The Romanian-born author, Aben Kandel (born 15 August 1897), grew up in New York City. He served in the United States Army in the First World War, following which he graduated in law from New York University (one of the characters in the novel also studied there). He began writing novels in the 1920s and established himself as a successful screenwriter in the late 1930s. This novel was adapted for the screen in 1940 and starred James Cagney. Another of his films, The Iron Major, was a biopic of Frank Cavanaugh, a First World War hero, who had a distinguished career as a football coach.
The central characters are Joey and Bert Glass, sons of Jewish immigrants. Joey is a tough kid and, like the author, becomes a boxer; his brother, Bert, prefers to read and becomes a playwright. Joey’s childhood sweetheart, Bella, wants to become a successful dancer. She deserts Joey in favour of Murray Burns, a more accomplished dancing partner, who promises her success, but is described as a lizard (a slimeball) and regularly rapes her. When the United States enters the war, Burns attempts to dodge the draft as he dreads the loss of a leg. The author appears to take pleasure in the irony of Burns returning from the Western Front with legs intact but with his lungs destroyed by gas. It's interesting to observe an author using the war as a means of killing off an unpleasant character:
“He had died in a government hospital at Liberty, New York. His lungs had been devoured. But he had died with perfect legs.”
The author does not, however, use the war only as a device to destroy a menacing character. Another character, Googi Zucco, works his way up to being a middle-ranking gangster. Having been sent to prison for four years, he is released early to serve in the army in 1918 (the author enjoyed the irony that convicted killers were the only prisoners excluded from the opportunity of going to war:
“By some method of cock-eyed reasoning, the murderer who had calmly hacked a betrayer to bits or scooped out his treacherous wife's entrails and hence needed no training period in which to lunge a bayonet at a dummy — this accomplished murderer was kept from the ranks.”). Rather than being destroyed by the war, Googi comes back a decorated hero and quickly re-asserts himself as a gangster. Even his war decoration is dishonest:
“For in Paris he had bought a medal for bravery under fire, a Croix de Guerre, from the first cynical American hero. The medal cost the hero one leg but Googi got it at bargain rates for 100 francs and a bottle of cognac.”
Though Googi is not the hero of the novel; he personifies the pattern of social rise and fall in the city that the author sums up on the final page: “Yes, New York's a two-way town.” The war allows Googi a second chance at working his way up:
“Googi had been at war all his life. He had been at war with his father, the truant officer, rival bootblacks, neighboring gangs, policemen, prison guards, and with all of the Germans. He knew military strategy and his sure instinct for what to do against an enemy would have made him a prize member of the West Point faculty even if he was below the regulation height. And so he prospered far beyond the wildest dreams of the straved and pain-wracked little dago that slunk out of a Bowery tenement in the chill of the morning, eyes pasted together, torn shoe-soles slapping the pavement, shoulder hunched over under the weight of a shoe-shine box. And what was more miraculous, he survived.”
In fact, he thrived.
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