Budd Shulberg's Novel, What Makes Sammy Run

This paper proposes a thesis in the form of an answer to the question implicit in the story's title. In Budd Schulberg's classic novel What Makes Sammy Run? Shmelka Glickstein Sammy is running from God. Growing up poor in a Jewish ghetto on New York's Lower East Side, Sammy wants to stop being poor. Poverty epitomizes to him all the evils of life rolled up into one miserable bundle. Convinced that his father's Jewish faith is the reason he lives in this misery, Sammy refuses to comply with the usual Jewish tradition of learning his Torah so that he can be bar mitzvah'd. He wants nothing to do with his father or with Judaism and only wants to escape the hell of never having enough. Learning that Jewish boys are not hired as paper boys, and aspiring to that position, he chucks off his Jewish identity without a second thought and changes his name to Sammy Glickstein. It is a momentous decision. Essentially, it is at this point that Sammy rejects God, since the Jewish identity is centered on a person's relationship with God. Whatever character, faith, and inner strength Sammy's father obtained from being a Jew is lost on Sammy from that point on. He turns his back on all of that, thinking that he doesn't need any of it. Little realizing the true import of his decision, he begins the endless process of trying to run away from the poverty that has held him in captivity as well as the Judaism that he believes has separated him from the wealth he craves.

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