Haunch Paunch and Jowl

Long out of print, Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch, & Jowl (1923) deserves the renewed attention it has received as a lost classic of modernist Jewish-American literature. The novel provides a panorama of the first generation of Jewish immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side through a cohort of young men: the struggles between religion and secular success, socialism and capitalism, tradition and modernity, manufacturers and labor unions. Originally marketed as an autobiography, the novel became a best-seller as an exposé of corruption. It was the first work by author Samuel Ornitz, a lifelong reformer later blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten during the McCarthyist era. Ornitz intended for his narrator, Meyer Hirsch, to be a negative example of assimilation, yet Meyer Hirsch’s savvy voice still speaks contemporary American truths about poverty, social mobility, corruption, ethnic politics, and the costs of social mobility.

Samuel Ornitz was an author, screenwriter, and one of the Hollywood Ten. Haunch, Paunch & Jowl was his first novel, and was alternately admired and reviled. Along with nine other screenwriters, he was called he was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October, 1947. In front of Congress he refused to admit to membership either in the Screen Writers’ Guild or the Communist Party. Ornitz was cited for contempt of Congress, and, although ill, he served nine months of a one-year term in 1950-1951 at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri.

Joel Dinerstein holds a Sizeler Professorship in Judaic studies at Tulane University, where he is also a professor of English and American studies. He is a cultural historian of comparative racisms, whether anti-Semitism or anti-Black racism. His first book was an award-winning theory of jazz and industrialization, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (2003), followed by a cultural history, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017). He is the founding editor of this new series, Lost Classics in Jewish Literature.