Israel Zangwill: 49 books

Frequently I have to ask myself in the street for the name of the man I bowed to just now, and then, before I can answer, the wind of the first corner blows him from my memory. I have a theory, however, that those puzzling faces, which pass before I can see who cut the coat, all belong to club waiters.

The Old Maids' Club was founded by Lillie Dulcimer in her sweet seventeenth year. She had always been precocious and could analyze her own sensations before she could spell. In fact she divided her time between making sensations and analyzing them. She never spoke Early English—the dialect which...

Beneath the gritty surface of industrial England, an ancient and persecuted people continue to love and dream. Subtitled “Being Pictures of a Peculiar People,” this influential 1892 early work of Anglo-Jewish fiction, set in London’s East End, brought its author fame—and comparisons to Dickens and Twain—for his humanity and humor.  

Following the previous year’s Dreamers of the Ghetto, this 1899 collection of sketches includes “ ‘They That Walk in Darkness,’ ” “Transitional,” “Noah’s Ark,” “The Land of Promise,” “To Die in Jerusalem,” “Bethulah,” “The Keeper of Conscience,” “Satan Mekatrig,” “Diary of a Meshumad,” “Incurable,” and “The Sabbath-Breaker.”

This 1898 collection of essays profiles famous Jews “who have arisen in the Ghetto from its establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking-up of our own day.” Portraits include Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Lassalle, Felix Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Sabbatai Zevi, Solomon Maimon, and Benjamin Disraeli.

Alle sei e quarantacinque del mattino di una fredda e nebbiosa giornata di dicembre, la signora Drabdump sale le scale della sua misera casa nel povero quartiere di Bow, a Londra, e bussa forte alla porta di Arthur Constant, il suo inquilino. Quindi scende in cucina, mette il bollitore sul fuoco...

This book is beautiful. Not beautiful like lovely writing in particular, though certainly israel zangwill wrote well, but beautiful in intricacy and fun and a level of cleverness so profound it boggles the mind. I suspect that the king of the schnorrers impact on later jewish humorists has been vastly...