Israel Zangwill

The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Israel Zangwill

Publisher Marketing: They both styled themselves "Madame," but only the younger of the old ladies had been married. Madame Valiere was still a demoiselle, but as she drew towards sixty it had seemed more convenable to possess a mature label. Certainly Madame Depine had no visible matrimonial advantages over her fellow-lodger at the Hotel des Tourterelles, though in the symmetrical cemetery of Montparnasse (Section 22) wreaths of glass beads testified to a copious domesticity in the far past, and a newspaper picture of a chasseur d'Afrique pinned over her bed recalled-though only the uniform was the dead soldier's-the son she had contributed to France's colonial empire. Practically it was two old maids-or two lone widows-whose boots turned pointed toes towards each other in the dark cranny of the rambling, fusty corridor of the sky-floor. Madame Depine was round, and grew dumpier with age; "Madame" Valiere was long, and grew slimmer. Otherwise their lives ran parallel. For the true madame of the establishment you had to turn to Madame la Proprietaire, with her buxom bookkeeper of a daughter and her tame baggage-bearing husband. This full-blooded, jovial creature, with her swart moustache, represented the only Parisian success of three provincial lives, and, in her good-nature, had permitted her decayed townswomen-at as low a rent as was compatible with prudence-to shelter themselves under her roof and as near it as possible. Her house being a profitable warren of American art-students, tempered by native journalists and decadent poets, she could, moreover, afford to let the old ladies off coffee and candles. They were at liberty to prepare their own dejeuner in winter or to buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in the dark, as the heart in them pleased; and thus they were as cheaply niched as any one in the gay city. Rentieres after their meticulous fashion, they drew a ridiculous but regular amount from the mysterious coffers of the Credit Lyonnais. Contributor Bio:  Zangwill, Israel srael Zangwill (1864-1926), the foremost Anglo-Jewish author of his generation, chronicled London's Jewish East End in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The son of Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Poland, he was born in Ebenezer Street in London's East End, and Zangwill frequently described his identity as a "Cockney Jew." He attended schools in Plymouth, Bristol, and the Jews' Free School in Bell Lane in London, where he later taught. In 1884, he received a BA degree with triple honours from the University of London and devoted himself to journalism and literature. In 1890, he founded and edited the short-lived comic magazine Ariel, or The London Puck. He wrote sketches, essays, and editorials about Jewish immigrants for a number of British and American periodicals, including the Jewish Quarterly Review, founded by Israel Abrahams (1858-1925) and Claude Montefiore (1858-1938), distinguished Jewish scholars. Israel Zangwill, who tried his hand in various forms of fiction on both Jewish and non-Jewish issues, published numerous short stories, several novels, and plays, including The Melting Pot (1908), which gave rise to the famous metaphor about America as a crucible where various nationalities are transformed into a new race. Under the pseudonym of J. Freeman Bell, Zangwill published together with Lewis (Laurence) Cowen (1865-1942) his first novel, The Premier and the Painter (1888), a political satire that emulated Dickensian humour, but had an entirely original plot. The novel contains some references to the East End slum life. Zangwill also wrote a series of essays on Jewish issues, the most important being Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), a series of fictionalised biographies of notable Jewish thinkers including Spinoza and Heine. Commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society of America, Zangwill wrote a novel of Jewish life, Children of the Ghetto (1892), which brought him an instant international fame. After the success of Children of the Ghetto he continued to deal with slum issues in his short stories, Ghetto Tragedies (1893, reissued and expanded in 1899) and Ghetto Comedies (1907). After meeting Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionist movement, in 1895, Zangwill supported the Zionism until he created in 1905 his own movement, the Jewish Territorial Organization, whose aim was to promote settlement of Jews in areas outside of Palestine. Zangwill rejoined the Zionist movement following the Balfour Declaration.