[In the excerpt below from a conference paper presented in 1964, Goldstone asserts that Awake and Sing! is Odets' most profound play and explores the significance of money to the characters.]

Awake and Sing is a turning away from naturalism, the mode which Zola, Gorki, Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill had exploited in their dramatic writings about the poor. Odets chose realism over naturalism, sensing that the time had come when an American dramatist could write realistically about the emerging lower middle class—in this instance, immigrant Eastern European Jews. Realistic drama had previously focused upon the middle and upper middle classes, social groups with whom the theater-going public could identify; only [Sean] O'Casey had successfully used the lower middle class as the subject for realistic drama and Odets sensed that what O'Casey had done for the tenement dwellers of Dublin, an American playwright could do for the Jewish denizens of the Bronx. …

Odets had two objectives. More explicitly than O'Casey he wished to make the theater the expression of his social conscience, of his awareness of the need for social reform. At the same time, Odets wished to lay bare the truth, as he saw it, about the lives of his own people, to reveal and interpret their confusions, their fears, their aspirations and their failures.

We encounter, then, in Awake and Sing a family of Jews, East European in origin. Of the nine persons of the play, five were born in Europe and the others are children of immigrants. No one in the play is very far from the memory of the squalor of their origins—the squalor both of the European ghettoes and lower East Side slums. Jacob, the grandfather, says to his grandson, Ralph: "Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills." But life for these people was printed on dollar bills, on dimes, nickels and pennies. Their life was the struggle to survive. In ghettoes and slums the energies of people were devoted to getting and clutching the coins and bills on which life depended.

This is a play about money, or more particularly, about money and Jews. As such, it is a harsh, ugly, and—in certain respects—an unfair play. Yet it makes something clear about Jews and money which even today after pogroms and genocide, the world does not now, nor did not in 1935, really understand. Odets, in coming to terms with Jews and money (or to be more accurate, some Jews and money), composed a remarkable play, but one susceptible to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

Money clearly dominates the play—the accumulating, the hoarding, the utter absorption with it. Money is the play's central image, its all encompassing symbol.

In any complex society, money is important and the less there is of it the more important it becomes. For the poor Europeans, money meant clothing, food, staples, horses or draft animals. In short, money provided the necessaries of life, which were hard to come by. For the European Jew, the Eastern European Jew, in particular, money had an additional function. It not only provided the necessaries, it was the means of buying life itself; for Jews, the accumulation of money was the only possible guaranty of life and breath.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century Jew of Russia, Poland, Galicia, Hungary and the Balkans was not generally permitted to own land, follow a profession or attend secular schools. Traditionally and by necessity the Jew was a money-lender, a barterer of cheap merchandise, a repairer of pots and pans, a clothing mender, or a fiddler. Because the professions, farming and government service were closed to him, the Jew's only avenues of escape from a life of hopeless drudgery were the amassing of small capital or expatriation.

Life in the ghettoes had, besides crippling poverty, worse hazards. Money was a necessity to protect one's life and family against the depredations of the police, petty officials, mounted soldiers and a bigoted peasantry, any of whom could, capriciously and with impunity, pillage and murder Jews. Immunity from such attacks might be bought; the only defense was money.

Expatriation also required the accumulation of more than travel expenses. Beyond railroad and ship passage, money was needed to bribe border officials and sentries, in lieu of passports not available to most of the Jewish population.

In America, the memory of what money was haunts the Berger family of Awake and Sing. Money was Bessie Berger's passion, for Bessie was the real head of the family, the one on whose shoulders lay ultimate responsibilities. Bessie's obsession with money explains her intransigent denial of Blanche, the penniless orphan; it explains no roller skates for the child, Ralph, and Bessie's willingness to defraud the grown Ralph of his inheritance. But Bessie was no miser; money to her was something to be spent, provided it was spent to secure life. No roller skates for little Ralph, but twenty-five dollars for a specialist when the child was ill. (Twenty-five dollars was a month's rent.) Bessie believed that money bought life; that you were dead without it.

Odets's point is that Bessie is wrong. Morty, her rich brother, is the proof. Here is a man who has money—all he needs—but his life is sterile and his soul is dead. If only the Jew in America could liberate himself from the idea that money, rather than spiritual freedom, is the key to life. Most of the characters in the play never learn this; Jake knew but he was too old and broken to act upon it. (He hadn't even cut the pages of the books he had bought to liberate his mind.) Ralph is the only one who makes the full transition from the ghetto to a free land. Myron, Jake, Bessie, Sam are victims caught between two worlds: the crippling, stifling memory of a Europe which in a few years was to become a crematorium for Jews, and America where a Jew could breathe, and walk erect so long as he used his heart and mind and body with courage and purpose and decency. The play's theme is expressed in the title: Awake and sing (ye that dwell in the dust).

