I. Zangwill. Children of the Ghetto
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CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO
A Study of a Peculiar People
BY
I. ZANGWILL
Author of "The Master," "The King of Schnorrers" "Dreamers of the Ghetto," "Without Prejudice," etc.
1914
Preface to the Third Edition.
The issue of a one-volume edition gives me the opportunity of thanking the public and the critics for their kindly reception of this chart of a
I. Z.
London, March, 1893.
PROEM.
Not here in our London Ghetto the gates and gaberdines of the olden
Ghetto of the Eternal City; yet no lack of signs external by which
one may know it, and those who dwell therein. Its narrow streets
have no specialty of architecture; its dirt is not picturesque. It
is no longer the stage for the high-buskined tragedy of massacre
and martyrdom; only for the obscurer, deeper tragedy that evolves
from the pressure of its own inward forces, and the long-drawn-out
tragi-comedy of sordid and shifty poverty. Natheless, 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. And
over all lie tenderly some streaks of celestial light shining from
the face of the great Lawgiver.
The folk who compose our pictures are children of the Ghetto; their
faults are bred of its hovering miasma of persecution, their
virtues straitened and intensified by the narrowness of its
horizon. And they who have won their way beyond its boundaries must
still play their parts in tragedies and comedies-tragedies of
spiritual struggle, comedies of material ambition-which are the
aftermath of its centuries of dominance, the sequel of that long