Children of the Ghetto - A Study of a Peculiar People: (Includes 'Grandchildren of the Ghetto'. (Paperback)

Zangwill's most famous novel, Children of the Ghetto (published simultaneously in London and Philadelphia in 1892), relates the life and experiences of East European Jewish children in Whitechapel in the early 1880s. Its second part, Grandchildren of the Ghetto, which was later also published separately, deals mostly with the gradual evolution of Jewish identity, describing the move of some successful immigrant Jews from the slums to the affluent West End and their subsequent assimilation. As Meri-Jane Rochelson writes in her superbly researched Introduction to Zangwill's novel: Children of the Ghetto gave readers an inside look into an immigrant community that was nearly as mysterious to more established, middle-class 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 modern British life. 11] Unlike other slum novelists, such as Gissing, Morrison, and Kipling, Zangwill wrote about slum life in a more sympathetic or even entertaining way. Children of the Ghetto is a mix of loosely connected sketches of Jewish life in the East End, based on the author's childhood memories of the Whitechapel slums. The novel opens with a Proem about the modern ghetto of London. This London Ghetto of ours is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality; a world which hides beneath its stony and unlovely surface an inner world of dreams, fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where they were woven, of superstitions grotesque as the cathedral gargoyles of the Dark Ages in which they had birth. In the 1880s, the East End of London became a haven for poor Jewish immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe. They quickly established a tight community of craftsmen and traders who were allowed to develop their small businesses and practice Judaism freely without restrictions imposed on Jews in their former homelands.