Les enfants du Ghetto by Israel Zangwill is a novel written in the late 19th century. Set in London’s East End, it follows Jewish immigrant life amid poverty, piety, and philanthropy, balancing humor and critique. Early focus rests on the struggling Ansell family—especially schoolgirl Esther and her devout father Moses—alongside neighbors like the Belcovitches, the aspiring musician Pesach Weingott, and the formidable matriarch Malka.
The opening of the novel paints Fashion Street in fog and hunger as young Esther Ansell queues at a soup kitchen, where dignitaries make speeches before the poor are served; she hurries home only to drop and lose the precious soup, and the charity bread proves inedible. Downstairs, the Belcovitch family celebrates Fanny’s engagement to Pesach, revealing sweatshop routines, matchmaking, petty snobberies, and a vein of kindness as the couple discreetly brings their soup to the starving Ansells. The narrative then follows Moses searching fruitlessly for work among cobblers and “sweaters,” observing the crush of schoolchildren and market sellers, before turning to the more prosperous kin Malka in Square Zacharie, where a comic neighbor quarrel and a family rift over a symbolic clothes brush frame his anxious appeal for help. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
