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Nathan Asch

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Nathan Asch (July 10, 1902–December 23, 1964) was an American writer.

Biography

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Nathan Asch was born in Warsaw in 1902, the son of the Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch and his wife Mathilda Szpiro.[1] After living in France, Germany, and Switzerland, the family settled in the United States when Asch was 13 years old.[2] In 1923, Asch moved to Paris where he met Ernest Hemingway.[3] His first story "The Voice of the Office", published in the June 1924 edition of The Transatlantic Review, was praised by Hemingway.[4] Asch worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood but quit to travel around the country by bus and report on the experiences of ordinary people during the Depression.[5] Asch criticized Hollywood from a Marxist perspective, describing it as a place of "the last manufactory of bourgeois romanticism... with no newspapers, no opinions, [and] no social consciousness".[6] He drew on his bus trips in his book The Road: In Search of America, a book that combines literary fragments and reporting to depict American life in the 1930s.[7]

During the Spanish Civil War, Asch collaborated with his friend Josephine Herbst on a play about the conflict called The Spanish Road but it was not produced due to Communist members of the Theatre Union who disagreed with the work's political viewpoint.[8] Asch was associated with a circle of leftist literary critics, including Muriel Rukeyser, Stanley Burnshaw, and Mike Gold.[9] His four novels were initially popular in Germany, through Hermynia Zür Muhlen's translations but his books could not be published after 1936 in Germany or Austria since Asch was Jewish.[10] With his books banned in Germany, Asch supported himself by writing for the Federal Writers' Project.[11] Asch, who had previously served in the Navy during World War I, was a technical sergeant during World War II, driving the photographer Margaret Bourke-White in a jeep.[12] He did not publish any books after the war, but he taught writing workshops in Marin County.[13]

In contrast to his father's works, Nathan Asch's writing was considered to be more modernist and experimental. His works focused on "the victims of modern life", such as the middle-class office workers in The Office.[14] Similarly, Pay Day is a modernist depiction of a twelve-hour period in a Manhattan office, on the day of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.[15] Comparing the two novelists, Malcolm Cowley said that Nathan Asch wrote "more lyrically...but lacked the father's simple vigor and breadth of conception".[16] Since both men were writing at the same time, the two novelists had a complicated relationship, with Nathan Asch recalling that he "loved my father and hated him and had also been completely alienated from him."[17] Nathan Asch wrote that he never learned to read Yiddish and could only read his father's books in translation.[18]

Bibliography

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  • The Office. New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1925.
  • Love in Chartres. New York: A. & C. Boni, 1927.
  • Pay Day. New York: Brewer & Warren, 1930.
  • The Road: In Search of America. New York: Norton, 1937.

References

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  1. ^ Hanrahan, Virginia (April 11, 1947). "Literary Napa Valley". The Napa Journal. p. 7.
  2. ^ "Nathan Asch, 62, Novelist is Dead: Son of Late Author Wrote on America's Depression". The New York Times. December 25, 1964. p. 28.
  3. ^ Huntley, Dan (March 4, 1990). "Asch Rediscovered: Lost Generation and Found". The Charlotte Observer. p. 107.
  4. ^ Joost, Nicholas (1968). Ernest Hemingway and the Little Magazines: The Paris Years. Barre Publishers. p. 102.
  5. ^ Peeler, David P. (1984). "Unlonesome Highways: The Quest for Fact and Fellowship in Depression America". Journal of American Studies. 18 (2): 191. ISSN 0021-8758.
  6. ^ Asch, Nathan (February 1934). "A Letter from an American Novelist". Soviet Russia Today. 2 (12): 12.
  7. ^ Browder, Laura (1998). Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America. University of Massachusetts Press. p. 21. ISBN 1558491252.
  8. ^ Mangione, Jerre (2001). An ethnic at large : a memoir of America in the thirties and forties. Syracuse University Press. p. 232. ISBN 0815607164.
  9. ^ Cohen, Milton A. (2010). Beleaguered poets and leftist critics : Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s. The University of Alabama Press. p. 32. ISBN 9780817317133.
  10. ^ Zur Mühlen, Hermynia (2010). Grossman, Lionel (ed.). The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life. Open Book Publishers. p. 289. ISBN 9781906924287.
  11. ^ Penkower, Monty Noam (1977). The Federal Writers' Project : A study in Government patronage of the arts. University of Illinois Press. p. 159. ISBN 0252006100.
  12. ^ Bourke-White, Margaret (1946). "Dear Fatherland Rest Quietly": A Report on the Collapse of Hitler's "Thousand Years". Simon and Schuster. p. 41.
  13. ^ "Nathan Asch, Mill Valley Writer, Dies". Daily Independent Journal. December 24, 1964. p. 4.
  14. ^ Berthoff, Warner (1994). American Trajectories: Authors and Readings, 1790-1970. The Pennsylvania State University. p. 121. ISBN 0271010517.
  15. ^ Kalaidjian, Walter, ed. (2005). The Cambridge companion to American modernism. Cambridge University Press. p. 43. ISBN 9780521829953.
  16. ^ Cowley, Malcolm (1978). And I worked at the writer's trade : Chapters of literary history, 1918-1978. New York: The Viking Press. p. 65. ISBN 0670122912.
  17. ^ Siegel, Ben (1976). The Controversial Sholem Asch: An Introduction to His Fiction. Bowling Green University Popular Press. p. 222. ISBN 087972076X.
  18. ^ Asch, Nathan (January 1965). "My Father and I". Commentary.
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