A Spitalfields Walking Tour with Israel Zangwill
by Dr Nadia Valman, Reader in English Literature at Queen Mary University, London
As a scholar of the literary history of
east London, I’ve long been fascinated by Israel Zangwill’s great novel of the
Victorian Jewish East End, Children of
the Ghetto, first published in 1892.
Zangwill was born near Petticoat Lane
market in 1864, the son of a Russian peddler. Despite these humble origins he
became a star pupil at the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane and later taught
there while studying for a university degree.
Children
of the Ghetto, his first novel, offers a panoramic
view of Jewish life in the late nineteenth century, exploring the many
conflicts that beset immigrants and their English-born children. As both an
insider to and a commentator on the immigrant community, Zangwill had a unique
authority as a writer, and the novel quickly became a bestseller.
But Children
of the Ghetto has another quality too: it’s written with an acute sense of
place. What’s more, many of the novel’s settings – the synagogues, sweatshops, markets
and garrets where Jews lived, worked and worshipped – remain part of the
landscape of Spitalfields today even if they are now often inhabited in very
different ways.
In Zangwill’s
Spitalfields, I’ve created a smartphone app that brings together a wide
range of sources from the Victorian world portrayed in Zangwill’s novel –
photographs, documents, illustrations, and objects and oral history recordings
from the Jewish Museum’s collection – in an immersive audio-visual walking
tour.
You don’t have to have read Children of the Ghetto to use the app. But
I especially wanted to give a flavour of Zangwill’s lively prose in the streets
where his novel is set. He’s a maverick figure, on the one hand committed to
radically modernising Jewish religious and social life and on the other delighting
in the noise and energy of the immigrant working class. These dilemmas animate
Zangwill’s novel and shape our walk through Spitalfields.
