Bard of the Melting Pot

...He had remained whole, of course, because he had always managed to give brilliant expression to each of the mutually repellent parts of his personality...

...The Tamiment Institute Library, which incorporates the Meyer London Memorial Library of the Rand School of Social Science, contains a unique collection of materials in the history of the American labor and radical movements and in the related social sciences...

...I cannot share the intolerance for the Jews of the old type who' live in Jerusalem...

...The wonder is not that he broke down shortly before his death at the age of 62 but that he had remained intact as long as he did...

...The Tamiment Institute Library 7 East 15th Street, New York 3, N. Y. (Algonquin 5-6250...

...Not since Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass have we had so inspiring a picture of America...

...And yet, as we read some of Zangwill's more flamboyant utterances in his palmy days we cannot help feeling that Jewish nationalism in our time was for some literary men the expression of the Romantic Moi writ large...

...He used a bitter Hebrew phrase which means, blot out the name of the backslider and the sinner in Israel...

...He may not know how to put together a book, but he can hardly write an individual page that is not absorbing, and these pages induce us to follow him to the end...

...It is not a problem play even, it is a message play, a modern Gospel of race fusion...

...According to Leftwich, he "saw no reason why they should not as Americans observe Judaism...

...according to Zangwill, "the Jewish pulpits of America resounded with denunciations of [the play's] supposed solution of the Jewish problem by dissolution...

...Holbrook Jackson is quoted by Leftwich as having said: "Critics have argued whether The Melting Pot is a good play or a bad play from the point of view of dramatic art, but such considerations in the light of the uplifting tragedy of a race could only occur to whipper-snapper minds...

...Zangwill, who had begun his political Zionism with the declaration that in the Jewish Parliament of the future he hoped to sit on the anti-clerical benches, later was to declare himself "utterly opposed to the new Godless Jewish nationalism which believes Jewish attachment adequately fulfilled in devotion to the nation and state...

...The fact remains, however, that it was Zang-will's popular play that gave the phrase currency...

...By the sheer pressure of not pressing them she has turned them into one...

...Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the crucible with you all...

...And in doing so he not only found relief for himself but also voiced the feelings, at one time or another, of nearly every separate tendency in contemporary Jewry...

...There are so many repetitions of anecdotes and quotations as to suggest sometimes that the author did not bother to proof-read his book...

...Perhaps this was what Chaim Weizmann had in mind when he referred on one occasion to Zangwill as Zionism's D'Annunzio...

...His own father, an observant Jew who left England to spend his declining days in Jerusalem, rejected him and took no pride in his fame...

...The delineation of these numerous contradictions, incidentally, is the source of whatever value the book has...

...He once described himself as a "democrat with a profound distrust of the people...

...In vain did Zangwill argue that he had been grossly misunderstood, that it was of the very essence that "America does not attempt to fuse the various peoples that seek her shores by force...

...Zangwill was born in 1864 and died in 1926...

...The Jew is here citizen of a republic without a state religion...

...The Melting Pot succeeds by power of impression and not by approximation to canons of art...

...If the purpose of Zionism was merely to beget another national type of the Western pattern, it would not be worth the striving...

...Yet this was not the end of the story for Israel Zangwill, who was filled with more contradictions than Walt Whitman...

...Everything is present, including the kitchen sink...

...Zangwill died a much abused and also a much disabused man...

...But, when all these reservations have been made, it must be added that I found this an extremely interesting and informative book...

...Zangwill, that's a great play...

...When Theodore Roosevelt attended the first performance of the play in Washington, he leaned over to the box where Zangwill was sitting and said: "That's a great play, Mr...

...There is vagueness and confusion in the chronological sequence, and there is not enough of a steadily pursued thesis of the kind that, when it does not become mechanical or tendentious, is so important to a biography...

...The Jewish nationality had been preserved not as a nationality but as a religion...

...But Leftwich is fascinating because he is fascinated...

...Since Zangwill himself had married out of the faith, however, he was not on the strongest ground vis-a-vis his people...

...On every possible subject, he revealed himself as divided, contradictory, torn...

...Zang-will's play The Melting Pot is generally credited as the origin of that description of America, though among the odd facts turned up by Leftwich is one which tells us that the phrase occurred in a sermon by a New York rabbi before Zangwill used it and that the idea is implicit in Crevecoeur's 18th-century Letters of an American Farmer...

...There is a great clutter of facts here, things of value and things of no value...

...This attitude brought its author a great deal of trouble...

...He admired the figure of Christ but objected bitterly to missionaries who sought to convert the Jews...

...He did not want to be known as the father of a renegade...

...The Library's facilities arc available to scholars, students, and those professionally working in the fields of study covered by its resources...

...Zangwill eventually believed that the Jews have to return to their religion in order to survive, but that he himself was cut off from returning...

...Reviewed by Milton Hindus Professor of literature, Brandeis University Joseph Leftwich has rendered a signal service in writing a biography of Israel Zangwill, and in the process has produced a very lively though ill-organized book...

...There will be few readers who will not be moved by Leftwich's account of his last days...

...Though he exploited the ghetto theme frequently thereafter (writing Ghetto Comedies, Ghetto Tragedies, Dreamers of the Ghetto), some of his most notable popular successes (such as the stage-play Merely Mary Ann) were scored in a wider field...

...God is making the American...

...On the other hand, the critic of the London Times described it as "romantic claptrap...

...Acclaim came to him at the age of 28 with the publication of Children of the Ghetto...

...The reactions provoked by The Melting Pot may be taken to be symbolic of the differences of opinion with regard to all his work...

...It is an improvisation rather than a composition, a series of essays rather than a coherent whole...

...Friends of the Library, trade unions and other organisations are reminded that the Library toelcomes gifts of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, photographs and other memorabilia relating to the labor and radical movements...

...I feel more strongly than ever that in these frowsy greybeards poring over their obsolete Talmuds and hugging their worm-eaten traditions to their caftaned breasts, we have a finer type of humanity than the Prussian Junker, in all his bravery, and that it pays a people better to keep up such a standing army of mystics and students than to nourish the insolence of a military caste...

...The message contained in the play, according to Zangwill in his dedicatory note, is a dramatic expansion of these ideas: "A fig for your feuds and vendettas...

...His end was horrible, filled with terror instead of resignation and peace...