3 /“I Didn’t Understand the Words, but My Voice Was Like Dynamite”

Anzia Yezierska, Mike Gold, and the Jewish American Break with Realism

It has taken the artists and poets to rediscover this life of the ghetto. The life in the ghetto was probably always more active and teeming than life outside. The ghetto made the Jews self-conscious. They lived on the fringe of two worlds: the ghetto world and the strange world beyond the ghetto gates.

—LOUIS WIRTH, THE GHETTO (1928)

It is in the immigrant development of the new America that the possibilities for a fundamental revolution of the word are inherent.

—EUGENE JOLAS, “THE KING’S ENGLISH IS DYING—LONG LIVE THE GREAT AMERICAN LANGUAGE” (1930)

Realism’s political valences proved immensely important to immigrant writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While humor had begun to destabilize the objectivity and narrative situations inherent in dialect realism, immigrant writers continued to struggle with realism’s conventions for a number of important reasons. Since the majority of realist texts posited cultural difference as visible linguistic difference in the text, immigrant writers—like the generation of African American writers in the 1890s—attempted to use the conventions of realism against these norms. On this influence, Thomas J. Ferraro has noted that “the ethnic writers of the teens and twenties had sharpened their imaginations in their late youth and early adulthood by reading Dreiser, Crane, Howells.”1 These realist conventions became a means of textually demonstrating both the humanity and the Americanness of immigrants. In other words, if realism depended on an objective narrator that defined genteel American language (and, by extension, American identity), the use of realism by immigrant writers—specifically Jewish American immigrants—became formative in showing the American reading public how similar this genteel public was to the poor, slum-dwelling immigrants that populated many of these books. While popular realist texts of the nineteenth century marked Jews as fundamentally different through the medium of dialect, the work of writers like Abraham Cahan and Mary Antin explicitly confronted the cultural hierarchies of many realist writers by showing their own characters speaking and thinking in the genteel language of realism.

The question of language and Jewish identity looms large in the late realist period. With the enormous influx of Eastern European Jews into the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, cultural depictions of these immigrants resembled, in both kind and degree, the stereotypes used to characterize African Americans during the same era. From sound recordings utilizing Jewish stereotypes to ethnographic depictions of Jewish neighborhoods for middle-American nickelodeon audiences, Jews found themselves constantly marked as different, exotic, and potentially subhuman.2 Most importantly, however, these fears became bound up with concerns about language. Here, one need think only of Henry James’s bewildered stroll through New York’s Lower East Side, as depicted in his The American Scene (1907), as well as his anxieties about the devolution of the American language described in his lecture “The Question of Our Speech” (1905).³ Jewish immigrants, residing largely in insulated, ghetto-like communities in large metropolitan areas like New York, posed explicit problems to projects of immigrant “Americanization” because of their unwillingness to relinquish markers of cultural difference. James’s fear of the Yiddish-speaking hordes that surround him in the Lower East Side is one example of this, while the linguistic caricatures of Jewish figures in the realist fiction of the era served to further deemphasize the possibilities of assimilation.⁴ The linguistic hybridity of these dialect characters—their jagged syntax, mispronounced words, and direct substitution of Yiddish for English—marked them as racialized others in a realist context that privileged objectivity and gentility through norms of narration. By the 1920s, however, this same linguistic hybridity was adopted and transformed by two writers of decidedly different political and aesthetic predilections. Drawing on and thematizing her own experiences as a writer, Anzia Yezierska developed a linguistic approach that foregrounded the defamiliarizing experience of cultural assimilation, while Michael Gold transformed his earlier experiences in avant-garde theater and fiction into an explicitly politicized and immigrant-inflected version of vernacular modernism.

“My Own Linguistic Psychology”: Realism and Assimilation

Prosperity is prosaic.

—MARY ANTIN, THE PROMISED LAND (1912)

The first major Jewish American writer to grapple with the representational concerns of Jewish American immigrants in American fiction was Abraham Cahan, longtime editor of a Yiddish-language newspaper in the Lower East Side and ostensible cultural diplomat for the Jewish American population. When H. L. Mencken was investigating Yiddish words that had made their way into popular usage for the first edition of The American Language, he contacted Cahan, whom Mencken cited multiple times in the first edition of his work. Still, Cahan has become most well known for two novels he published in English: Yekl (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Cahan’s work established some important paradigms for the work the followed it, adapting (especially in The Rise of David Levinsky) the Benjamin Franklin narrative to a mode of cultural assimilation, all while suggesting a nostalgia for an innocent past, both premodern and, in a sense, prepubescent.

Language, in these texts, operates according to the logic of dialect realism, where a genteel frame contains substantial dialect. In Yekl, Cahan employs a technique by which characters’ Yiddish is rendered in a “fluent” English translation while uses of English are singled out (essentially marking this language as outside the realm of conventional usage). A footnote in Yekl reads, “English words incorporated in the Yiddish of the characters of this narrative are given in italics.”5 In addition, this text occasionally includes “translations” of particularly difficult English dialect in parentheses. To emphasize more strongly the difference between language as it is spoken and the genteel language of the realist narrator, Cahan italicizes and misspells English words that his characters grossly mispronounce, words that they drop into their Yiddish exchanges. The effect of this—the Yiddish sentences fluidly translated into English, interrupted by italicized English mispronunciation—is linguistic alienation much in line with the hierarchies of the dialect realism and humor writing of writers like Finley Peter Dunne and George Ade. Rather than give the impression that these characters share some relationship with the reader, Cahan lures the reader into some comfort with the language, only to short-circuit that relationship with a mark of dialect that the reader must almost pronounce aloud in order to discover its connection to the standard representation of the word. Thus, italics and phonetic spelling operate as markers of distinct ethnic, cultural, and, most importantly, linguistic difference. Lawrence Rosenwald has described Jake, the protagonist of Yekl, as a “linguistic traitor,” whose close association with English (even in a form strongly marked by dialect) indicates both assimilation and unethical behavior.6

While this mode—in Cahan’s first extended work of fiction in English—is complex, he smoothes over the rough edges of this dynamic in the bildungsroman that appeared two decades later. The Rise of David Levinsky uses a first-person narrator, a mode that disrupts conventional realist discourse. However, this nostalgic narrator is emblematic of the already assimilated immigrant. The text gradually uncovers the price of this assimilation—spiritual, creative, social, and romantic. However, the reader’s experience of this text is from the reflective point of view of a character with whom s/he can linguistically identify. It matters little that the acquisition of an American identity for Levinsky entails both the loss of a rich and rewarding ethnic identity and the addition of a linguistic (and narrative) facility with English. From an aesthetic standpoint, Cahan has recognized the still politically and socially valuable strategy of realist representation. As one critic has noted of realist writers like Cahan, “For social power they sacrificed literary authority—that is, the prospect of passage into the community of self-proclaimed leaders of American letters.”⁷ For Cahan, acceptance in the eyes of a popular American audience was far more important than breaking down aesthetic boundaries. His work continues to be defined by the troubling standards of dialect realism, as his characters strive to narrate their own stories in an already assimilated language.

Following Cahan, Mary Antin’s work—specifically, her loosely fictionalized memoir The Promised Land (1912)—also partakes in the discourse of realism. The Promised Land opens with a memorable description of assimilation:

I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s story? I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell. Physical continuity with my earlier self is no disadvantage. I could speak in the third person and not feel that I was masquerading. I can analyze my subject, I can reveal everything; for she, not I, is my real heroine. My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began.⁸

Antin’s insistence here on a narrative and discursive separation highlights the degree to which immigrant writers could reinscribe the realist relationship of genteel observer to object of study. Antin is writing about “she”; Antin can write “in the third person.” Both of these signal a complete alienation from the preassimilated identity, along with a wholesale identification with newness, assimilation, Americanness, and “standard” English usage.

In the case of both Cahan and Antin, what is communicated by the language of the past and the language of the present may differ, but the necessity of transitioning between these two languages remains of the utmost importance. Antin’s autobiographical persona can speak “as if I were dead,” because the parallel projects of realism and Americanization have enabled her to turn her past into a “third person,” something almost wholly unrelated to the person she is now. For Cahan, though this past may at some level be desirable, it remains unrecoverable for David Levinsky, a fact demonstrated through his performance of a mastery of English. As Levinsky learns English by questioning his coworkers, he meditates on the link between language, culture, and psychology: “It did not occur to him that people born to speak another language were guided by another language logic, so to say, and that in order to reach my understanding he would have to impart his ideas in terms of my own linguistic psychology.”9 Levinsky’s performance of a nostalgic, fluent English throughout this novel suggests that he has done the inverse, transferred his own “linguistic psychology” and “language logic” to that of English. This loss (of language, culture, connection) is what haunts him at the text’s conclusion, but, paradoxically, it is what enables him to tell the story. In a sense, The Rise of David Levinsky becomes a subtle critique of dialect realism, but—like Twain’s work—one only possible from within realism’s aesthetic and ideological boundaries.

