Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People

A Note on the Text

A Note on the Text The earliest known version of Children of the Ghetto is the partial typescript held by the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Ms.NewYork.JIR.K.ll in the George Alexander Kohut Collection). As discussed in the Introduction, a manuscript labeled "an early attempt at Children of the Ghetto" has no textual connection to the novel. The Kohut typescript, with annotations and revisions in Zangwill's hand, includes a title page addressed by Zangwill to Mayer Sulzberger, with both their addresses ; a neatly handwritten author's note; a table of contents for the first part of the novel ("Children of the Ghetto"); and a text of the novel from an early version of the "Proem" until it breaks off in the middle of the chapter "Esther and Her Children." The typescript is undated, but because it includes no table of contents for "Grandchildren of the Ghetto" (and because the author's note presents the novel's second part as only projected), it clearly predates the first British and American editions. The American texts over which Zangwill may most confidently be said to have had authority are the two-volume first edition published by the Jewish Publication Society of America (JPSA) in December 1892 and the one-volume Macmillan edition published in 1895; the most authoritative British printings are the three-volume first edition published by Heinemann in September 1892 and the one-volume Heinemann edition of 1893. The present volume is intended to provide an authoritative text of Children of the Ghetto, not the definitive edition based on a collation of all variants. It therefore reprints the text of the novel published by Macmillan in 1895, by arrangement with the Jewish Publication Society ofAmerica. It is the text most readily available to American readers as it was used for the Golden Jubilee Volume of 1938, along with Ghetto Comedies and Ghetto Tragedies. It includes the preface and glossary that Zangwill first appended to the 1893 one-volume Heinemann edition. A letter of 3 April 1895 from William Heinemann to the Macmillan Publishing Company indicates that Zangwill may have wanted Macmillan to use the 1895 British fifth edition (which is identical to the third edition of 1893) 51 A NOTE ON THE TEXT as the basis for its text. Heinemann wrote, "Mr Zangwill desires me to say that he hopes you are setting your edition for America . . . from the fifth edition published by me, as many misprints and errors were corrected in that edition" (Macmillan Company Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations). Evidently, however , and for reasons unknown, that recommendation was not followed. Indirect evidence of ZangwilTs hand in the Macmillan/JPSA text may be found in a letter to him from Judge Mayer Sulzberger dated 27 May 1895. The letter reads, in part, "In order that the text might be satisfactory to you, I had a copy corrected according to the latest corrections (including your MS. corrections) in the copy you were good enough to send me. From this they printed . . ." (letter from Mayer Sulzberger to Israel Zangwill, Central Zionist Archives, file A120/462). Although the identity of the "MS." he alludes to is not clear, Sulzberger specifically names the 1895 cheap edition as the text published. Additional correspondence between Sulzberger and Zangwill may be found in the Central Zionist Archives and at the Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center at the Balch Institute. Details of the arrangements between the JPSA and Macmillan appear in the Society's Published Books Correspondence, Box 45, at the Philadelphia Jewish Archives; they are also discussed briefly by Jonathan D. Sarna in JPS: The Americanization ofJewish Culture, 1888-1988 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989) 42, 307 n. 46. I have emended the text of the 1895 American edition only in cases of obvious typographical errors. Some peculiarities of spelling and punctuation remain. 52 CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO: A Study of a Peculiar People ...