The Old Bunch

Book excerpt: The acclaimed novel of growing up in Chicago’s Jewish ghetto in the shadow of WWI: “A landmark in the development of the realistic novel” (Harold Strauss, The New York Times). Chicago reporter and author of Compulsion, Meyer Levin won critical acclaim with this debut novel based on his own coming of age in the west side of Chicago. It follows the lives of nineteen teenagers—eleven boys and eight girls—who grow up together in the same working class Jewish Chicago neighborhood. The children of immigrants, these young people strive to forge their own paths in the aftermath of World War I and the struggles of the Great Depression. With compassion, intimacy, and photographic detail, Levin captures not only the lives of this unique “bunch,” but also the life of a generation from the Roaring Twenties through the New Deal and the Chicago World’s Fair. First published in 1937, The Old Bunch “brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived” (The New York Times). “Written in good hard-driving colloquial prose, full of sharp characterizations . . . A very fine novel.” —New Republic