over every other member of the community from above. 

“My mother had that dark proletarian instinct which distrusts all that is connected with money-making.”

The kind of “money-making” Katie distrusts has brought nothing but pain to her family. She misses her home country, a place she left in an attempt to make money and become successful. Her husband becomes bedridden and full of regrets because he continuously tries to make a success of himself. Katie has seen everyone around her suffer due to their lofty ambitions, so now she treats such ambitions with skepticism. Katie recognizes the cycles of poverty that trap so many people, a recognition that Mike relates to the “dark proletarian instinct” that only the poorest people come to understand. 

“Many careers of splendor and importance have been founded on this misery of a million Jews.”

Mike recognizes that certain people are able to escape the poverty of the Lower East Side, but the few people who escape do so at a cost. Everyone portrayed in the novel who succeeds does so by exploiting others. Herman raves about his business associates and their ability to make money without realizing that he is the person they are exploiting. Herman and the hundreds of thousands of Jews who live in New York are exploited by their own people, by other ethnicities, and by the country itself. All success is built on the back of the suffering of others in America, Mike suggests, and this opinion helps to form the socialist views he develops later in his life. 

“How happy the world would be without money!”

Dr. Solow is peculiar to many of the other characters. For them, the desperate need for money defines their lives. They wish they had more money so that they could escape poverty. However, Solow views the issue from another perspective. Rather than imagining a world in which everyone has money, he speculates about a utopia in which no one has any money. Removing money entirely would solve the problem of having none at all. The unique perspective is not necessarily grounded in any particular ideology but illustrates Solow’s capacity for original, inventive solutions to the problems of the world. While other people cannot look beyond their immediate, desperate needs, he is able to diagnose the ill health of the entire system and recommend a treatment. 

“He was accustomed to people who cowered.”

Mr. Zunzer is a typical bully whose powers are increased through his ownership of the tenement building and the pawn shop. He controls people’s ability to save themselves from poverty, and he controls their living spaces. With such a totalitarian grip on the lives of people in his community, he is used to getting his way. He revels in the fear people have for him, and he enjoys the power he has over them. Katie refuses to bow before the bully. She stands up to him and demonstrates how fragile his power actually is. Katie’s strength is shown by her willingness to challenge the systems and institutions that terrify everyone else.  

“His needle flashed in and out, sewing a millionaire’s coat, and scenting it with the perfume of a pauper’s cancer.”

The poor tailor stitches together a suit for a millionaire. The image creates a clear contrast between the rich and the poor. The millionaire will never think twice about where and how his suits were made, but each garment will forever be infused with the “perfume of a pauper’s cancer” (264). The reality of poverty is stitched into every aspect of society. Even at a millionaire’s home, as physically removed from the poor neighborhoods as possible, even the clothes are infused with the suffering that was needed to create them. The rich can ignore the suffering of the poor, but the truth is evident in every aspect of their existence. 

“I despised her weakness.”

Mike considers his sister’s innocence and optimism to be a sign of weakness. He has spent years on the poor streets of the Lower East Side, an environment in which any demonstration of weakness is enough to result in a physical beating. Mike has internalized this violence and resents that Esther does not need to do so. Esther can enjoy her fairy tales and her innocence in a way that Mike cannot, and Mike resents her for this reason. He tells himself that she is weak as a way to justify his negative emotions and his jealousy toward his sister. Later, he will come to understand that she was far stronger than he is, and he will regret his attitudes. As a child, however, he resents not being able to enjoy his childhood in the same way that his sister enjoys hers. 

“Esther was dead.”

The phrase “Esther was dead” is repeated throughout the final chapters. The repetition is like a tolling bell, marking the passage of the young girl from life to death. Mike repeats the phrase in his narration because he struggles to come to terms with the reality of the loss of his sister. Each time he repeats the phrase, he remembers that she is gone forever. The pain and the grief of her loss returns to him as an echo of the cycles of poverty that affect everyone in the tenement building. Her death and the poverty are both inescapable, but they never cease to be painful. 

“One loves a child for years, then a truck kills it.”

Katie carefully chooses her pronouns when reflecting on the death of her daughter. In the first part of the sentence, she notes how she spends years loving her child. In the second part, however, the child dies and ceases to be a person. The child is referred to as “it” rather than her. After Esther’s death, Katie no longer sees her child as the human she loved so much; now, Esther is a memory and a source of pain. This change is reflected in the use of a pronoun that dehumanizes Esther. 

“But I felt older than he; I could not share his naïve optimism; my heart sank as I remember the past and thought of the future.”

Mike inherits a great deal from his parents, but he cannot continue his father’s optimism. He views Herman’s hope as “naïve” and takes a pessimistic stance on whether he or anyone else will ever truly be able to escape the cycles of poverty in which they are trapped. Mike refers to both the past and the future, thoughts that make his heart sink because they seem indistinguishable from his present. The death of his sister brings about the death of his optimism, and Mike ceases to believe that he will one day escape from his punishing poverty.