Abstract Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People was published in 1892 by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, based on observations of the east London area of Jewish settlement where he grew up. Appearing at a moment when Jewish immigrants were under increasing scrutiny, the novel combined ethnography, melodrama and social satire to contest their representation in public discourse. This article focuses on the spatial metaphor of the ghetto in Zangwill’s writing. It begins by examining the key literary source that he drew upon for his fictionalization of the Jewish East End: nineteenth-century European ghetto fiction. These highly popular tales of the dying folk traditions of eastern European ‘ghettos’, or Jewish quarters, reached British readers in translation in the early 1880s just as eastern European Jewish migrants began to arrive in Britain. Their representation of the Jewish encounter with modernity as a tragic and moving subject for fiction was, I argue, adaptable for the British context. The article goes on to explore Zangwill’s experiments with the theme of leaving the ghetto in his short fiction. Finally, it discusses the ways that Children of the Ghetto developed the genre in the dynamic environment of modern London, responding in particular to class conflict in the East End. Zangwill portrayed the ‘London Ghetto’ as a space of resistance to bourgeois control; not as a place stuck in the past, but a modern subculture in formation.
Nadia Valman (Sat,) studied this question.