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Some of them got to college, but most went to work, with night school on the side for the more ambitious. Rudy and Mitch studied medicine; Sam, Lou and Runt went to law school; Sol became a six-day bicycle racer; Mort and Alvin went into business with their fathers; Harry wanted to be an inventor; Joe, a sculptor. They married each others' sisters. All the girls found husbands except Estelle, who got too fond of casual lovemaking, and Rose, whose skinny height kept her a spinster schoolteacher. Rudy and Mitch both became good doctors; but Mitch would have done better in the research from which he was sidetracked. Sam's conflicts with authority forced him to become an increasingly radical lawyer. Lou, who had married a politician's daughter, learned how to play ball with the boys. Runt's underworld connections got him the name of shyster. Mort proceeded blithely from amorous to business success, became a big man in the Chicago hat trade. Alvin, the world-weary intellectual, found himself thrown back into business again by the crash of '29. Harry, without the capital or knowledge to market his inventions, was at last thankful just to get a job. Joe found sculpture a hard row to hoe. On the whole, the girls did better than the boys: most of them turned out to be comfortable middle-class matrons.
Author Levin's characters think, speak and act with complete naturalness—so long as they are in Chicago. Their prospects may improve but their grammar remains true to life. As a Jewish commentary on the 13-year period that took in Big Bill Thompson, Samuel Insull and Al Capone; as a citizen's-eye-view of Chicago justice, education, business and racketeering methods during that time, The Old Bunch is an impressive job. As a novel, it is too self-consciously Jewish, too uneven, too exhausting to be rated in the first rank.