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The Sad, Short, Brilliant Life of Amy Levy, Female Victorian Jewish Novelist

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In Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People, Israel Zangwill’s 1892 novel of Jewish life in late Victorian London, an urchin who trudges through slummy East End streets in the first chapter grows up to write her own fictional ethnography of London Jewry. Esther Ansell’s Mordecai Josephs is an “opprobrious” portrait of the Jewish nouveaux riche. Published under a male pseudonym, it causes outrage in the press and is denounced by other characters as anti-Semitic treachery, the “putting of weapons into the hands of our enemies.”

Children of the Ghetto had its detractors, too. The question of whether Zangwill’s novel was good for the Jews was hotly debated on the letters page of New York weekly The American Hebrew, with businessman Cyrus Sulzberger asserting that any accusation made of anti-Semitism “will find substantiation” in the novel. (Cyrus’ cousin Mayer Sulzberger, who co-founded the Jewish Publication Society of America, was Zangwill’s U.S. publisher.) Critics’ reactions were mostly positive, however, and the public started reading in droves; in the U.K., Zangwill entered history as the author of the first Anglo-Jewish bestseller.

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