BOOKS OF THE WEEK
.Israel Zangwill
By WOLF MANKOWITZ ISRAEL ZANGWILL'S father was sent to England to escape the military conscription imposed upon Jewish children in Tsarist Russia. When Zangwill was born in 1864 his refugee father had prospered in the free, smoky atmosphere of East London. As the son of an East End small trader and synagogue official, Zangwill went to Jews Free School. There, following the tradition of the brilliant son, he won all possible scholarships to London University, graduated with triple honours to become—still in the-tradition —a schoolteacher until he could live by writing. Excepting the Russian-Jewish background, the East End, the ghetto Without walls, Zangwill's progress is similar to that of other working-class artists. And as to the ghetto birthplace—it limits the sensibilities less than do (say) the restricted cultural amenities of the English counties; its political disadvantages are no greater than those of the Rhondda Valley; its social contacts no more restricted than those of a royal Court; its vernacular is alive, its characters freely display every human Colour, and its vitality tends to endow its children with a Prejudice in favour of life. Not surprisingly then, Zangwill's generation believed that evil has its source in ignorance—that It was, in consequence, a disease which could be cured. To this therapy Zangwill applied himself.
The political problem for the Jew is simpler than for others. The enemy is always, whatever else, an anti-semite. For the Jewish writer the prejudice against the adjective he was born carrying is a reality which he quickly recognises and accepts. He may decide to fight this prejudice specifically, or he may set out, as Zangwill did, to eradicate it by educational means —at least to expound the character of what has been so unquestioningly rejected. So Zangwill systematically wrote UP the East End, wrote up the characteristics and customs and recent history of the Jews, not for a moment as an apologist, but as a nineteenth-century idealist believing that the prejudiced are so because they have been deprived of educational opportunities which he, the devoted educationist, now strives to make good. On this principle Zangwill helped to found the Jewish Historical Society and the Jewish Drama League, lectured all over the world, and, until his death in 1926, worked in all those movements which direct their efforts at the further education of the people.
Zangwill belonged to the rationalist prc-Freudian age; he believed that to argue convincingly could convince. If he had examined, for example, the case of his quite literate contem- Porary, G. K. Chesterton, he might have perhaps realised that ignorance is not entirely the source of racial prejudice; though Chesterton's sheer ignorance of what a Jew. Was like is in itself an indication of the educational necessity of Zangwill's work. Except, of course, that YOur bluff Chestertonian rolling in what he calls his ' innocence,' has no wish to disburden himself of his Prejudices. He finds what Chesterton calls the ' negro vitality and vulgarity' of the Jew distasteful—and presumably Objects to Negroes for their Jewish vulgarity and vitality. Chestertonian Jews speak stage cockney, are dressed like racecourse touts, r and are not Christian. His Negroes are coons with banjos, POP-eyes, and striped trousers; they are Christian. But religion as such has nothing to do with the prejudice which Zangwill attempted to eradicate. For the Chestertonian—never vulgar enough perhaps to state it- in bald terms—Negro and Jew are equally members of inferior races, celebrants of degenerate cultures. His beery afflatus never lifts him to Dr. Alfred Rosenberg's pinnacle of distaste. Your innocent Chesterton does not propose the extermination of the mongrel descendants of Shem and Ham. The burbling .Gargantua of the suburbs just feels a chronic distaste, that's all, and (alas for the efforts of educationists ! ) he has a taste for his distaste.
It is by his failure to realise in his work such aspects of human irrationality that Zangwill betrays his limitations as an artist. His characters in The King of Schnorrers,* (now re- issued) the aristocratic Mannasseh, the cunning Yankele, the benevolent Grobstock, have a two-dimensional quality. Zangwill's writing and dialogue only very occasionally capture the accent and rhythm of the language of the people he is observing, and even he resorts to stage tricks (` If you vas me vat vould you marry 7 ') to get comic effects at a music- hall level. Zangwill's careful historical construction, his humour, and his detailed understanding of Jewish culture cannot entirely save his work from the clinical detachment which characterises a teacher making instructional points. He remains all the time aware of the serious intentions behind the entertainment, so that in reading his Ghetto stories one becomes conscious of a gap between the writer and his subject.
Zangwill was not a religious Jew. He married out of the faith, and, according to some orthodox authorities, flirted all his life with Christianity.' The Christian principles which Zangwill thought to be good are in fact considerably pre- Christian. Hillel said that the essence of Judaism could be expounded while standing on one leg as, Do to others as you would them do to you.' As many Jews as Gentiles dismiss this as altogether too simple a proposition. The irreligious worship only their own tastes (and distastes), and it was against the irreligious of all creeds that Zangwill preached. In 1911 in a blank verse play called The War God which very clearly projects the imminent war, Zangwill in a Tolstoyan mood presents a Count Frithiof who, Gandhi-like, prevents a rebellion by exposing himself to the rebels. They kill him for it, to the great satisfaction of their opponents, the worship- pers of the war god. Zangwill makes his Frithiof into a saint: the Frithian sect enjoins, Resist not evil, but reform thyself.' It is an instruction even more difficult to follow than art is to create. It may easily be of greater importance to pursue it than the most divine of muses. For his part Zangwill did what he could to reform himself and others; and there is no record of his work having harmed even Chesterton in the slightest way.
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