The erasure of linguistic difference in the narrative voices of Antin and Cahan suggests that the Jewish American writers of the 1910s were struggling with the politics of representation that also became central among African American intellectuals in the mid-1920s (see chapter 5). Faced with both an increasingly virulent anti-Semitic nativism in political discourse and the resultant popular cultural productions that exoticized Jews as ethnic and racial others, Antin and Cahan worked to stress a sameness through the realist language of bourgeois gentility. Their aesthetic approach is somewhat understandable, given the tendency of many writers (both Jewish and not) of the era to exploit racial difference. In 1910 journalist Hutchins Hapgood, for example, suggested to writers that ethnic exoticism might be the solution to writers’ block: “Instead of inventing your plots, if you are a novelist, you can take them from the lips of common people, provided you are interested enough in low life to put yourself in touch with the next best ‘gorilla’ or ‘spieler’ you may meet. You can take not only your plots from the lives of these people, but you can also derive the vigor and vitality, the figurative quality, of your style, from the slang and racy expressions of your lowly friends.”10 Certainly, the obsession with dialect and difference inspired many major writers to begin experimenting with language, as Michael North has charted in The Dialect of Modernism, but when ethnic writers themselves experimented with language and form, as Werner Sollors has argued, they tended to cling “to old-world languages and yet be more modern than their Americanized and American counterparts.”¹¹

Sollors’s characterization is a valuable and trenchant description of the aesthetic environment that produced Cahan and Antin. By 1920 the immigrant narrative—taking its origin point in both Eastern and Western Europe—had become a valued cultural commodity. An excellent example of this is Netherlands-born editor Edward Bok’s bestseller The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920). This text, part Franklinesque success story, part critique of America and the hollow nature of its success, was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. However, in the same year Edward Bok’s celebrated autobiography appeared, it is possible to see the beginning of a fragmentation of the strategy of realist representation among immigrant writers in English.

In Beyond Ethnicity, Sollors suggests that “literary forms are not organically connected with ethnic groups; ethnicity and modernism form a false set of opposites; and the very desire to transcend ethnicity may lead writers back into the most familiar territory of ethnogenesis and typology.”¹² While Anglo-American writers consistently mined the language and culture of ethnic others to achieve some kind of new form or aesthetic, for a couple of decades Jewish American writers in particular remained suspicious of how embracing hybrid linguistic forms could advance a new aesthetic practice, especially in the face of anti-immigrant rhetoric. However, with the rise of interest in the multiethnic and multilingual speech of the American streets, a language of which Mencken claimed that “no other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily,” new possibilities emerged. These ethnic and political dynamics offered ways for Jewish American writers to advance the concerns of humorists and other vernacular modernists by exploring the potential for a radical aesthetic practice in the hybrid language of the Jewish immigrant.¹³ This brand of vernacular modernism, as practiced in very different ways in the 1920s by writers like Anzia Yezierska and Michael Gold, utilizes a previously ghettoized language as a means of creating a studied and self-conscious aesthetic distance, as opposed to creating social ostracization. To use the Yezierska metaphor that provides the title to this chapter, this vernacular modernist immigrant language served as a form of aesthetic dynamite that destroyed and completely reshaped the understanding of how a multilingual and multicultural subject might accurately describe experience.

“Slipping Back into the Vernacular”: Anzia Yezierska and the Vernacular Modernism of Assimilation

“Poems of Poverty!” cried Mother. “Ain’t it black enough to be poor, without yet making poems about it?”

—ANZIA YEZIERSKA, BREAD GIVERS (1925)

I jot down any fragment of a thought that I can get hold of. And then I gather these fragments, words, phrases, sentences, and I paste them together with my own blood.

—ANZIA YEZIERSKA, “MOSTLY ABOUT MYSELF” (1923)

During her 1923 trip to Europe, Anzia Yezierska made the appointed rounds of any serious American author of the early 1920s. According to her daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen, Yezierska sought out George Bernard Shaw, Israel Zangwill, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Joseph Conrad to discover the secrets of their writing. The most interesting visit was with Gertrude Stein in Paris, where Stein gave her some typically Steinian advice: “Why worry? Nobody knows how writing is written, the writers least of all!”14 The encounter between Yezierska and Stein has essentially gone unexamined in scholarship on these two writers, in part because they inhabit profoundly different spheres of the American literary canon. Despite the fact that they are both Jewish American women of roughly the same generation (Stein was born in 1874, Yezierska around 1880), they have come to represent very different things to scholars of American literature. Stein, firmly embedded in the modernist canon, has received less attention as an ethnic writer than she has as an avant-garde experimentalist; only a handful of critics—including Maria Damon, Barbara Will, and Priscilla Wald—have foregrounded her Jewish identity as central to their scholarship on Stein. Yezierska’s rise in American literary studies, on the other hand, has been almost exclusively fueled by the interest in the subcanon of ethnic women’s writing, with little attention to the formal structure and possible experimentation in her texts.15 Yezierska’s 1923 meeting with Stein certainly does not figure as the same kind of watershed moment in American modernism as Ernest Hemingway’s arrival at 27 rue de Fleurus in the previous year. After all, Hemingway approached Stein as an apprentice and Yezierska’s meeting occurred after she had already become a successful writer. However, the insistence that Stein remain an unqualified modernist writer and that Yezierska, at best, be labeled an ethnic modernist suggests that existing literary subcanons continue to struggle to deal adequately with the variety of modernist writing produced in this era.

Yezierska was all but invisible to scholars of American literature until the 1970s. Outside a brief mention in Allen Guttmann’s 1971 study The Jewish Writer in America, Yezierska was even largely absent from the Jewish American literary canon, which was kinder to conventional realist and modernist figures such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Henry Roth.¹⁶ Yezierska’s rediscovery by literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s (with the republication of Bread Givers [1925] in 1975, and the 1979 publication of the Yezierska collection The Open Cage and the 1985 edition of Hungry Hearts [1920]) came on the heels of an increasing interest in narratives of working women by feminist scholars.¹⁷ Mary V. Dearborn exemplifies this when she notes that Yezierska’s “fiction is welcomed, in short, because it provides valuable documentary evidence that ethnic women existed.”¹⁸ To both feminist and labor historians, such documentation was crucial to the expansion of labor histories to include more diverse voices in the understanding of twentieth-century labor.

Since Yezierska’s rediscovery, the scholarship on her work has consistently emphasized ethnicity, gender, and class, placing her in subcanons that write out meetings like the one she had with Stein. Critics have recently gone so far as to include her in studies of Yiddish literature, even though—unlike Abraham Cahan—she never published in Yiddish.¹⁹ Ethnic American writers such as Yezierska have been both blessed and cursed by the last forty years of American literary scholarship. With the emergence of ethnic studies, many American writers long forgotten by literary historians have reemerged in new editions and made their way into classrooms and scholarly journals. This new attention has certainly been a boon for writers like Zora Neale Hurston, whose work has become an indisputable part of the American and African American literary canons. While less canonical ethnic writers continue to inspire a significant amount of scholarship, the relationship of these writers to the rest of American literary history remains murky. In certain cases, such as Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism (1994), writers like Hurston and Claude McKay form a background for understanding the racial and linguistic appropriations of already canonized high modernists such as Stein, Eliot, and Pound. But in most literary histories, ethnic writers usually remain outside standard narratives, playing supporting roles, uninvolved in the major literary questions of a given moment. In part, this stems from an unwillingness of critics to confront these writers in the terms the writers themselves found most important. Instead, these figures are essentially seen as documentarians of a complex modernist “culture,” recording the ethnic world around them: if not a world ignored, then one often exoticized, objectified, and aesthetically mined by canonical figures in a manner not unlike Hapgood’s call to frustrated writers to get “in touch with the next best ‘gorilla’ or ‘spieler’ you may meet” and mine the ghetto’s “low life” for literary inspiration. Central to the project of these critics is the construction of literary subcanons such as ethnic literature, a crucial step in rediscovering writers, but not necessarily an endpoint, as many of these writers considered themselves part of a larger literary landscape.

To designate a writer as ethnic suggests thematic, aesthetic, and ideological affinities with other writers sharing a similar background. This serves as an effective means of generating narratives of ethnic literary history, but often does a disservice to the writers themselves, many of whom neither published in exclusively ethnic literary journals nor explicitly targeted an ethnic audience (in fact, it was often a mainstream audience they sought). One need only think of the tensions surrounding Ralph Ellison’s work (and his own admission of modernist influences) to see the complexity inherent in the construction of a “separate but equal” ethnic literary canon. Yezierska, for example, published her work alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and Katherine Anne Porter in magazines like Metropolitan and Century. Her 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements was advertised by publisher Boni & Liveright in the international avant-garde magazine Broom just two months after the publisher had issued the American edition of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).20 And Wendy R. Katz has documented Yezierska’s interest in figures from Walt Whitman to William Faulkner.²¹ Still, Yezierska’s writing is rarely—if ever—read by critics today without using the adjectival preface ethnic. The relationship Yezierska and similar writers held to modernism produces a convoluted story; ethnic writers were certainly aware of experimental writing in the 1910s and 1920s, but how did they respond?

With these concerns in mind, I argue that Yezierska’s work certainly exemplifies what I have been calling “vernacular modernism.” Unlike Henry Roth, whose mid-1930s work drew quite obviously on the modernist aesthetics of canonical figures such as James Joyce, Yezierska’s vernacular modernism emerges in the shadow of popular writers such as Ring Lardner, who approached representation in more comic ways that stretched the function of language and emphasized a particularly intense subjectivity. Importantly, Yezierska’s vernacular modernist style amounts to more than merely an “ethnic modernism,” a term used by Werner Sollors and others; her work is a part of a larger, cross-ethnic body of work that takes as its inspirational source the colorful vernacular of the American language celebrated by Mencken in The American Language.22

Though a discussion of Yezierska has become practically de rigueur in monographs on Jewish American literature over the past two decades, her unconventional aesthetic—neither firmly realist nor recognizably modernist—has meant that she is rarely discussed in terms of style or form. Before Yezierska’s ascendance, the writers most frequently assessed in studies of Jewish American literature conformed to relatively conventional literary models: Mary Antin and Abraham Cahan emerge from late nineteenth-century realism, while later writers Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth exhibit strong affinities to commonly understood modernist aesthetics.²³ By conforming to the increasingly outdated modes of realism, early twentieth-century Jewish American writers (to varying degrees of self-consciousness) placed themselves outside the literary avant-garde. Interestingly, while Thomas J. Ferraro lumps Yezierska into the realist group of writers including Antin and Cahan, most literary histories leave Yezierska out of this group, precisely because her aesthetic is not sufficiently realist.²⁴ Unlike Antin and Cahan, who relied almost exclusively on realist models, and later writers like Henry Roth, who drew heavily on the models of European high modernism, Yezierska’s ghetto fairy tales do not explicitly participate in either aesthetic discourse. In addition, the narration of her texts—particularly her short fiction—exhibits a reliance on Yiddish syntax, code switching, and elusive suggestion. Yezierska takes advantage of her own relationship to language to denaturalize the written word and destroy the naïve trust of language in realist writing and the troubling politics of dialect realism.

