Children of the Ghetto

by Israel Zangwill

Overview

In its first appearance in 1892, Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto created a sensation in both England and America, becoming the first Anglo-Jewish bestseller and establishing Zangwill as the literary voice of Anglo-Jewry. A novel set in late nineteenth-century London, Children of the Ghetto gave an inside look into an immigrant community that was almost as mysterious to the more established middle-class Jews of Britain as to the non-Jewish population, providing a compelling analysis of a generation caught between the ghetto and modern British life.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940000746684
Publisher:	B&R Samizdat Express
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Israel Zangwill (1864 - 1926) was a British author at the forefront of cultural Zionism during the 19th century and was a close associate of Theodor Herzl. He later rejected the search for a Jewish homeland and became the prime thinker behind the territorial movement. He had already written a tale entitled The Premier and the Painter in collaboration with Louis Cowen, when he resigned his position as a teacher owing to differences with the school managers and ventured into journalism. He initiated and edited Ariel, The London Puck and did miscellaneous work for the London press. Zangwill's work earned him the nickname "the Dickens of the Ghetto". He wrote a very influential novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892). The use of the metaphorical phrase "melting pot" to describe American absorption of immigrants was popularized by Zangwill's play The Melting Pot, a success in the United States in 1909-10. When The Melting Pot opened in Washington D.C. on October 5, 1909, former President Theodore Roosevelt leaned over the edge of his box and shouted, "That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that's a great play." In 1912 Zangwill received a letter from Roosevelt in which Roosevelt wrote of the Melting Pot "That particular play I shall always count among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life."

Editorial Reviews

A long-overdue reissue restores to print an 1892 novel that is generally acknowledged as one of the earliest and finest works of Anglo-Jewish fiction. A scholarly and informative Introduction by editor Rochelson capably summarizes the life and influence of its once-famous author (18641926) as fiction writer, journalist, playwright, and political activist. Published both in Zangwill's native England (he was a second-generation Jew of Latvian and Polish heritage) and in America as the initial offering of the Jewish Publication Society, Children of the Ghetto—the author's third book of fiction—was an instant critical and popular success. Its exhaustively detailed portrayal of social, economic, and marital strife in London's Whitechapel Ghetto (where Zangwill was born) brings to vivid life an impressive gallery of believably thoughtful characters—most notably those torn between the new science and theology of the ending century and the tradition-bound world of their fathers. Prominent among Zangwill's several protagonists are Hannah Jacobs, who sacrifices her own happiness to obey her parents' beliefs; Esther Ansell, a troubled freethinker who will fulfill her intellectual ambitions only by writing in the guise of a male author; and Raphael Leon and Joseph Strelitsky, each of whom is both embittered and empowered by the tension between his commitment to orthodoxy and his conviction that the world is changing in ways his elders' wisdom can't comprehend. The frequent objection to the comparatively undramatic "Book Two: Grandchildren of the Ghetto"—that it amounts to little more than Zionist propaganda—has merit; yet even in its flatly argumentative pages, theresolutions of its characters' moral dilemmas are presented with passionate force. And few have ever denied that the racy color and vitality of its first half ("Book One: Children of the Ghetto") make this one of the liveliest novels of its period. An incomparable portrait of a culture in transition—and a classic that truly deserves to be rediscovered and remembered.

Kirkus Reviews