How to Write Yiddish in English, or Israel Zangwill and Multilingualism in Children of the Ghetto

Abstract

In 1888, an Orthodox English-language newspaper, the Jewish Standard, published an article series, "Jews in Fiction," that looked critically at Jewish characters in English literature. The series began with Sir Walter Scott's Isaac of York, then featured Benjamin Disraeli's Sidonia and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. After critiquing Fagin and Riah, the April 20th column conjectured what it might look like for Charles Dickens to use his "magician's wand" to write a more nuanced treatment of everyday Jewish life: How he would have reveled in the description of the ostentation, the generosity, the kindliness, the harshness, the thousand and one contradictions to be found in our fellow-Jews and Jewesses. [How he would have treated]… Mr. and Mrs. Z-, with all their children-how they went to synagogue Saturday morning gorgeously attired....Then Dickens would describe how the family go home to luncheon, a better luncheon most likely than on weekdays, because paterfamilias is at home. How our author would revel over the fried fish and various orthodox dainties. (3) Envisioning Jewish life through the lens of an outside observer, the columnist's flight of fancy focuses more on the imagined pleasure Dickens would take in the spectacle, how he would "revel" in the scene, than on the interior lives of the Jewish characters. The writer then exclaims, "Shade of Dickens! would that your mantle might descend on my shoulders, that I might worthily describe all this." The irony is, of course, that the writer has just described this scene, but as the imagined Dickens. This passage from the Jewish Standard dramatizes the pressure of external Jewish stereotypes on the self-conception of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish community. In the very act of portraying this community, the columnist negates the act by calling upon Dickens to make the anonymous columnist a