Nathan Asch

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His four novels were initially popular in Germany, through Hermynia Zür Muhlen's translations but his books could not be published after 1936 in Germany or Austria since Asch was Jewish.^[10] With his books banned in Germany, Asch supported himself by writing for the Federal Writers'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]