Jews Without Money

Herman Gold is Mike’s father. He is a Jewish immigrant from Romania who came to America to pursue his dreams of becoming rich and successful. Unlike many of the people in the poor community, Herman is an optimist. He is something of a dreamer and constantly insists that he will one day become his own boss and the owner of a successful company. However, this perpetual optimism is slowly eroded by reality. Unfortunate events conspire against Herman, either through bad luck or through the active crimes of other people. He is injured in a job that exploits him, and he is tricked by a business partner. In both instances, he loses a great deal of money. More importantly, the constant misfortune grinds away his optimism. Without any institutional support or recompense, Herman’s reality shows how poverty becomes a trap for even the most ambitious, hard-working, and optimistic people.

Herman’s body is an importance metaphor for the ways in which poor people suffer. In a physical and psychological sense, Herman is beaten down by the world in which he lives. His physical well-being is destroyed by his low-paying job. As a house painter, he is well aware that the lead-based paint is slowly making him sick. Eventually, this sickness becomes too much, and he falls from a scaffolding, breaks his legs, and cannot work. His ruined body is a demonstration of the way in which capitalist society exploits and uses the bodies of the poor to perpetuate the wealth and good fortune of a limited number of people. The psychological scars left on Herman’s mind, forcing him to lose his optimism and develop fears of the world, show how the capitalist society breaks down even the happiest, most optimistic people into shadows of their former selves. As a result, Herman is left to live vicariously through his son. He wants Mike to become a doctor and to achieve what Herman never could. However, Mike is well aware that this dream is just as unrealistic as everything else in Herman’s life. At the end of the novel, even Herman’s last, most desperate hope—that Mike will become rich and successful—is shown to be hollow and impossible. Mike does not go to high school because he must work to help his family. Herman’s dreams are as broken down and withered as his physical and psychological well-being.

Katie functions as the practical counterpart to her more high-minded husband. Like him, she is a Jewish immigrant from a poor country. Unlike Herman, she never convinces herself that she will be anything other than poor. As a result, she focusing on the essential act of living. Katie’s ambition is to ensure that she and her family have food and to help the people around her as best she can. She is generous, proud, strong, and determined, providing Mike with the perfect role model for how to live in a society that treats his family as disposable and irrelevant. She makes herself relevant and essential by sheer force of will.

Katie’s generous side is visible in her willingness to help everyone. While many people in the tenement buildings take a reserved view of people from different ethnicities, Katie does not care. She may harbor prejudices and repeat stereotypes about Irish or Italian people, but she does not hesitate to help anyone who is in trouble. Even when she cannot speak someone’s language, she goes above and beyond what is expected of her to help people. She helps an Italian widow, an Irish victim of domestic abuse, and everyone who works in the multicultural cafeteria where she works. Though Katie lacks the ideological framework that her son will later develop to view the world, she understands class solidarity on a fundamental level. She recognizes that all the poor people are together, even if she lacks the technical words with which to express this solidarity.