Mike Gold
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Mike Gold (April 12, 1893-1967), was the pseudonym for Itzok Isaac Granich. He was a lifelong communist and a combative American literary critic for the leftwing. One of three sons born to a family of Jewish immigrants named Granich on the Lower East Side of New York city, he reportedly took his pseudonym from a Jewish Civil War Veteran. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gold was considered the "Dean of U.S. Proletarian Literature."
The revolutionary magazine The Masses published his first piece in 1914. It was a poem about three anarchists who are killed in a bomb explosion. He was an ardent supporter of the Communist Revolution of 1917. He changed his pseudonym to "Michael Gold" during the Palmer Raids of 1919-20.
Gold became editor of the Liberator in 1921. In 1925, he made a trip to Moscow. He was a founder of The New Masses, which published leftist works and also set up radical theater groups. In 1928, he became the editor-in-chief. As editor, he chose to publish works by proletarian authors rather than literary leftists. Championing Proletarian literature, Gold did much to help make it popular during the the depression years of 1930s.
One of the articles he wrote for the The New Masses was "Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot", where 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 1930, Gold published his most influential work, Jews Without Money, a semi-autobiographical novel about about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The book was eventually translated into more than 14 languages and would become a prototype for the American Proletarian novel. In the novel, a poor Jewish boy prays for the arrival of a Marxist messiah who will punish the capitalist classes and reward the proletarian classes.
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." (Author's Note, p.10)
The popularity of the novel made Gold a national figure and cultural commissar of the Communist Party. Gold became a daily columnist for 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 psyche" Ernest Hemingway who once said, "Go Tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should Go F---- himself." (from Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life, Scribners, New York, 1969; p. 459:)
Gold himself was fond of saying, "“O workers’ Revolution!...You are the true Messiah!”, which was a quote from his popular novel. (From Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Post-Contemporary Interventions by Barbara Foley, Duke University Press, 1993, p. 312.)
References:
Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Post-Contemporary Interventions by Barbara Foley, Duke University Press, 1993, p. 312.
Jews Without Money: A Novel by Mike Gold. (Published 2004 Carroll & Graf Publishers New York (N.Y.)
Mike Gold: Dean of American Proletarian Literature by John Pyros (Published Dramatika; January 1980)
Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics: Censorship, Revolution, and Writing A-Z [Three Volumes] by M. Keith Booker (Published 2005 Greenwood Publishing Group)
