The Old Bunch

Name: The Old Bunch
ISBN: 9781625670878

Meyer Levin

First published in 1937, Meyer Levin's novel The Old Bunch recounts the lives of 19 teenagers—11 boys and 8 girls—from the same neighborhood on Chicago's West Side.

Too young for World War I, they will later be too old for World War II.

But they are not too young or too old for the Great Depression that begins to unravel their lives.

Their choices are not easy: whether or not to identify with the suffering of the Jewish people, to seek love rather than status in marriage, to see African Americans as fellow sufferers.

Harold Strauss called the book "a landmark in the development of the realistic novel" that "brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived.”

Levin later became well known for his novel Compulsion, but here he argues for the growth that comes when we learn to speak for ourselves.

The Old Bunch is a novel pulsing with life, still vital 75 years after its original publication.

It is the story of ordinary neighborhood kids—Jewish boys and girls who, to their immigrant parents' bewilderment, take the spirit of a great American city into their hearts.

About the Author

Meyer Levin (1905-1981) was an American novelist, journalist, and filmmaker, and one of the most prolific Jewish American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago to immigrant parents, he studied at the University of Chicago and began his career as a newspaper reporter. His early novels, including Reporter (1929) and Yehuda (1931), drew on both city journalism and his growing engagement with Jewish and Zionist themes.

His breakthrough came with The Old Bunch (1937), a sweeping, realistic portrait of a group of second-generation Jewish Americans coming of age in Chicago. He later reported from Europe and Palestine and documented the aftermath of the Holocaust, including a stint as a war correspondent and work on documentary films.

His best-known work, Compulsion (1956), a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder case, became a bestseller and was adapted for stage and film. Levin was also a passionate early advocate for The Diary of Anne Frank in the United States. His dispute over the dramatization of the diary, and the legal battle with Otto Frank that followed, consumed much of his later life and became the subject of his memoir The Obsession (1973).

Levin settled largely in Israel from the 1950s onward, and later novels such as The Settlers (1972) and The Harvest (1978) drew on that experience. His novel The Stronghold (1965) earned the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 1966. Levin died in Jerusalem in 1981.