Israel Zangwill Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill was born of Jewish immigrant parents in the Whitechapel ghetto of London's East End. Soon after young Israel's birth, his father, Moses Zangwill, from Latvia, and his mother, Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill, from Poland, took him to live in Bristol, where he received his early education. After the family returned to Whitechapel in 1872, he attended Jews' Free School, eventually becoming a pupil-teacher and remaining there until 1888. He also attended London University and in 1884 received a B.A. with honors in French, English, and mental and moral science. Surrounded by a ghetto in transition, as he and his fellow Jews became assimilated into British life, Zangwill devoted much of his life to recreating the characters and values of the old ghetto for an ever-widening audience, beginning with Motza Kleis, a pamphlet about market days in the ghetto, which he wrote with Louis Cowen, a fellow pupil-teacher in 1882. He and Cowen later collaborated on a novel, The Premier and the Painter (1888), and a one-act play, The Great Demonstration , produced in 1892. During his lifetime Zangwill was well known for such novels as The Bachelors' Club (1891), The Old Maids' Club (1892), Children of the Ghetto (1892), The King of Schnorrers (1894), The Master (1895), The Mantle of Elijah (1900), and Jinny the Carrier (1919).

In an essay, "The Realistic Novel" (1897), Zangwill stated his belief that art had to be related to reality, particularly the romance of everyday reality. Yet he dreamed of a kind of utopia where, as he put it in Italian Fantasies (1910), "Society is sacred, not Property" and where equality reigns; he attributed society's ills to the rampant disease of nationalism. Still, after meeting Theodore Herzl in 1895, he became a Zionist and preached Judaism's moral vision. The link among these seemingly contradictory convictions was Zangwill's insistence that in exploring the character of the Jews in a Gentile world one could find a key to the path to love, brotherhood, and humane ideals. All his life he believed in the "law of contiguous cooperation," with the Jewish "race" intact, pointing the way to the brotherhood of man. His plays were written to teach and to entertain. Zangwill knew that a good play had to achieve a concentration undemanded in the novel, but unfortunately, he could not control his ample gift for farce and burlesque and his penchant for overwriting and sentimentalism. The theme of his earliest plays was the pathos and comedy of the ghetto. In the twentieth century, politics and social reform intruded and his plays became more didactic.

Zangwill's earlier plays, The Great Demonstration, Aladdin at Sea, The Lady Journalist, and Six Persons, produced in London in 1892 and 1893, were followed by Threepenny Bits in 1895. Children of the Ghetto, adapted from his novel, was produced in New York and London in 1899; The Revolted Daughter was produced in London in 1901. His first and greatest success, Merely Mary Ann, adapted from his 1893 short story, was produced in New York in 1903 and ran for 148 performances. In the short story and the play, a poor but talented musician, Lancelot, falls in love with a lovely serving girl and hopes to win her by making a success in popular music. After Mary Ann inherits a fortune, however, and changes her name to Marian, he decides she is too good for him and leaves her to return to the composition of serious music. In the play version, Lancelot and Mary Ann are reunited, after the successful American premiere of his symphony, and they promise to live happily ever after. Merely Mary Ann is a sentimental exercise, a tale of some problems faced by the poor, but as Maurice Wohlgelernter reported, it brought Zangwill "more money than all the ghetto books put together."

On 26 November 1903 Zangwill married Edith Ayrton, a feminist, novelist, and social activist. From that point on, his commitment to social reform, Zionism, and working for peace marched hand in hand with his lifelong belief in the need for assimilation and toleration. In The Melting Pot, produced in Washington, D.C., in 1908, in New York a year later, and in London in 1914, he demonstrated his hope that America would be "God's crucible." David Quixano, a Russian Jewish immigrant with a Sephardic name (which echoes that of Cervantes's Don Quixote) falls in love with Vera Revendal, a Christian emigrant from Russia. Thrown out of the Quixanos' house by his Uncle Mendel for having "cast off the God of our Fathers," David meets Vera's father, Baron Revendal, and learns that the baron has taken part in the Kishineff pogrom in which David's parents had been murdered. Although Vera converts to Judaism and Baron Revendal offers to let David kill him, David rejects these attempts to erase the past. In the last act, David tells Vera that even in "God's crucible," the ages-long differences and vendettas of the past cannot be ignored. At the end, Vera forgives David as she realizes that he must go his way and she hers. Although they do not marry, they are united in the spiritual love that Zangwill hoped would come to unite all Americans.

The Melting Pot, which in 1926 Holbrook Jackson called "a message play, a modern Gospel of race-fusion," describes the wished-for but unsuccessful American dream of welding races and creeds together. David and Vera are destined to be overcome by those who are "killing my America," as Zangwill put it in 1914, but the play also expresses his belief that if the Judeo-Christian ideal is to succeed anywhere, it would be in America. Zangwill's play is now remembered mostly for its having introduced the term melting pot to refer to the assimilation of racial and ethnic groups in America.

None of Zangwill's later plays was as successful as Merely Mary Ann or The Melting Pot. The War God, produced in 1911, pits pacifism, nonviolence, and love against power politics. In The Next Religion, produced in 1912, Zangwill attacked traditional religion and what he called the new religion--"the revelation of Science" and "the God of Law." For Zangwill the new religion, as Elsie Adams has explained, would become as ritualistic and dogmatic as the old. By 1912, Zangwill suspected that all religions in a capitalist and technological society were destined to become superstitious, selfserving, narrow, and fanatical. Going beyond Bernard Shaw, who in Major Barbara had reasoned that if one's old religion breaks down, one should find a new one, Zangwill saw the ideal of peace and brotherhood receding as any religion, regardless of its name, became established.

In Too Much Money, produced in 1918, Zangwill explored the corrupting power of wealth, while in The Cockpit (1921) Queen Margherita of Valdania, who wants to bring peace and love to her country, must battle nationalists and warmongers. In The Forcing House; or, The Cockpit Continued, produced in 1926, a pacifist-socialist party replaces Queen Margherita only to create a new tyranny. Humankind, according to Zangwill, was not ready for rational, peace-loving government. Neither Christian idealism, as contained in the essence of "true" Christianity as opposed to organized Christianity, nor socialism would work. In the last play he wrote, We Moderns, produced in 1924, two years before his death, Zangwill had Mary and Dick Sundale proclaim that "we moderns have outgrown our parents' [morality]" while they and their parents come to understand that modern ideas of morality can be as bad as the double standards or duplicity of the parents' generation.

Zangwill dealt with generational problems, social and economic issues, war and peace, and the acculturation and/or assimilation of Jews in a Christian society. He revolted against the constrictions of his religious tradition, looking for the essence of "true" Christianity, but he also saw the value of that tradition. He was a successful novelist but not a great or even a consistently good dramatist. Yet his themes are of universal interest and will cause his plays to be remembered, if not produced. He was a child of the ghetto who had sprung out of the zeitgeist of the nineteenth century. At the end, he wrote, "to be born, to struggle, to breed, to die--there is the natural life cycle." In the words of Joseph Leftwich, "If Zangwill is no Everest or no Mont Blanc, he reaches nevertheless a very impressive height, and is worth an ascent. There is wonderful country to be viewed."