Israel Zangwill was born of Jewish immigrant parents in the Whitechapel ghetto of London's East End. Soon after young Israel's birth, his father, Moses Zangwill, from Latvia, and his mother, Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill, from Poland, took him to live in Bristol, where he received his early education. After the family returned to Whitechapel in 1872, he attended Jews' Free School, eventually becoming a pupil-teacher and remaining there until 1888. He also attended London University and in 1884 received a B.A. with honors in French, English, and mental and moral science. Surrounded by a ghetto in transition, as he and his fellow Jews became assimilated into British life, Zangwill devoted much of his life to recreating the characters and values of the old ghetto for an ever-widening audience, beginning with Motza Kleis, a pamphlet about market days in the ghetto, which he wrote with Louis Cowen, a fellow pupil-teacher in...