Yezierska’s work mounts a strong critique against the gentility of realist writers Antin and Cahan, one that runs parallel to the critique of nineteenth-century gentility by high modernists. Yezierska brings to the inherited genre of the immigrant memoir a new kind of aesthetic practice, one that rejects the fundamental assumptions of realist writing and implicitly calls into question the political and social motives of the writers who preceded her. In opposition to the large number of popular culture productions that exoticized Jews as ethnic and racial others, Antin and Cahan worked to stress a sameness through realist language of bourgeois gentility within their narrators. Yezierska, on the other hand, rejected this form, preferring, especially in her early writing, the creation of an aesthetic distance (using the vernacular) that suggested the limits of realist language by foregrounding language as language, over and above its signifying operations.25 Sally Ann Drucker argues that unlike Antin and Cahan, Yezierska “used [dialect] to show that her characters came from the culture of the ghetto, but without that culture denigrating or debasing them.”²⁶ What Drucker calls dialect, I want to redefine as vernacular language, precisely because Yezierska rejects the hierarchies that dominate dialect realism in favor of an invented vernacular language that produces new hybrid forms. In other words, though Yezierska’s characters may have experiences similar to the protagonists of Antin’s and Cahan’s work, their ability to describe that experience in a realist discourse breaks down and, frequently, this experience can only be rendered in the abstract, experimental vernacular of the immigrant. Yezierska’s recognition that realist discourse fails in the wake of immigrant experience corresponds to Priscilla Wald’s reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), where, Wald argues, “character and culture come together not in the fear of merging but in the fear of disappearing into incomprehensibility . . . with an immigrant divested of cultural narratives, and the familiar terms, that mark personhood.”²⁷

As with Antin and Cahan, Yezierska’s central concerns involved the personal and spiritual prices of assimilation; her novels Salome of the Tenements and Arrogant Beggar (1927) both engage this question directly, even polemically, utilizing an aesthetic much closer to the realism of these earlier writers. Her more well-known works, the short-story collection Hungry Hearts and the novel Bread Givers, also weigh in on similar questions, but rather than present these questions in the objective narrative form of most realist writers, Yezierska foregrounds an immigrant consciousness constantly in development. While stories of assimilation are frequently narrated from a first-person perspective, they often emphasize the status of their narrators as already assimilated. Thus, in Antin’s autobiographical The Promised Land, Cahan’s fictional The Rise of David Levinsky, and other successful narratives of Americanization such as Edward Bok’s bestselling The Americanization of Edward Bok and Ludwig Lewisohn’s Up Stream: An American Chronicle (1922), the storyteller stands above his or her life, on a par with the genteel reader. Yezierska’s early fiction flies in the face of these conventions and demonstrates her peculiar aesthetics that aim to alienate readers from a language they should feel some affinity with, simultaneously complicating notions of linguistic purity and syntax in ways analogous to high modernists like Stein.

Critics have interrogated Yezierska’s language from a variety of perspectives. Ruth Bienstock Anolik emphasizes how the female “bread givers” of Yezierska’s most famous novel must occupy the assimilating linguistic space of Americanization, as the patriarch remains staunchly a scholar of Hebrew.28 Others argue for the centrality of both linguistic and cultural hybridity not only to Yezierska’s work, but also to her position within a modernist moment.²⁹ Delia Caparoso Konzett associates Yezierska with Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Rhys, calling their work “ethnic modernism” in a study that “raises the combined question of dislocation and ethnicity as a key feature of modernism, one that is still too-often dealt with in discreet separation.”³⁰ While Konzett, Anolik, and others foreground gender and ethnicity as the determinants and signs of Yezierska’s participation in a modernist culture, wedding these components to larger concerns of aesthetic choices strips the concept of modernism of its major signifying force, its aesthetic innovation. All of these critics have done important work in conceiving of Yezierska as a modernist, but their emphasis on gender and ethnicity as prerequisites for such attributions comes close to keeping Yezierska’s writing within the proverbial literary ghetto, unable to assert its aesthetic value in a larger literary context. By drawing on the important work of these critics but recasting the linguistic experimentation in Yezierska under the rubric of vernacular modernism, it becomes possible to see her as engaged with a broader set of modernist aesthetics through both linguistic expatriation and cultural transformation.

A concern with the interstitial language of the American immigrant runs throughout Yezierska’s work. Whereas Cahan and Antin adopted the assumptions of realism—the largely objective narrator, the classification of characters through linguistic difference, and so forth—Yezierska’s work demonstrates an awareness of how language functions in the mouths of her characters as they undergo various forms of assimilation, some more successful than others. Indeed, what marks Yezierska as a vernacular modernist is her hyperawareness of how language constitutes her characters as they simultaneously constitute their language out of fragmentary snatches of English and Yiddish. The words in the mouths of her characters and narrators reject realist standards in favor of a vernacular form that disturbs the relationship between signifier and signified. Yezierska’s modernism is not merely about subjectivity, but also about the process of assimilation and how an aesthetic of language can dramatize this process. Her characters, always striving to become American, find themselves drawn back to their Lower East Side, Jewish roots, even in the syntactical construction of their language.

The story that most clearly demonstrates Yezierska’s self-conscious use of this aesthetic is “To the Stars,” first published in Century magazine in May 1921 and included in her second, lesser-known 1923 collection Children of Loneliness. Sophie Sapinsky, the protagonist of “To the Stars” and an earlier story, “My Own People,” dreams, as Yezierska did, of becoming a writer. The dean of her college and the creative writing professor both discourage her. The dean claims, “What chance is there for you, with your immigrant English? You could never get rid of your foreign idiom.”31 Undeterred by their lack of faith in her abilities and encouraged by an advertisement for a short-story contest, Sophie writes her story. Her determination is palpable: “Centuries of suppression, generations of illiterates clamored in her: ‘Show them what’s in you! If you can’t write it in college English, write it “immigrant English!”‘” (HIFA 164). Encouraged by the president of the college (a believer in “democracy in education” and a clear stand-in for John Dewey), Sophie takes her story to a creative writing class.³² The president has told her: “There are things in life bigger than rules of grammar. The thing that makes art live and stand out throughout the ages is sincerity. Unfortunately, education robs many of us of the power to give spontaneously, as mother earth gives, as the child gives. You have poured out not a part, but the whole of yourself. That’s why it can’t be measured by any of the prescribed standards. It’s uniquely you” (HIFA 171). The president’s argument that “the power to give spontaneously” through art “can’t be measured by any of the prescribed standards” echoes the concerns of modernist writers and critics, who were arguing much the same thing in the early 1920s. Existing forms and standards were mere fetters to be broken by new, more authentic and spontaneous expressions. But unlike the Deweyan college president, Sophie’s creative writing class is by no means on the cutting edge of literary aesthetics.

Sophie’s class savages her writing. The criticisms are notable: “‘It’s not a story; it has no plot’; ‘feeling without form’; ‘erotic, over-emotional’” (HIFA 172). In this multivalent moment, Yezierska accomplishes a number of things. First, it is clear that the standards of this creative writing class are those of the realism practiced by Cahan and Antin. Plot, formal construction, and emotional distance in narration all characterize this kind of writing. Through the suggestion that experimentation allows access to sincerity and spontaneity, Yezierska has subtly aligned Sophie (and herself) with high modernism, a mode of creation that faced some of the very same criticisms.33 One need only recall the 1929 “Revolution of the Word” “Proclamation” from transition (discussed in the introduction)—and its claims that “narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality” and “the writer expresses, he does not communicate”—to see the ways that Yezierska’s controversial aesthetics in “To the Stars” mirror those of the formally experimental writing of high modernism.³⁴ While modernists like Eugene Jolas of transition reached this revolution in aesthetics through a labored critique of nineteenth-century literature, Sophie and Yezierska have arrived at an analogous point through the inherent linguistic alienation in the immigrant experience. Undeterred by the class’s criticism, Sophie sends off the story “for a judgment of a world free from rules of grammar,” and, not so surprisingly, wins the first prize in the short-story contest (HIFA 172).³⁵

Around the time Yezierska published “To the Stars,” she entered an ongoing discussion in the New York Times Book Review and Magazine over Ludwig Lewisohn’s memoir, Up Stream. Her letter—a response to Brander Matthews’s negative review of Lewisohn’s work—lays out a few important aesthetic principles against which Yezierska’s own work should be read. She celebrates the multiethnic quality of American society and the value that immigrants bring to the linguistic identity of the United States: “Foreigners bring new color, new music, new beauty of expression to worn-out words. The foreign mind works on an old language like the surging leaven of youth. It rekindles and recreates our speech. Trite words, stale phrases, break up into new rhythms in the driving urge to express more vitally the rush of new experience, the fire of changing personality.”³⁶ Her language here looks back to the work of the Seven Arts critics and Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America”; her words are reminiscent of Van Wyck Brooks’s claim that “slang has quite as much in store for so-called culture as culture has for slang.”³⁷ It also echoes Mencken’s claim in The American Language that “American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy.” The language of Yezierska’s letter veers close to ethnic essentialism, but she notes that the “foreign mind . . . rekindles and recreates our speech,” and that this leavening force, this experimental linguistic transformation allows all Americans—not just the foreigners she discusses—”to express more vitally the rush of new experience, the fire of changing personality.” Like more easily identifiable modernists, Yezierska essentially argues that experimentation at the level of language is absolutely necessary to produce authentic, sincere, and vital representations of modern life: the immigrant language of the American streets is a language seemingly built for modernity.

In language analogous to the many modernist manifestos of the era, Yezierska’s letter even describes a new “creative spirit” that “has arisen . . . in the form of a protest and a rebellion.”38 Her emphasis on the overhauling of language that the “foreign mind” enables even anticipates manifestos such as the 1929 “Proclamation” in Jolas’s transition, which included points such as “the revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact” and the writer “has the right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws.”³⁹ Jolas’s later defense of the “Revolution of the Word” manifesto strongly echoes Yezierska’s argument about immigrant language, boldly claiming that “it is in the immigrant development of the new America that the possibilities for a fundamental revolution of the word are inherent.”⁴⁰ The ability of Sophie’s “immigrant English” to shatter “trite words [and] stale phrases . . . into new rhythms in the driving urge to express more vitally the rush of new experience” parallels one of the central concerns of high modernist aesthetics. The “Proclamation” opens with a claim that the signees are “tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, [and] descriptive naturalism.”⁴¹ As Yezierska’s defense of Lewisohn suggests, she was equally fed up with the legacy of realism and in hope of reinventing the language of her fiction and accessing something closer to the “real.” In “To the Stars,” the “sincerity” of Sophie’s work, as the college president calls it, rises above the rules and regulations of language, a case in point of William Carlos Williams’s call for “not ‘realism,’ but reality itself” in Spring and All, published in 1923, the same year as Children of Loneliness.⁴²

Throughout her work Yezierska takes up the call of the “real” and the authentic in many guises.⁴³ This appears most explicitly in her use of first-person narration. While both Cahan and Antin use this narrative point of view, they do so in forms fully recognizable to early twentiethcentury audiences. Though often dismissed as simple, Yezierska’s use of the first person is more complex, and, in a way, more challenging than that of these earlier writers. Rather than translating her linguistic experience to something easily digestible for readers or using the trope of the dialect figure as in Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, Yezierska occupies a third space, a liminal point both between these two options and outside them. This is most apparent in her earliest work, the story collection Hungry Hearts. Later in her career, Yezierska—like Lardner—gravitated toward more conventional forms, utilizing the third person in a novel of social critique, Arrogant Beggar. However, Yezierska always mixed first- and third-person narration, and the structure of Hungry Hearts demonstrates the kind of self-conscious use of these techniques later theorized in the story of Sophie Sapinsky.

The ten stories in Hungry Hearts are split evenly between first- and third-person narratives. The collection opens with three third-person pieces in the tradition of the realism of Cahan. The narrative voices of “Wings,” “Hunger,” and “The Lost ‘Beautifulness’ ” approach the objective stance of the realist narrator, while the characters Shenah Pessah of “Wings” and “Hunger” and Hanneh Hayyeh of “The Lost ‘Beautifulness’ ” speak like the unassimilated figures in Cahan’s fiction. These three stories are followed by a block of four first-person narratives occupying the center of the book, one might say the “heart” of Hungry Hearts. In this block of stories, Yezierska’s strategy—the aesthetic approach that will drive her most celebrated novel, Bread Givers—begins to emerge. This group of unconnected narratives thematizes cultural and linguistic assimilation through its use of vernacular language.

This block of stories begins with Yezierska’s first published story, “The Free Vacation House,” which originally appeared in the Forum in 1915. The unnamed narrator of this story opens the tale in quintessential Yezierska fashion: “How came it that I went to the free vacation house was like this.”44 The abruptness, the unconventional syntax, and the seeming substitution of Yiddish sentence structure for English immediately throw the reader into a realm in which the standard realist narrator is nowhere to be found, an absence that resembles the narrative experiments of Ring Lardner. The narrator of “The Free Vacation House” commands the reader’s attention in a line that implies a particular intimacy, that of the occasional or informal storyteller, a radical move in a genre of literature where conventions generally demanded an aesthetic distance between the reader and the working-class characters. This break is more striking in that it directly follows three stories with a fairly conventional relationship to these standard narrative practices. Throughout “The Free Vacation House,” the narrator remains in this vernacular register, making biting commentary about the “Social Betterment Society” and its representatives along the way: “When she is gone I think to myself, I’d better knock out from my head this idea about the country. For so long I lived, I didn’t know nothing about the charities. For why should I come down among the beggars now?” (HH 64). At certain points, “The Free Vacation House” inverts the conventions of realism, placing the vernacular figure in the narrator’s position while having her accurately report the “standard” speech of the women from the charity office: “Before I could say something, she goes over to the baby and pulls out the rubber nipple from her mouth, and to me, she says, ‘You must not get the child used to sucking this; it is very unsanitary’ ” (HH 62–63). The narrator’s exact replication of the speech of these genteel charity workers implies an awareness and rejection of standard language in favor of something more appropriate—in spite of its grammatical irregularities—to the narrator’s experience. This difference is clearly demarcated in “The Free Vacation House” when the narrator paraphrases (rather than reports) the barrage of questions she receives from the charity workers: “What is my first name? How old I am? From where come I? How long I’m already in this country? Do I keep any boarders? What is my husband’s first name? How old he is? How much wages he gets for a week? How much money do I spend out for the rent?” (HH 63). This difference in reported speech and paraphrase highlights Yezierska’s aesthetic strategy. It is not necessarily that her narrator cannot speak “college English” (to use Sophie’s phrase); she has no problem imitating and reporting verbatim the language of the charity workers. But, to narrate her own story, the unnamed narrator needs “immigrant English”—that “vitally” expressive language appropriate to the modern experience.

The two stories in Hungry Hearts that follow “The Free Vacation House” continue the emphasis on linguistic development and cultural assimilation. These almost share a narrator; in “The Miracle,” the first of these two stories, the narrator is Sara Reisel, while “Where Lovers Dream” is narrated by a character named only “Sara.” The appearance of the same characters in multiple stories runs throughout Hungry Hearts, creating the impression of a fictional community larger than the individual stories and connecting the collection to modernist short-story sequences such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). Indeed, when Hungry Hearts was turned into a film by MGM, elements of the stories were combined into a single narrative involving a protagonist named Sara and a love interest named David (based largely on “Where Lovers Dream”).45 Other characters make repeated appearances throughout Yezierska’s fiction: Hanneh Hayyeh, the protagonist of the third-person-narrated “The Lost ‘Beautifulness,’ ” has a minor role in “The Miracle,” while the first two stories of the collection both involve Shenah Pessah.46

Insisting on the cross-extual importance of characterization might seem, at first glance, trivial. However, the fact that “The Miracle” and “Where Lovers Dream” both have a protagonist named Sara, coupled with their adjacent position in the collection, leads the reader to see these stories as not merely connected, but in some way continuous. Internal evidence, such as the personal histories of the characters and the location of each of Sara’s parents, makes this direct continuity impossible, but their adjacency, combined with how the collection has already demonstrated cross-textual appearances of characters, closely links these two Saras. These two stories, located at the center of the volume (the fifth and sixth stories in a ten-story collection), create a crucial hinge on which the collection—and Yezierska’s aesthetics—depends. While Sara Reisel (of “The Miracle”) narrates her own experiences along the vernacular lines of “The Free Vacation House,” Sara (of “Where Lovers Dream”) moves somewhat closer to linguistic assimilation, a process completed in “Soap and Water,” the last story in this four-story unit at the center of Hungry Hearts. The two stories that feature narrating Saras, however, suggest an ever-increasing awareness and sophistication in the use of English.

In both of these central stories, the narration already demonstrates a degree of linguistic assimilation beyond that of the narrator of “The Free Vacation House.” In “The Miracle,” Sara Reisel’s family sends her to America to improve her marriage prospects. She tells her mother, “All I need is a chance. I can do a million times better than Hanneh Hayyeh. I got a head. I got brains. I feel I can marry myself to the greatest man in America” (HH 76). The story concludes with Sara realizing “the miracle of America come true” when her English teacher falls in love with her (HH 87).⁴⁷ Yezierska injects into this conventional romance plot a sense of linguistic malleability that occasionally arrives at moments of more recognizable modernist experimentation. Her description of the trip across the Atlantic, including her fantasy about meeting a great lover, demonstrates a host of experimental techniques that resemble familiar high modernist forms: the repetitive forms of Stein, the understatement of Hemingway, and the exploration of subjectivity that dominates modernist fiction.

I didn’t see the day. I didn’t see the night. I didn’t see the ocean. I didn’t see the sky. I only saw my lover in America, coming nearer and nearer to me, till I could feel his eyes bending on me so near that I got frightened and began to tremble. My heart ached so with the joy of his nearness that I quick drew back and turned away, and began to talk to the people that were pushing and crowding themselves on the deck.

Nu, I got to America. (HH 79)

Despite the use of relatively standard grammatical forms, this passage demonstrates how vernacular modernism can emerge at the level of syntax. The immigrant consciousness of this Sara echoes Stein with the insistent and repetitive “I did n’t” form, and deflates emotion with the blunt statement, “Nu, I got to America.” The repetition and syntactical inversions so characteristic of Stein’s defamiliarizing style in Three Lives (1909) and The Making of Americans are rendered more natural—but no less modernist—in Yezierska’s work. In fact, to read Yezierska closely is to be able to read Stein anew (as an “ethnic” writer and a modernist), since Stein’s challenges to realist language often seem to mimic the invented vernacular of Yezierska’s Yiddish-English hybrid. In instances like this, Yezierska’s vernacular modernism veers close to Stein’s high modernist style, while nevertheless transforming it through its insistent connection to her character’s immigrant experience.

Immediately following “The Free Vacation House” and “The Miracle,” Yezierska includes “Where Lovers Dream,” another story that occupies this space between total linguistic assimilation and immigrant vernacular. With its lyric opening, the text seems to have veered more in the direction of Mary Antin’s prose: “For years I was saying to myself—Just so you will act when you meet him. Just so will you stand. So will you look on him. These words will you say to him” (HH 88). This syntactically sophisticated opening soon gives way to another one of Yezierska’s vernacular narrators, Sara, whose boyfriend David Novak is the male ideal and assimilating agent. David, says Sara, “was learning me how to throw off my greenhorn talk, and say out the words in the American” (HH 90). The contrast between the lyrical opening and the rest of the narration underscores how language, identity, memory, and narration are compounded in these stories at the center of Hungry Hearts.

In “When Lovers Dream,” the questions of language and learning are intertwined in the concerns Sara has about her relationship with David. The opening frame of the story finds Sara trying to remain determined to uphold her dignity as she confronts the man who has jilted her: “I wanted to show him that what he had done to me could not down me; that his leaving me the way he left me, that his breaking my heart the way he broke it, didn’t crush me; that his grand life and my pinched-in life, his having learning and my not having learning—that the difference didn’t count so much like it seemed; that on the bottom I was the same like him” (HH 88). Sara contrasts David’s “having learning” with her own “not having learning,” a construction that recalls Stein’s use of gerunds to emphasize states of being in The Making of Americans. Sara’s determination fails her in this opening frame, though; she faints and must leave the party after David speaks to her. This experience triggers a flashback; Sara narrates this in a way that emphasizes the associative nature of memory: “Ah, I see again the time when we was lovers!” (HH 89). In the past, loving, learning, and language are connected in ways that emphasize Sara’s inability to remake herself according to David’s standards: “David was always trying to learn me how to make myself over for an American. Sometimes he would spend out fifteen cents to buy me the ‘Ladies’ Home Journal’ to read about American life, and my whole head was put away on how to look neat and be up-to-date like the American girls” (HH 90). This attempt at selfrefashioning through the genteel periodical the Ladies’ Home Journal falls squarely in line with links between the tropes of fashion and consumerism and racial and ethnic identity across Yezierska’s work.48

This Sara and her family remain unable to cross over into the “neat” and “up-to-date” world of “American girls.” Marked by poverty and by language, Sara and her family are ultimately shunned by the young doctor David, whose wealthy uncle makes his financial support contingent on David’s abandoning his greenhorn girlfriend. Though Sara studies English, she remains unable “to throw off [her] greenhorn talk,” and her narration remains at the level of the vernacular, suggesting that Sara’s experience, like that of the other narrators in Hungry Hearts, is more accurately and authentically rendered through this language. While “Where Lovers Dream” is set up like a story of transformation, that language insists that such a transformation does not—and perhaps cannot—occur. The final lines both document Sara’s lack of change and suggest an emotional power that eludes standard narration: “For the little while when we was lovers I breathed the air from the high places where love comes from, and I can’t no more come down” (HH 100). Though Yezierska’s stories of self-remaking do not always end in emotional tragedy, even her most successful protagonists often remain unfulfilled.

“Soap and Water,” the story that follows “Where Lovers Dream,” signals a shift in narrative voice, a modification that dominates the latter half of the collection. This story features a fully assimilated narrator whose voice approaches the standard narration of “How I Found America,” the wellknown first-person narrative that concludes Hungry Hearts. “Soap and Water” is told from the perspective of an unnamed immigrant graduating from college with a teacher’s certification. Like Sara Smolinksy of Bread Givers, this narrator demonstrates complete control over conventional language, a mark of her education as well as her assimilation. The story thematizes this assimilation; the narrator’s inability to appear clean according to bourgeois standards (her lack of “soap and water”) erases her education, itself indicated by the language in which the story is narrated. “Soap and Water,” placed in the collection after a number of powerfully emotional stories told in varying degrees of vernacular, turns the conventions of realist language on its head, pointing toward the emptiness of the standard language that cannot, ultimately, help the narrator transcend her identity. The fear that the adoption of bourgeois American culture and realist language might not enable the narrative of success or create an emotionally and aesthetically challenging fiction lies underneath Yezierska’s later work in the form of a muted, though still present, vernacular modernism.

Much of Yezierska’s later fiction relied exclusively on third-person narration, rejecting the intense subjectivity of these stories in Hungry Hearts. Two of her novels of the 1920s, Salome of the Tenements and Arrogant Beggar, draw back into more conventional modes of melodrama and social critique. However, her most frequently studied work, Bread Givers, demonstrates an aesthetic between the hypersubjective first-person vernacular narrative and the language of the already fully assimilated character. In a way, Bread Givers provides an aesthetic missing link between the stories “When Lovers Dream” and “Soap and Water.” Told by yet another Sara, this time Sara Smolinsky, Bread Givers articulates a harsh critique of traditional Jewish patriarchy, a trend in Yezierska’s work noted by Thomas J. Ferraro and Magdalena J. Zaborowska.49 As a young girl, Sara watches her religious father ruin the romantic prospects of her sisters by matching them with men who, in varying ways, make their lives miserable. Sara, determined to break the cycle of tradition and repression, strikes out on her own, with ambitions to become a schoolteacher.

As in “Soap and Water,” the narration of Bread Givers emerges from the already-assimilated figure of Sara Smolinsky, one that has largely adopted a realist aesthetics. It is clear that Sara’s complex impressions of the world around her at ten years old are not to be taken as a literal replication of a young girl’s consciousness. The narration resembles that of Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky in its reflective mode; however, reflection and nostalgia are not the only registers in which Sara’s narrative voice expresses her history. Indeed, Sara’s emotions often overwhelm the novel’s mostly realist aesthetic modes. Such moments emerge in forms that resemble the Yiddish-English narration of the vernacular stories in Hungry Hearts. As Yezierska claims in the autobiographical piece “Mostly about Myself”:

I envy the writers who can sit down at their desks in the clear calm security of their vision and begin their story at the beginning and work it up logically, step by step, until they get to the end. With me, the end and the middle and the beginning of my story whirl before me in a mad blurr [sic]. And I can not sit still inside myself till the vision becomes clear and whole and sane in my brain. I’m too much on fire to wait till I understand what I see and feel. My hands rush out to seize a word from the end, a phrase from the middle, or a sentence from the beginning. I jot down any fragment of a thought that I can get hold of. And then I gather these fragments, words, phrases, sentences, and I paste them together with my own blood. (HIFA 132)

Yezierska’s description of her working practice, in which “fragments, words, phrases, [and] sentences” are “paste[d] . . . together with [her] own blood,” echoes many of the central concerns for the high modernist artist, and even recalls T. S. Eliot’s “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” in The Waste Land.50 If the fragmentary nature of reality has become unavoidable in the modernist era, the modernist artist struggles to bring these disparate pieces of existence together in some coherent form, to “paste them together.” In acknowledging both the fragments of individual consciousness of experience and the fragments of language that go into the literary means of capturing and communicating that experience, Yezierska’s work not only parallels central formalist concerns of high modernist experimentation, it does so in a way that emphasizes the defining feature of linguistic and cultural hybridity.

Yezierska came to this particular understanding through secondlanguage acquisition. When Yezierska’s narrators speak in a fragmented form, they expose their own interstitial existence between languages. Yezierska’s characters—and her narrators—use a hybrid combination of English words, Yiddish syntax, English translation of Yiddish expressions, and a number of untranslated Yiddish words. When she declares that she unites the fragments of language “with [her] own blood,” Yezierska acknowledges the profound effect that ethnic heritage has, not just on the development of her characters (as in Cahan and Antin), but also on the very way in which she constructs language, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence. As Sara in Bread Givers notes about her first intimate conversation with Hugo Selig, “After that, all differences dropped away. We talked one language. We had sprung from one soil.”51 The association of a particular creative practice with “blood” and “soil” has the potential to veer rather close to racial essentialism, as it does more clearly in Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements; in her other works, however, Yezierska emphasizes both the ability of her characters to become American and the important heritage that will always frame that Americanness. Bread Givers demonstrates this complex assimilation through its strategic placement of brief moments of vernacular modernist effusion, episodes in the text when Sara cannot rein in her emotion and remain reflective in her narration, and when an accurate representation of her modern life demands linguistic experimentation.

These moments appear more frequently in the early parts of the novel, which involve more dialogue—all of which Yezierska renders in the vernacular—and less of the dominant, reflective (and largely realist-inflected) voice that Sara begins to adopt near the novel’s conclusion. In the opening moments, the juxtaposition of these voices immediately confronts the reader: “I was about ten years old then. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother” (BG 1). In these sentences the two narrative registers appear clearly. The matter-of-factly stated “I was about ten years old then” contrasts strongly with the sentence that follows it; the second sentence describes an emotional state that Sara finds difficult to render in standard syntax. At times, this explosion of vernacular language, the only means of communicating the consciousness of certain emotional experiences, even shifts tense to reflect time-specific thought patterns: “More and more I began to think inside myself. I don’t want to sell herring for the rest of my days. I want to learn something. I want to do something. I want some day to make myself for a person and come among people” (BG 66). As Sara begins “to think inside” herself, to explore her own consciousness and subjectivity, her language becomes less wedded to standard forms. In this probing, Sara certainly feels what Yezierska called the “driving urge to express more vitally the rush of new experience, the fire of changing personality”; this results first in a series of repetitive forms reminiscent of “The Miracle”: I don’t want/I want/I want/I want. The Steinian “I want to learn something. I want to do something,” is followed by one of Yezierska’s characteristic syntactical inversions: “I want someday to make myself for a person.” Here, Sara works to remake language in order to remake identity itself, “the fire of changing personality” recreated through vernacular modernist language.

