SOURCE: A review of Dreamers of the Ghetto, in Nation, Vol. 66, No. 1712, April 21, 1898, p. 310.

In the following review of Dreamers of the Ghetto, the anonymous critic faults Zangwill for his melodramatic style and ironic tone.

An application of the methods employed by Landor in his ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ and by Louisa Mühlbach in her historical novels, to some more or less famous Jewish worthies and unworthies of recent times, may redound to an author's credit for eccentricity but not sanity of genius. The result could not fail to be bizarre, particularly when, throughout, the jester's cap and bells seem to compete for mastery with the cynic's wail. The stories, too, it must be confessed, read better when they appeared “syndicated” in various magazines and weeklies than in the present collection; the tricks of phrase and style, the exaggerations in language and sentiment, the threadbare plush of rhetoric, and...