Three years before the first edition of the Jewish Chronicle appeared, Charles Dickens introduced to the world one of literature’s most unsavoury characters: the repellent Fagin who, in Oliver Twist, was continually described as “the Jew”.
But the same number that denotes the JC’s birthday, 180, has a small, corrective connection to Dickens’s Jew.
Some time after the publication of Oliver Twist, Dickens sold his home, Tavistock House, to a Jewish couple: James Davis, a banker, and his wife, Eliza.
Eliza Davis and Dickens became friends and she told him that his creation of Fagin had done “a great wrong” to the Jewish people.
In response, the author removed 180 pejorative mentions of the word “Jew” from later editions of the novel and went on to soften his portrayal of the erstwhile contemptible villain.
It’s quite an irony now that, for the past half-century or so, the literary character Fagin has been transformed into a genial personality of the musical stage and screen, played by the Jewish actor Ron Moody in Oliver!, a show written by the Jewish composer Lionel Bart.
But then, irony permeates the written history of Jews over the past two centuries.
Who, for example, could have foreseen that a pamphlet written by a Hungarian journalist with negligible Hebrew — Theodor Herzl— would kick-start the modern Zionist movement?
Or that, among personal accounts of the war the one with the greatest emotional impact would be a diary written by a teenage girl — Anne Frank? And that a major shift in Jewish literary sensibility would be initiated by a book written by a non-Jewish, Australian novelist — Thomas Keneally?
After the war British publishers shunned Holocaust books until Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker Prize in 1982.
“People don’t want to read about such horrors,” was a regular refrain of many a publishing house editor.
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Amos Oz
That changed with the 1993 success of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. A flood of Shoah memoirs followed.
But while Keneally and Spielberg had been dealing with historical fact, some of the books that came after blended fiction into non-fiction in what had become a genre in its own right. Nothing wrong with that. Fiction’s reach is infinite. No subject, the Shoah included, is out of bounds.
But if a writer decides to set a work of fiction in a recognisably real place and time, then it should transmit that authentically. Otherwise, readers are being short-changed.
And when the theme is actual genocide, the author thereby assumes a responsibility — to victims as well as readers — to produce something historically plausible and, at the very least, competently written.
Unfortunately, the commercial success that Holocaust-themed fiction has recently enjoyed has not always reflected that responsibility.
Of course, commercial success is not an altogether reliable measure of literary worth. But what is? There can have been very few Jews, in fact very few people, as well-read as the literary critic and writer George Steiner, who died in 2020, and he claimed that the impossibility of setting literary standards of mathematical precision flawed his career.
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Anne Frank
In a book of interviews with Steiner by the French journalist Laure Adler (The Long Saturday, reviewed in the JC on 21 June 2017), Steiner quotes Tolstoy’s extraordinary assessment of Shakespeare’s King Lear: “An overblown melodrama by someone who doesn’t understand tragedy at all.”
A frustrated Steiner observed: “You can say, ‘Mr Tolstoy, I regret to inform you that you are laughably wrong.’ But you can’t prove him wrong.”
However self-evident that may seem, the compulsion to rank written works, and their authors, in order of excellence is irresistible, as indicated by the hundreds of book prizes awarded annually across the globe.
The most authoritative of these was bequeathed by a very different polyglot from Steiner — a Swedish poet, peace activist, chemist and arms trader: Alfred Nobel.
The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in the JC’s 60th year, five years after Nobel’s death. A century later, the disproportionately very high number of Jewish Nobel literature laureates is frequently commented upon — not least in the JC — and the current holder of the literature prize is the American-Jewish poet Louise Gluck.
As for Israel, names such as Agnon, Appelfeld and Yizhar; Rachel, Lea Goldberg and Sami Michael; AB Yehoshua; Assaf Gavron; Etgar Keret, Eshkol Nevo and Ayelet Gundar-Goshen; along with the two most often featured in the JC, Amos Oz and David Grossman have illuminated the nation throughout the 73 years of its existence.
And it’s from an Israeli writer, the poet Yehuda Amichai, I’m borrowing a phrase to define the enduring link between Jews and writing, which really is “beautiful as the commentary on an ancient text”.