Clearly, both Yezierska and Sara convert language into central metaphors of the immigrant experience. When Sara refuses to engage in the coarse humor of her classmates at college, she feels “shut out like a ‘greenhorn’ who didn’t talk their language” (BG 180). When she asks someone about how he managed English words as a street vendor on his first day in America, he tells her, “To me it was only singing a song. I didn’t understand the words, but my voice was like dynamite, thundering out into the air all that was in my young heart, alone in a big city” (BG 189). In a consideration of another Yezierska novel (Salome of the Tenements), Michael North notes the political valence of the link between dynamite and ethnicity, connecting this to cultural tropes of “political anarchy and violence” common in cultural representations of anti-immigrant nativism.52 The fact that dynamite can also operate as a metaphor both for a dangerously emotional ethnicity and for the power of second-language learning confirms the intimate connection between ethnic identity, linguistic experimentation, and conventional notions about modernist threats to culture. For Yezierska, the experience of culture and of life is the experience of language, and life will always be consciously mediated by language and linguistic difference. While the narration in Bread Givers largely demonstrates a cultural and linguistic savviness over that of some narrators in Hungry Hearts, particularly in its more conventional style and syntax, Sara Smolinsky finds herself “slipping back into the vernacular” when emotionally overcome while teaching pronunciation to her Lower East Side students (BG 272).

In Yezierska’s work, the vernacular lurks beneath her narrators’ standard language, always ready to emerge in moments where realist representation cannot effectively capture the mental or emotional experience of her immigrant characters. Her vernacular modernism appears not merely as an essentialist marker of cultural or ethnic difference. Instead, her use of this language works at cross-purposes. On the one hand, it marks her characters—as did the dialect realism of Cahan. However, as her own theoretical writing suggests, it provides a critique of the “trite words [and] stale phrases” on which realist writing depended, and that Yezierska herself criticized in her defense of Lewisohn. Because her stories are about immigration and assimilation, Yezierska uses this strategy as a means of aestheticizing the process of assimilation, but in a manner that suggests the power of experimental language to communicate experience more “vitally.” The unassimilated (and indeed the unrefined) elements of her characters are also signs of modernism; as much as the betterment societies and settlement houses strive to mold her characters into models of nineteenth-century bourgeois gentility, these characters remain hostile to these social and cultural codes, as well as to the genteel language of nineteenth-century dialect realism that operated as its own force of linguistic containment. As with so many high and vernacular modernists, Yezierska fights this stifling gentility with linguistic experimentation, the “immigrant development” that Eugene Jolas saw creating “the possibilities for a fundamental revolution of the word.”

“The Broken Talk Came through the Airshaft Window”: Michael Gold and Vernacular Expressionism

I will not deny the World Revolution provides a Weltanschauung that exfoliates a thousand bold new futurist thoughts in psychology, art, literature, economics, sex. It is a fresh world synthesis—the old one was killed in the war, and long live the new!

—MICHAEL GOLD, “LET IT BE REALLY NEW!” (1926)

While placing Yezierska and her vernacular first-person narratives in the orbit of vernacular modernism might seem relatively plausible (especially given her close association with John Dewey and her pilgrimage to Gertrude Stein’s Paris apartment), doing the same with Michael Gold is anything but an easy task. Gold was well known for his relentless critiques of modernist writers and his promotion of working-class writing and realist aesthetics in his 1930s column “Change the World.”53 His notorious attack “Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot” took a clear stand on the kinds of literary modernism emanating from Paris. Gold called Stein’s work “an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist, and a reflection of the ideological anarchy into which the whole of bourgeois literature has fallen.”⁵⁴ Modernists, Gold claimed, “destroyed the common use of language. . . . They went in for primitive emotions, primitive art. Blood, violent death, dope dreams, soul-writings, became the themes of their works” (CTW 25). While Gold admired Hemingway’s style, he still characterized Hemingway’s writing as the “heartless” work of “a white collar poet.”⁵⁵

Gold’s positions on aesthetics and politics had become firmly entrenched during the 1930s, and his most vitriolic statements on modernism are, in large part, from this period. Earlier in his career, however, Gold was much more closely allied with experimental art forms. This included work with the aesthetically progressive Provincetown Players and New Playwrights Theatre, which led to productive associations with major figures in both theatrical and literary modernism, including Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and John Dos Passos.56 His most ambitious and experimental dramatic work, Hoboken Blues (published in 1927, performed by the New Playwrights Theater in 1928), attempts to grapple with the history of American racial injustice and capitalist exploitation in a form derived from Soviet constructivist theater. What remains lacking in criticism of Gold’s work is any coherent picture of his career. How does one bring together communist polemics and experimental theater with Gold’s most celebrated work, the fictionalized East Side memoir Jews without Money (1930)? Such disparate creative productions seem to emanate from altogether different writers—with completely different assumptions about the role of art in society. In a sense, Gold had investment in most of the major strands of literary production during the 1920s. His poetry rejects most received nineteenth-century forms but remains explicitly derivative of Walt Whitman. Gold’s devotion to Whitman’s aesthetic already puts him in an oppositional relationship to modernist poets like Ezra Pound, who sought to reject Whitman’s influence in American poetry. Gold’s short fiction vacillates between experimentation (in, for example, “Love on a Garbage Dump” and “Faster, America, Faster!”) and polemical pieces in the tradition of literary naturalism. His plays can be decidedly naturalistic, clichéd, or experimental—sometimes all in the same text (as is the case with Hoboken Blues). And his one extended work, Jews without Money, is alternatively nostalgic and horrifying, naturalistic and lyrical.

Rather than ignoring Gold’s experimental work and reading him exclusively as a proletarian memoirist or chalking up his varied output to political and aesthetic incoherence, it is useful to import two interlocking concepts into the study of Gold’s work: vernacular language and expressionism. Gold’s fascination with vernacular language and culture cuts across ethnic groups, appearing in Jews without Money as well as in the plays Money and Hoboken Blues. In addition, Gold’s work across genres draws heavily on European expressionism, broadly conceived as a literary, dramatic, and artistic form that, according to Peter Nicholls, “veered between an often decadent preoccupation with types of spiritual ‘sickness’ and an attempt to harness liberated emotion to this project of social renewal.”⁵⁷ For expressionist playwrights, Günther Berghaus writes, “strength of feeling and pathos of expression meant more . . . than mastery of form. . . . The unrestrained outpourings of the Expressionist actor showed a human being in a state of delirium seeking to reach his or her audience with a liberating, primeval cry.”58 With its roots in the development of American expressionism, Gold’s work can be seen as a form of vernacular expressionism; Gold is profoundly interested in language, but he is also invested in dramatic and aesthetic techniques used in Europe (by figures like Bertolt Brecht and Vsevolod Meyerhold). In a sense, Gold’s strange uses of dialect and vernacular language in his 1920s expressionist theater and of a hybrid, though muted, Lower East Side language in Jews without Money form a continuity around vernacular and expressionist incarnations of the grotesque. With an emphasis both in the expressionist grotesque and in reviving Whitman’s street-level aesthetics, Gold’s own approach seeks to negotiate the aesthetic threshold between realism and modernism, politics and literature, prose poetry and narrative. Rather than reading Gold’s work through his programmatic and doctrinaire 1930s column “Change the World,” considering his creative output and his statements on art in the 1920s enables a new reading of Gold, one that puts him more comfortably in the realm of the vernacular, the expressionist, and the modernist.

Gold’s own positions on art throughout the 1920s are in more constant conflict than critics usually admit. During this period, a number of Gold’s statements on aesthetics and politics form a trajectory from the self-described “mystic” manifesto “Towards Proletarian Art” (1921) through the nine-point proscriptive description of “Proletarian Realism” (1930) that codified his thinking at the beginning of the 1930s. Critics have tended to read these two texts as inherently related, even seeing the latter as “a rationalization and codification” of “Towards Proletarian Art” (LA 203). But articles and editorials published in New Masses, the radical literary magazine Gold edited beginning in 1926, present a more complex evolution of his thinking about the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

In “Towards Proletarian Art,” Gold’s first manifesto, he collapses a number of strands in early twentieth-century literary discourse. On the one hand, Gold opposes received forms, both of art and of artists, which he links to capitalist oppression: “The old moods, the old poetry, fiction, painting, philosophies, were the creations of proud and baffled solitaries. The tradition has arisen in a capitalist world that even its priests of art must be lonely beasts of prey—competitive and unsocial” (LA 65). While he notes this tendency of contemporary artists to see themselves as “the aristocrats of mankind,” by linking this tendency to the past he emphasizes his desire to see proletarian art as a new form for a new world (LA 65). At the same time, Gold evokes the modernist moment, claiming in one of his more mystic flourishes that “it is the consciousness that in art Life is speaking out its heart at last, and that to censor the poor brute-murmurings would be sacrilege. Whatever they are, they are significant and precious, and to stifle the meanest of Life’s moods taking form in the artist would be death” (LA 64).

