The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-01-01
From the London Academy.

From the London Academy.
 @ OR sheer psychological interest
 % no nation can equal Israel. He is the great paradox of ethnology; a complex of the most radical opposites, at once the most ideal and the most materialistic of men, the weakest and yet the strongest, the most individual yet the most cosmopoli tan. So intertwined, in fact, are his good and bad qualities, that often as not an unconscious touch of satire turks in the words of those who praise him most warmly, and those who come to ban bless with far less faint praise than they realize. The business of novelwriting lies with the interesting; and many and varied are the opportunities which Is- rael presents to the competent novelist.
 In England, as perhaps only natural, Israel has received scant attention. The Jews in this country have until quite re- gently been too few and too solidly pros- persous for romance. There was need, moreover for a sympathetic touch and an inside knowledge which was supplied only when MT. Zangwil gave us in"They That Walk in Darkness and the earlier portions of 'The Children of the Ghet- to- his eloquent descriptions of the po- etry and pathos of Hebrew life in the East end of London. Psychologically, however, by far the most interesting fea- ture of Ghetto life is the conflict between the old and young generations. This as- pect Is dealt with by MT. Zangwill in his genuinely tragic account in ''The Chil- dren of the Ghetto' of the relations be- tween Reb Shemuel and his son and in sDreamers of the Ghetto the story of the agnostic son who commits suicide through sorrow at his inability to bridge the gulf that opens between him and his family There is indeed, another side of the medal, for which we have to go to continental and Austrian authors in par ticular Meyer Isoswicz," by Orzeszko and "The Fugitive" by Ezra Brando, are vivid descriptions of the self-com- placent and fanatical ignorance of the Jews of a small Polish village.
 z I would also mention the. works of the Austrian novelsts are Franzos and Leo bold Sacher- Masoch. who depict the Jew ish life in the Galician villages in the
 
 theme is the endeavor of beautiful Jewess to put color into the grayness of her life by a marriage and intrigue with a Christian nobeman, her consequent repudiation by the community, who inn redately give her a cenotaph. and the wrath and grief of the Injured father. The stories by F'ranzos of Moses Freu- denthal who shuts his door against his daughter when she returns Ill and starv- ing and of Judith Trachtenberg, who is very near to being a Jewish Lucretia, are the best examples of the treatment of this subject.
 Vastly more interesting, however, are the more modern conditions, where, though the stone walls of the Ghetto have been broken down. an invisible Ghetto of the spirit still survives, i'm penetrable; where the position of Israel, with his race one thing and his national ity another is gloriously ambiguous, and the struggle for existence between Jew and Gentle goes on merrily.
 Among strictly English writers the con- ceptinn of the Jew is somewhat tainted by the Shylock legend, best epitomized in Casanova's epigram "qui dit juif dit us,Irer" Dickens Fagin is the classical expression of this idea. As for Riah, the benevolent Jew in Our Mutual Friend"