Israel Zangwill and Children of the Ghetto

Judaism, Wntr, 1999 by Meri-Jane Rochelson

WHEN ISRAEL ZANGWILL'S CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO first appeared in 1892, it created a sensation on two continents and established its author as the preeminent literary voice of Anglo-Jewry. A novel set in the late nineteenth century, Children of the Ghetto gave readers an inside look into an immigrant community that was nearly as mysterious to more established, middleclass Jews as it was to the non-Jewish population of Britain; at the same time, it provided a compelling analysis of the generation caught between the ghetto and modem British life. In a period that saw the development of the working-class novel and the novel of spiritual malaise, Children of the Ghetto encompassed both. The first half, "Children of the Ghetto," [1] conveyed the details of poverty without the brutality of, for example, George Gissing's The Nether World(1889). "Grandchildren of the Ghetto," the second half, explored a spiritual crisis among young Jews at a time when novels such as Mary Arnold (Mrs. Humphry) Ward's Robert Elsmere (188 8) examined its Christian counterpart. For middle-class Jewish readers, Children of the Ghetto's second half would have held the appeal of contemporary realism, satire, or controversy. For those who had started out in the East End themselves, the nostalgia of the first part would have had its own attraction. Thus there were many reasons why, in its British edition, Children of the Ghetto became "the first Anglo-Jewish best-seller." [2] As the first work of fiction published by the new Jewish Publication Society of America, [3] Children of the Ghetto was once again a success and, even more than in England, a source of controversy.

The novel's popular success was aided by highly favorable reviews upon its publication in both Britain and America. Jewish critics tended to be more charitable to Zangwill on issues of artistic form, although they sometimes expressed concern as to how his characters might reflect on the larger group; correspondingly, non-Jewish reviewers occasionally revealed their prejudices. However, despite differences in emphasis and tone, disagreements on the artistic merits did not divide strictly along either religious or national lines. Most reviewers applauded the picturesque and sentimental scenes of the first volume and saw them (whether they knew the ghetto or not) as convincingly realistic. That the novel was a "panopticon of Ghetto scenes and characters" or even a "bundle of loosely connected sketches" was to some critics a unique virtue rather than a weakness of structure. [4] Others felt that "in many portions of Children of the Ghetto the wood of narrative is hidden by the leafage of information," and "[t]he multitude of characters is at times so confusing that one loses the thread of the narrative--which at best is but thin." [5] Often such judgments were the critical accompaniment to an ultimately positive assessment: the Athenceum's reviewer faulted Zangwill for "a want of care in putting the story together," but found "truly admirable" the "vividness and force with which [he] brings before us the strange and uncouth characters with which he has peopled his book." [6] Israel Abrahams, in the Jewish Chronicle, praised Zangwill for filling his "gigantic canvass" with a "profusion only equalled by Dickens"; [7] here the difference in tone between Jewish and other reviewers is apparent. Critics in the general press (as well as the non-Jewish writer for the Jewish Quarterly) were nearly unanimous in finding the second half of the novel less compell ing than the first. But in one way or another, most reviewers agreed with the Speaker's assessment that this was "a remarkable book." [8] However, changing critical standards [9] (perhaps coupled with Zangwill's increasingly controversial position in Jewish politics) led to a steep decline in its reputation until the book became virtually unknown. That is unfortunate, because Children of the Ghetto remains an important book in both Jewish and English literary history.

Israel Zangwill was born on January 21, 1864, in Ebenezer Square in London's East End. His family had lived in the provinces before his birth, and they soon left the metropolis, so that Zangwill spent his early childhood in Plymouth and then Bristol, returning to Whitechapel when he was eight years old. [10] But although Zangwill himself was not of the 1880 immigrant generation he describes in Children of the Ghetto, he experienced in many ways the East End life of his novel's immigrant children. [11] Moses Zangwill, Israel's father, supported his

large family [12] as a traveling peddler and has been regarded as the prototype of Moses Ansell in the novel. As a student and then a pupil-teacher in the Jews' Free School in Bell Lane, Israel Zangwill obtained and then supervised the Anglo-Jewish education provided for East End youth that forms a background to the lives of Esther Ansell and her siblings. And as the child of immigrants from Latvia and Poland living in the provinces, Zangwill could not avoid facing issues of identity formation in a society that urged acculturation, particularly since--with a pious, traditional father and a less devout, independent-minded mother--the conflicts such issues generated were made vivid in his own home. [13]