Gold’s faith in the artist’s individual vision (those “poor brutemurmurings”) and his insistence that the new artist be both social and socialized stand in partial conflict to one another, especially since Gold later maintained such hostility toward what might be characterized as the “brute-murmurings” of experimental modernists like Stein. But, more than anything else, it is Gold’s own admitted “primitivism” that makes “Towards Proletarian Art” such a puzzling example of proletarian literary theory. While “intellectuals have become bored with the primitive monotony of Life—with the deep truths and instincts,” Gold writes, “the masses are still primitive and clean, and artists must turn to them for strength again. The primitive sweetness, the primitive calm, the primitive ability to create simply and without fever or ambition, the primitive satisfaction and self-sufficiency—they must be found again” (LA 66). This equation of the working class (the “masses”) with primitives remains one of Gold’s stranger claims in this essay, particularly given the impetus in most proletarian writing of humanizing the masses (to counter their dehumanization by capitalist production). In effect, he is suggesting here that politically committed writers relinquish interest in other fetishistic forms of primitivism in bohemian literary culture and begin to write about some “real” primitives: the working-class (!). Gold’s claims, then, create a strong bridge between his interests (in the primitivism of the masses) and larger concerns of primitivism in the work of modernists like Stein, Eliot, and others.59

While editing New Masses, Gold often saw parallels between the aesthetic and political avant-garde. The magazine routinely published work by John Dos Passos, and early issues sought to establish modernist credibility by featuring work by William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Alfred Kreymborg, and even Ezra Pound. In “Let It Be Really New!,” an editorial published in the magazine’s second issue, Gold claimed that “the World Revolution provides a Weltanschauung that exfoliates a thousand bold new futurist thoughts in psychology, art, literature, economics, sex,” and that he “would like the New Masses to be the bridge to this world for American artists and writers, which means it will not be a magazine of Communism, or Moscow, but a magazine of American experiment—only let’s not experiment in the minor esthetic cults.”60 This contempt for what Gold calls “the minor esthetic cults” drives his later critique of modernist writers like Stein, but for much of the 1920s he praised modernist little magazines, singling out transition and the Little Review as positive examples of literary experimentation.⁶¹ Also during this period, Gold would praise such high modernists as Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, calling Ulysses “one of the few masterpieces of our times.”⁶²

These complex articulations, and not Gold’s programmatic comments on “Proletarian Realism,” inform the majority of his creative work, which largely dried up after this second manifesto was published in September of 1930.⁶³ During this creative period, Gold maintained an obsession with avant-garde elements in European theater; he constantly invoked terms like “futurism” and “constructivism,” and in 1925 he published an essay in the Nation on Meyerhold’s constructivist experiments in the Soviet Union, something Gold called “the neo-primitive stage.”⁶⁴ Gold’s “futurism” is certainly not the protofascist futurism of Marinetti, but another way of rendering the concept “avant-garde” (without the implication of “minor esthetic cults”). This obsession with avant-garde theater and the use of aesthetic estrangement for political effect has, in part, caused at least one critic to link Gold with Bertolt Brecht. Morris Dickstein, in an essay on the legacy of Gold’s Jews without Money, suggests that “with his tough-guy manner and hard-boiled, telegraphic prose, Gold could have become an American Brecht, but he lacked the German playwright’s instinct for survival and his canny ironic temperament, which complicated every proletarian pose into an avant-garde gesture.”⁶⁵ Nevertheless, like Brecht, Gold saw the theater as a space to interrogate social and aesthetic assumptions under capitalism.

Though Gold’s theatrical work has largely escaped the notice of critics, it establishes some important foundations for thinking about Jews without Money and demonstrates his interest in vernacular language as a central theme. His earliest surviving play, Money, was one of three Gold-authored one-act plays produced by the Provincetown Players in the late 1910s. The story of a group of Jewish American roommates and a bundle of missing savings, this play remains relatively realistic, but at least one linguistic element anticipates Henry Roth’s modernist novel Call It Sleep (1934). When the roommates are talking among themselves, they speak fluently, but when a police officer arrives to investigate, Abram, the only English speaker in the group, speaks “in singsong, broken Ghetto English.” The policeman speaks an equally thick urban vernacular, explaining his arrival: “Why, a feller just come up to me on my beat and told me there was a lot of Yits down here fighting like cats and dogs.”66 Gold’s shift from the dignified fluency of the insulated community to the vernacular cacophony of the mixed social environment in Money parallels the linguistic and modernist differentiation between speech and internal monologue in Roth’s more celebrated modernist novel.

But Gold’s interest in language and the theater was not limited to stories of the Lower East Side. His most ambitious play, Hoboken Blues, explicitly attempts to combine the constructivist experiments of Meyerhold with a satire of American blackface minstrelsy. First published in the modernist anthology The American Caravan in 1927, the year that saw Al Jolson star in The Jazz Singer, Gold’s play has escaped the attention of critics like Michael Rogin, whose study Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot outlines the complex ways that Jewish performers related to blackface performance.⁶⁷ While Hoboken Blues tries to undercut the racist stereotypes associated with blackface, it is rather telling that one of the only critical essays published on Hoboken Blues to this point is subtitled “An Experiment That Failed.”⁶⁸ Given the ideologically inflected stage directions (i.e., “NOTE: No white men appear in this play. Where white men are indicated, they are played by Negroes in white caricature masks”), Gold clearly wanted to write an advanced constructivist play about the nexus of racism and capitalism in the United States.⁶⁹ If anything, Hoboken Blues is Gold’s most explicit avant-garde gesture, a text focused on the collision of constructivism and black dialect, of European and American forms of linguistic and aesthetic experimentation.

Part of the struggle evident in Hoboken Blues is Gold’s attempt to wed the racist grotesquerie of the minstrel tradition to a constructivist aesthetic that he describes in detail in “Theater and Revolution”: “Machinery has been made a character in the drama. City rhythms, the blare of modernism, the iron shouts of industrialism, these are actors. Paradox is an honored guest at the feast. Vitality and youth and courage are Three Graces. And futurism is the fantastic godmother of this swarm of new theaters in Russia; futurism, the cult of a few odd persons in New York.”⁷⁰ The desire to unite the popular form of the minstrel show with constructivism, clearly seen as an elitist “cult of a few odd persons in New York” (perhaps even a “minor esthetic cult”), encounters further problems with Gold’s insistence on presenting his vernacular characters as less sympathetic and more grotesque in the fashion of the German expressionist drama of the turn of the century. As Alan Wald writes, “Gold’s clumsy efforts at Black dialect and his depiction of African American stereotypes in Hoboken Blues seem somewhat inexplicable in the context of Gold’s militant antiracism. . . . What seems likely is that Gold was attempting to recreate Black urban culture with the same humor and earthiness with which he was depicting Jewish ghetto culture in his East Side novel; but the effort failed due to his lack of intimate familiarity with the materials and his primary focus on producing a Futurist spectacle.”71 Clearly, constructivism valued paradox, but Gold’s literary talents were stretched beyond a breaking point in attempting to stuff all of these paradoxes into a single theatrical production.

With the contradictions of Gold’s ambitious but failed constructivistexpressionist theatrical experiments in mind, the complexities of his most lasting work, Jews without Money, should become a bit more understandable. Often cited as one of the pioneering examples of the proletarian novel, Jews without Money resists many of the thematic conventions of this genre (strikes, conversion narratives, etc.), limiting its most explicit political engagement to the final pages. As a result, the text was lauded by notorious antileftist critic H. L. Mencken as “one of the most eloquent stories that the American press has disgorged in many a moon,” and certain sections were published in Mencken’s American Mercury (as well as in Gold’s own New Masses) while Gold worked on the book through the 1920s.⁷² In 1965 the book was even reprinted without the last half page, in which the fictional narrator “Michael” undergoes a political radicalization and praises the “workers’ Revolution” as “the true Messiah.”⁷³

Michael’s conversion at the book’s conclusion has struck many critics as an afterthought to a narrative that nostalgically revels in the grotesquerie of the vernacular culture and language of New York’s Lower East Side. Though the search for a messiah dominates the text and provides thematic coherence, the stylistic shift of this final chapter makes it, at least at the textual level, incongruous. While critics have characterized this novel as a “proletarian fictional autobiography” or a “ghetto or tenement pastoral,” the strange, lingering nostalgia in Gold’s text seems to push against any such cut-and-dried reading of the politics of the text.⁷⁴ With its endless delay of radicalization in favor of nostalgia, the text refuses an exclusively political reading; with its harsh and grotesque character types, it never quite seems as comfortably pastoral as critics suggest. Jews without Money, then, is stuck between the nostalgic memoir and the depiction of the brutalities of capitalism, never quite comfortable with either. It is for this reason that reading this text through Gold’s earlier experiments—especially Hoboken Blues—can open up new avenues for understanding Gold’s project.

Because one of Gold’s primary aesthetic strategies throughout the 1920s was of a kind of European expressionism blended with the vernacular and dialect modes of the minstrel tradition (as in Hoboken Blues) and the immigrant experience (in Money), it is possible to see Jews without Money as an extension of this project, to see it, in effect, as an example of vernacular expressionism, rooted in the language and culture of the Lower East Side, drawing on the democratic cityscapes of Walt Whitman but with an emphasis on the grotesque that keeps the fictionalized memoir in a realm of aesthetics that seem frequently out of line with his later descriptions of “Proletarian Realism.” Jews without Money, with its monstrous figures, its brutal and horrific descriptions of poverty, all accompanied by Howard Simon’s expressionist woodcuts, takes a strange turn away from the mode of Yezierska (as well as from Cahan and Antin). If Yezierska’s stories turn ghetto life into fairy tales of linguistic self-construction, Gold’s major work moves in the opposite direction, emphasizing community languages over individuals and turning every experience into a grotesque, expressionist nightmare.

Most critical discussions of American expressionism focus exclusively on the theater of the late 1910s and 1920s; Gold’s involvement in this movement is one of the unexplored aspects of his career. Mardi Valgemae’s pioneering work on the emergence of the style emphasized its “objectification emphasized through distortion” and its “nightmarish visual images.”75 Gold’s transition from expressionist theater to prose, while not unprecedented, was actually quite rare, and few critics have considered the stylistic influence across these genres. Sherrill E. Grace, in a study that charts expressionism’s vacillation between poles of regression and apocalypse, argues that expressionist-influenced fiction (like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood [1936]) “presents intense personal emotion as well as social protest in forms that resist representation, that use distortion and varying degrees of abstraction, and that stress themes of degeneration, disintegration, and apocalypse.”⁷⁶ The world of Gold’s Jews without Money certainly exhibits many of these thematic characteristics: visions of a nightmarish world, abstract portraiture, and a social protest that becomes explicit in the novel’s final pages. Gold’s innovations in this text include his introduction of an almost Proustian nostalgia, his Whitmanesque lists, and his orientation toward the central importance of vernacular language, a “broken talk” that mirrors the expressionist abstraction of the novel.