But Odets qualifies this idea of American freedom. Hennie's elopement with Moe represents her impulse to escape the constrictions of her environment, just as her brother Ralph needs to escape his. But Hennie is not admirable and her actions serve as a counterpoint to the main theme of the play.

After Hennie's seduction and abandonment by Moe Axelrod (before the play begins), she becomes promiscuous and reckless. When she can no longer conceal her pregnancy, she reluctantly agrees to her mother's scheme to deceive Sam Feinschreiber. But her reluctance is not at all like her grandfather Jacob's moral repugnance to taking advantage of a simple and ingenuous greenhorn; on the contrary, Hennie is appalled at having to marry an immigrant, "a poor foreigner", she calls him, who "can't even speak an English word."

What we see here operating in Hennie, Odets observes, is the impulse of the first generation American to turn his back on his roots and in doing so begin to develop the characteristic American xenophobia which was particularly virulent in the decades preceding the Second World War. Hennie marries and mistreats the luckless Sam; finally she abandons him and her child whom she foists upon her parents without a second thought because, presumably, Moe—as he himself reminds her over and over again—is more exciting in bed than Sam.

Hennie might be described as the kind of Jew, who having liberated herself from the strict regimen of Mosaic law, plunges into a world of moral anarchy because—like Moe—she has found nothing to replace the stern faith of her ancestors. Whatever Marxist ideas infiltrate the play, in Hennie's instance they are irrelevant. One cannot see how Hennie's moral disintegration and her final act of defiance have any economic basis; she is a girl with a strong sexual libido and no moral values or intellectual resources to hold it in check.

The situation of Hennie and Moe—two Jews who have liberated themselves from their past, from their religion and culture, from American concepts of respectability—is stated but not developed in the play. Yet we have a clear sense that the kind of specious freedom that this couple has won for themselves is taking them down an ugly blind alley with no exit. For what future is there for two bitter and spiritually crippled individuals whose basic tie extends no further than the double bed of adultery and self-absorption?

The Hennie-Moe-Sam Feinschreiber triangle set off against the central drama involving Bessie-Jacob-Ralph has a clear thematic function suggesting as it does that self-realization is no more to be obtained through moral anarchy and self-indulgence than it is through the accumulation of money and its spurious security. Ralph's drive toward freedom from his family's values is to be made possible by Jacob's suicide, a suicide undertaken so that Ralph will be the beneficiary of the old man's insurance. But Ralph's rebirth begins at the moment that he rejects the legacy.

Ralph cannot put behind his oppressive ghetto origins and take his place as an American unless he divests himself of the symbol of those origins—the hoard of gold and silver. At the moment that Ralph rejects the symbolic hoard and spiritually disassociates himself from the household which has remained a symbolic ghetto, he becomes an American and a free man.

In the middle thirties when the play was first produced, audiences assumed that Ralph was going to join the Communist movement. The text, however, does not justify such an assumption; Ralph's only explicit objective is to help organize the workers in his warehouse so as to improve working conditions.

No matter. Ralph has made a basic transition. He has crossed the line which separates those concerned only with family and self from those who seek or accept responsibility for those outside family and self. It is at the moment of crossing that line that Ralph is, as he says, "reborn." Ralph's rebirth coincides with Hennie's decision to abandon her responsibilities. Her decision—the choice of a loveless elopement—contrasts ironically with Ralph's. Hennie, already defeated by life, has met her final defeat: the loss of her role as wife and mother.

Whatever Marxist impulses the play may have once transmitted to its audiences are no longer felt in the reading of the text. Essentially what Odets portrayed—objectively, but with compassion—is a family group whose likeness could be found wherever large clusters of immigrant Jews betook themselves. What makes the play both arresting and important is that from unpromising basic materials—the Bergers are, after all, a commonplace group—Odets has created characters who join the line of older American families: the Laphams, the Babbitts, the Compsons, the Gants, and the Joads. In illuminating the lives of those in the process of becoming Americans, Odets somehow en ables us to know what it is to be an American. Most of those who left the Old World behind were people whose dissatisfactions were sufficiently intense that they were willing to uproot themselves from what was safe, or at least familiar; Americans, as Thornton Wilder once observed, are a people without roots whose strength lies in the circumstance that they don't really want them.