Nathan Asch

Nathan Asch (July 10, 1902 – December 23, 1964) was an American writer.

Biography Nathan Asch was born in Warsaw in 1902, the son of the Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch and his wife Mathilda Szpiro. After living in France, Germany, and Switzerland, the family settled in the United States when Asch was 13 years old. In 1923, Asch moved to Paris where he met Ernest Hemingway. His first story "The Voice of the Office", published in the June 1924 edition of The Transatlantic Review, was praised by Hemingway. Asch worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood but quit to travel around the country by bus and report on the experiences of ordinary people during the Depression. Asch criticized Hollywood from a Marxist perspective, describing it as a place of "the last manufactory of bourgeois romanticism... with no newspapers, no opinions, [and] no social consciousness". He drew on his bus trips in his book The Road: In Search of America, a book that combines literary fragments and reporting to depict American life in the 1930s.

During the Spanish Civil War, Asch collaborated with his friend Josephine Herbst on a play about the conflict called The Spanish Road but it was not produced due to Communist members of the Theatre Union who disagreed with the work's political viewpoint. Asch was associated with a circle of leftist literary critics, including Muriel Rukeyser, Stanley Burnshaw, and Mike Gold. His four novels were initially popular in Germany, through Hermynia Zür Muhlen's translations but his books could not be published after 1936 in Germany or Austria since Asch was Jewish. With his books banned in Germany, Asch supported himself by writing for the Federal Writers' Project. Asch, who had previously served in the Navy during World War I, was a technical sergeant during World War II, driving the photographer Margaret Bourke-White in a jeep. He did not publish any books after the war, but he taught writing workshops in Marin County.

In contrast to his father's works, Nathan Asch's writing was considered to be more modernist and experimental. His works focused on "the victims of modern life", such as the middle-class office workers in The Office. Similarly, Pay Day is a modernist depiction of a twelve-hour period in a Manhattan office, on the day of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Comparing the two novelists, Malcolm Cowley said that Nathan Asch wrote "more lyrically...but lacked the father's simple vigor and breadth of conception". Since both men were writing at the same time, the two novelists had a complicated relationship, with Nathan Asch recalling that he "loved my father and hated him and had also been completely alienated from him." Nathan Asch wrote that he never learned to read Yiddish and could only read his father's books in translation.