Gold’s characters, while not imbued with the same hybrid speech as those in Yezierska’s work, still speak what the narrator calls “Jewish talk” (JWM 113). In this way, he emphasizes the communal language of the East Side ghetto, an alternative to the individualist, assimilationist project that Yezierska demonstrates in so many of her texts. In many spots this social vernacular is implicit, though Gold does import some Yiddish expressions into the text. In one of Jews without Money’s most kaleidoscopic and Whitmanesque moments, Gold merges suffering, grotesquerie, and this “Jewish talk”: “The whole tenement was talking and eating its supper. The broken talk came through the airshaft window. The profound bass of the East Side traffic lay under this talk. Talk. Talk. Rattle of supper dishes, whining of babies, yowling of cats; counterpoint of men, women and children talking as if their hearts would break. Talk. Jewish talk” (JWM 113). Later, this talk becomes more explicitly sutured to a long history of suffering; the talk itself assumes an immense, mythical proportion: “Then talk, talk, talk again. Jewish talk. Hot, sweaty, winey talk. A sweatshop holiday. Egypt’s slaves around a campfire in the shadow of the pyramids. They drank wine even then. Thousands of years ago. And talked as now. The Bible records it. And their hearts were eased by it. And Moscowitz played the Babylonian harp” (JWM 116).

The “broken talk” of the Jewish community mingles with a cacophony of other broken sounds, but also speaks to a long legacy of Jewish social history.77 This language, more often described than demonstrated, is to a certain degree like Woolf’s description of Lardner’s work, “twisted at the root.” While earlier Jewish American novelists and memoirists emphasized the individual’s struggle to adapt to the new American realities, often using language acquisition to thematize this transition, Gold’s interest is not in the language learning of his central character but in the linguistic community he inhabits, the world of “Jewish talk.” This “hot, sweaty, winey talk” becomes “a sweatshop holiday,” highlighting the ways in which these figures’ vernacular language is the only respite they have from the sufferings of capitalist oppression. That the community bands together, telling ancient stories in an ancient language implies a linguistic wholeness that eludes many of the vernacular modernists.

But Gold’s emphasis on the “brokenness” of the language, as well as on the broken hearts the “Jewish talk” describes, complicates this notion of coherence; as with the characters of Yezierska and Cahan, the social protagonist of this scene in Jews without Money inhabits a space that is fundamentally shattered, fractured, and incoherent. The incomprehensible wailing (of men, women, children, and even animals) drifting in the window helps to politicize the vernacular language of the novel as it becomes the only means of expression in a world where the economic structures continue to close in on immigrant families. Whereas Yezierska’s protagonists escape poverty through education and self-transformation, Gold’s characters—for the majority of the novel, at least—can only emit a collective vernacular wail into the wilderness.

The broken nature of the language of Jews without Money provides a central means of understanding the novel’s odd structure. Gold worked on this book through much of the late 1920s, routinely publishing excerpts subtitled “From a Book of East Side Memoirs” in New Masses. Though the first of these was titled “Jews without Money,” this piece does not begin the book-length version. The excerpts function only partially as a serial (since they appeared every couple of months from June 1928 through the book’s publication in 1930), but they operate according to a logic much more associative than serial or realist. Serial narratives imply continuity and plot-driven narration, while the memories published here operate in a more impressionistic manner. In Jews without Money, memories come back to the narrator in profound ways and are figured as impressions or theatrical set pieces rather than as parts of a highly structured realist narrative along the lines of Antin or Cahan’s work. Indeed, the novel lacks a central storyline: memory after memory is piled up, and the narrator Michael’s communist conversion at the novel’s conclusion is the only example of a forward-moving narrative device.

More a collection of memories than a single narrative thread, Gold’s text refuses the developmental mode of the bildungsroman—popular with both realists Cahan and Antin and vernacular modernist Yezierska—in favor of a set of associative memories organized around the poetic structures of remembrance. He foregrounds this strategy in lines such as, “I can see, in the newsreel of memory, the scene on our roof when I first heard this story” (JWM 84). His structures follow not the realist models of linear narration but a technique of impressionistic symbols reminiscent of Proust.78 For example, Gold explicitly references seasons (summer/winter in Chapters 4 and 19) while focusing on recursive moments and figures. The narrator Michael’s friend Joey Cohen dies in a horrible streetcar accident early in the text but returns later on without any cue, signaling that the text is not following conventional narrative time. Like the “Jewish talk,” the realist narrative assumptions of the Jewish American memoir have also been “broken” in Jews without Money.

But this brokenness assumes a new, poetic form in Jews without Money, as Gold alternates moments of realist narrative and modernist memory with the elevated language of Whitman’s poetry. Throughout the text, Gold also inserts Whitmanesque lists to provide an accumulative impact of impressions. In the opening pages, he writes,

People pushed and wrangled in the street. There were armies of howling pushcart peddlers. Women screamed, dogs barked and copulated. Babies cried.

A parrot cursed. Ragged kids played under truck-horses. Fat housewives fought from stoop to stoop. A beggar sang.

At the livery stable coach drivers lounged on a bench. They heehawed with laughter, they guzzled cans of beer.

Pimps, gamblers and red-nosed bums; peanut politicians, pugilists in sweaters; tinhorn sports and tall longshoremen in overalls. An endless pageant of East Side life passed through the wicker doors of Jake Wolf’s saloon. (JWM 13–14)

Here, individual images merge into an overall impression of poverty, emphasizing the dark, the grotesque, and the repulsive aspects of the environment while retaining a sense of nostalgia. This is not Whitman’s colorful and dynamic humanism of the streets, but a grotesque vernacular, full of an “endless pageant” of hee-hawing and beer-guzzling. While other Jewish American writers emphasize the ability of their protagonists to emerge from the poverty of their surroundings, Gold revels in the grotesquerie of his childhood: not surprising, since he routinely listed Sherwood Anderson as one of the most important writers of the 1920s.

Still, Gold’s interest in the grotesque does not always diminish the romance of his memories. At one point, again channeling Whitman, he writes an ode to the ugliness of his childhood home: “Shabby old ground, ripped like a battlefield by workers’ picks and shovels, little garbage dump lying forgotten in the midst of tall tenements, O home of all the twisted junk, rusty baby carriages, lumber, bottles, boxes, moldy pants and dead cats of the neighborhood—every one spat and held the nostrils when passing you. But in my mind you still blaze in the halo of childish romance. No place will ever seem as wonderful again” (JWM 46). In Gold’s text, the “home of all the twisted junk” is also the home of “childish romance”—the two are closely intertwined in ways that make the nostalgic grotesque and the grotesque nostalgic.79 Unlike Yezierska, whose characters are frequently compelled to transform their domestic circumstances into some semblance of bourgeois propriety (see, for example, the obsession with “Soap and Water”), Gold’s narrator revels in exposing every obscene and disturbing element of his childhood home. He understands the Lower East Side “as a jungle, where wild beasts prowled, and toadstools grew in a poisoned soil—perverts, cokefiends, kidnapers, firebugs, Jack the Rippers,” and as “a spectral place, a chamber of hell, hot and poisoned by hundreds of gas flames. It was suffocating with the stink of chemicals” (JWM 60, 306).

These descriptions, along with the dark and abstract woodcut illustrations by Howard Simon, help identify Jews without Money as an unabashedly expressionist text—one explicitly connected to Gold’s avant-garde theater of the 1920s (including Hoboken Blues).80 This expressionism, melded with the interest in vernacular language (the “hot, sweaty, winey talk” of his Jewish family and friends), situates Gold in an antirealist mode, one that distorts representation both linguistically and impressionistically and results in an example of vernacular expressionism. Certainly, Gold’s Lower East Side upbringing contained many of these horrors, but Gold, with this peculiar almost antirealist aesthetic, deviates from the conventions of Jewish American memoir writing through the nightmarish abstraction and distortion of his descriptions. For example, Fyfka the Miser, a boarder in the narrator’s family’s apartment, becomes a “thing,” “this yellow somnambulist, this nightmare bred of poverty; this maggot-yellow dark ape with twisted arm and bright, peering, melancholy eyes; human garbage can of horror” (JWM 76). Calling Fyfka a “thing,” a “maggot-yellow dark ape,” and a “human garbage can of horror” explicitly hearkens back to Gold’s youthful injunction to discover the primitive not in the exotic but within the working class.⁸¹ It also seems to contrast strongly with one of his later injunctions about “Proletarian Realism”: “Away with drabness, the bourgeois notion that the Worker’s life is sordid, the slummer’s disgust and feeling of futility. There is horror and drabness in the Worker’s life; and we will portray it; but we know this is not the last word; we know that this manure heap is the hope of the future” (LA 207).⁸² There seems little hope for Fyfka or for any of the characters within Gold’s text; for this reason the messianic ending has often been read as incongruous with the rest of Jews without Money.

Across Gold’s varied output, it is possible to see a nexus of experimental European forms (constructivism and expressionism), vernacular language (minstrel dialect and “Jewish talk”), political commitment, and an increasing interest in the grotesque depiction of urban environments. Gold’s literary career during the 1920s suggests something of a failed struggle to wrestle these competing forms into some kind of coherence. However, Gold’s work demonstrates how wide the net for the representational mode of vernacular modernism might be extended. Gold’s work is certainly a break with the realist traditions of Cahan and Antin, but his emphasis on the grotesque and violent separates him from Yezierska and places him far closer to another genre experiencing a vernacular modernist revolution in the 1920s: hard-boiled crime fiction, with its expressionistic mean streets, underworld slang, and cast of grotesque street figures.