In his historic play ""The Melting Pot"", Israel Zangwill
(1864-1926) introduced into our discourse a potent metaphor that
for nearly a hundred years has served as a key definition of the
United States. The play, enthusiastically espoused by President
Theodore Roosevelt, to whom it was dedicated, offered a grand
vision of America as a dynamic process of ethnic and racial
amalgamation. By his own admission, ""The Melting Pot"" grew out of
Zangwill's intense involvement in issues of Jewish immigration and
resettlement and was grounded in his interpretation of Jewish
history. Zangwill, Anglo Jewry's most renowned writer, began
writing seriously for the stage in the late 1890s. At the time, the
negative stereotype of the so-called Stage Jew was still deeply
entrenched in the theatrical mainstream, so much so that Jewish
playwrights writing for the English-language stage avoided
altogether the portrayal of Jewish life. Zangwill shattered this
silence in 1899 with the American premiere of ""Children of the
Ghetto"" - his first full-length drama, and the first
English-language play devoted in its entirety to the depiction of
Jewish life in an authentic and positive fashion. The play's
groundbreaking production drew tremendous attention and generated
heated debates, but since the script was never published, the
memory of the passions it generated dimmed, and its whereabouts
eventually became unknown. After more than a century, theater
historian Edna Nahshon has discovered the original manuscript of
this milestone text, as well as that of another unpublished
Zangwill play, ""The King of Schnorrers"", and the original version
of ""The Melting Pot"". Nahshon brings these three works together
in print for the first time in ""From the Ghetto to the Melting
Pot"". Though written and produced over a period of twenty-five
years and not conceived as a trilogy, the three plays are united in
this volume by virtue of their shared Jewish subject matter. Read
in historical sequence, they take us on a two-hundred-year journey
that begins in eighteenth-century London, with its intra-jewish
tensions farcically depicted in ""The King of Schnorrers"", then
proceeds to the nineteenth-century London Ghetto struggling at a
crossroads between tradition and modernity, as portrayed in
""Children of the Ghetto"", and finally reaches the shores of
twentieth-century America, where the survivor of a Russian pogrom
advocates intermarriage and delivers a messianic gospel of
tolerance and racial fusion in ""The Melting Pot"". Edna Nahshon's
in-depth introduction to this volume includes a biography of Israel
Zangwill that especially pertains to these works and situates them
within the Anglo-American theater of the time. The essays preceding
each play provide rich and hitherto unknown information on the
scripts, their stage productions, and their popular and critical
reception. While some issues addressed in ""From the Ghetto to the
Melting Pot"" are uniquely Jewish, others are universal and typical
of the negotiation of self-presentation by ethnic and minority
groups, particularly within the American experience.
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