The Forgotten Jewish Novelist Who Scandalized Her Co-religionists

The protagonist of Children of the Ghetto, an immensely popular novel by the fin-de-siècle Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, is Esther Ansell, a poor Jewish girl from an immigrant neighborhood who grows up to write an acclaimed novel of her own. An unsentimental depiction of the Jewish nouveaux riches, Ansell’s fictional novel is lambasted by her fellow Jews, who see it as lending credence to anti-Semitic stereotypes. While Zangwill would attract similar criticism for Children of the Ghetto, the inspiration for Ansell was an English author and poetess by the name of Amy Levy (1862-1889). Emma Garman writes: