SOURCE: "Literary Myth and Ethnic Assimilation," in The New Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 80, Winter, 1980, pp. 131-36.

In the following essay, which was originally presented as a lecture at an American Studies conference, Moses contrasts Griggs's views on ethnic assimilation in America with those of the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill.

Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was a man of two souls. As one biographer contends, "He was passionately devoted to the values of the Jewish past as enshrined in the ghetto, but at the same time, he sought to escape from what he felt to be the ghetto's restrictiveness." He was born in London of a poor Russian immigrant family, educated at the Jews' Free School in the East End of London, where he later became a teacher. He published prolifically, essays, stories, and plays, becoming known for his "Dickensian" portrayals of types of London Jewry. But the best known...