Language, Gender, and Ethnic Anxiety in Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto

Language, Gender, and Ethnic Anxiety in Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto By Meri-Jane Rochelson Florida International University In his 1909 study of The Jew in English Literature, Rabbi Edward N. Calisch wrote of Israel Zangwill, "He is a brilliant, versatile and picturesque writer, a novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, and critic, and his place in English literature is assured for all time."1 It would have surprised Calisch (and, indeed, most of Zangwill's contemporaries) to learn that outside of Jewish studies Zangwill is now virtually unknown. In the first quarter of the twentieth century until his death in 1926, Zangwill was an activist on behalf of numerous causes, including pacifism, feminism, and Jewish nationalism, and in the 1890s he had already established himself as a significant literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic. He began his career as one of the "new humorists " of Jerome K. Jerome's Idler, in 1891 published The Big Bow Mystery (which remains an outstanding example of detective fiction), and from 1894 through '96 contributed a regular column, "Men, Women and Books," to the American periodical The Critic—and this is just a small sample of his early literary output. A prolific and respected translator of Hebrew poetry, Zangwill's name is appended to many of the translations in the Jewish prayerbook, and most Americans are familiar with the phrase "the melting pot," though unaware that it comes from the title of Zangwill's 1909 play.2 In 1899 James Oliphant (to whom Dickens seemed a "glorified newspaper reporter"3) wrote that although the novelty of his ghetto fiction hastened Zangwill's fame, "his genius would sooner or later have compelled recognition, whatever class of subject he had been led to choose."4 Today, however, it is precisely Zangwill's Jewish fiction, and most specifically Children of the Ghetto, that interests us. For in this novel Zangwill, more than any of his predecessors,5 initiates the tradition of the modern Jewish novel in English, with all the ambivalence and complexity such a categorization entails. Zangwill wrote Children of the Ghetto in 1892 to dispel positive as well as negative stereotypes, to show that Jews are more than despised Fagins or the idealized Mordecai and Mirah of Daniel Deronda. But the book's form is the Victorian three-decker novel, one of the last of the genre, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Zangwill had George Eliot in mind also as a positive model.6 Just as Middlemarch is "A Study of Provincial Life," Children of the Ghetto is subtitled "A Study of a Peculiar People," and Zangwill produced a similarly panoramic and microscopic view of Anglo-Jewish society. But apart from the real insight the novel gives into the lives of nineteenthcentury English Jews, one of its major points of interest today is what J. C. Benjamin calls "a rhetoric of anxiety," the signs in the novel of the author's 399 Rochelson: Zangwill's 'Children of the Ghetto' sense of his own marginality. Benjamin faults Zangwill for lacking "critical detachment."7 But Zangwill's true subject in Children of the Ghetto is the future of Judaism beyond the ghetto, under emancipation. The dilemma he presents (and never entirely resolves) is his own as the child of immigrants, seeking a place among the London literati.8 In his ambivalent attitude toward the Yiddish language, in his choice of female protagonists, and in his hesitancies , as author, in resolving their fates, Zangwill creates a work of fiction whose very structure figures forth the dilemmas and anxieties of a "hyphenated" writer. Children of the Ghetto is thus more than a compelling picture of life among nineteenth-century London Jews; it is also a document in the language of literary marginality, a product and illustration of the dilemmas it describes. The novel is divided into two parts. Its first and longer section conveys a richly detailed picture of Jewish life in the East End slums of London, with a Dickensian energy and sense of abundant life. The second, shorter, section, "Grandchildren of the Ghetto," takes the book beyond the realm of local-color fiction and confronts the reader with the uncertainty and ambivalence...