Aaron Traum

New York: Horace Liveright. Very Good in Good dj. 1930. 2nd printing. Hardcover. [moderate shelfwear to book; the jacket is heavily edgeworn, with a large chip at the upper left corner of the front panel and some paper loss at the top of the spine, and a couple more tiny chips at the top of the rear panel]. A father-son team produced this novel, "a story about a man who started in the gutter and ended with the stars." Per a contemporary Los Angeles Times review, the narrative covers "the family making its way from Russia, where it had sprung from a rabbinical background; the hard life in the New York slums; the grandmother's terrible determination to give Aaron the chance to go to school; the hunger that drove him to the sweat shops and kept him there for years, despite a spirit that was ever seeking the freedom and the beauty he knew were to be found, and his final emancipation." This was Lester Cohen's third published novel, and his only collaboration with his father, a doctor upon whose experiences as an immigrant the book draws. Lester himself, born in Chicago in 1901, had a fair-to-middling career as a Hollywood writer during the 1930s; his best credit was for the screenplay of OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934). Blake ("The Strike in the American Novel"): "Meek unheroic little Aaron Traum ... becomes an impassioned orator and indefatigable organizer when his garment shop goes out on strike." Also, Hanna 725. ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .