by Bob Biderman
Looking at her sitting sedately at the table across from him, Z thought this might very well have been then and that the distance between past and present was simply a blip in the continuum of earthly existence. But much had changed since they spent that extraordinary morning together on a rough wooden bench in Victoria Park, hand in hand, listening for the bells of Bow Street Church that announced the terrible act played out at Newgate prison in the early hours of 22 August 1887.
He wore better clothes now, as he could afford a tailor (even if his tailor was a bit of a schlemiel). Her clothes were still hand-me-downs from her cousin, Beatrice, or things she wore a decade before, mended and patched many times over. But beyond the clothes and a trace of greying hair, it could have been 1887 – at least for them.
She asked him about his books and his recent theatrical career. He told her of New York, of his amazing experiences there exploring the vast recreation of the Eastern European Yiddish culture in Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn and his fascinating meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt who much admired his play about the melting pot of peoples that gave America such a vibrant edge at the start of the new century and pointed the way toward a blissful new tomorrow.
She told him that she had continued to write stories about the dispossessed, about the crimes of injustice. And he detected in her a kind of melancholy he hadn’t noticed back then, those many years ago.
And his marriage how was that? she had asked him.
He had married a wonderful woman; someone very supportive of his work. She read everything he wrote and had become his best friend and most ardent critic. He would be lost without her.
Was she of the same cultural background?
She was Christian but desired, as he did, to integrate the wisdom of the ancients with the knowledge of the moderns.
And was he content? It was an awkward question, perhaps, and one that surprised her as much as him, but she felt she had to ask it.
He replied but the question seemed to transport him to another part of himself, deep and secret. Instead of the personal response she had wanted, about his feelings and emotions, he spoke of something having to do with a greater hope and longing. And it was this longing she knew related to something missing in herself. What he said and what lingered in her mind afterward, was that he could never be content until his people had all found safe harbours.
For a while they were silent. They drank their coffee and she had waited till their eyes met, as if she were searching for confirmation of an ineffable sign that would allow her to continue.
Then, fixing him in her gaze, she asked if he could tell her who they really were – those he called ‘his people’?
Maggie left a few days later on a steamer bound for Calcutta. Z heard no more from her but a few years later he noticed an article in the Times about a group of English women who had became active in the Indian National Congress. Along with the theosophist Annie Besant, Maggie was mentioned as one of those who had helped campaign for Indian home rule.
As Z carefully cut this article from the newspaper to add to his box of clippings, he was reminded of his final meeting with her and the question she had asked him which still lingered in the air.
That very question – ‘his people’: who were they and where did they come from? – had obsessed Z throughout his adult life. He had come to believe they weren’t actually the ancient Hebraic tribes that left biblical Israel many thousands of years ago. Those he referred to as ‘his people’ were both less and more. They were the many and diverse groups of nomads and wanderers, traders and farmers, poets and musicians who had somehow ended up populating the great expanse of Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Crimea – whose hair and eyes, features and complexions, were a mixture of everything and everyone but who, to a greater or lesser extent saw themselves as ‘Jewish’ and spoke a common tongue.
It was with these masses of Eastern European Jews, once happily settled and then progressively impoverished over the last decades of Tsarist rule, that Z so strongly identified; for there is where his parents and his grandparents and countless generations before them had lived. There is where Lipski came from, too. And Z sometimes thought, for fleeting moments, if a few wrong doors had been opened or right ones shut, if certain opportunities had been lost, or if the prevailing wind had suddenly changed direction, he could have been Lipski himself. For wasn’t his first name also ‘Israel’?
Endnote
THE TWO MAIN characters in this book, Maggie and Z, are based on real people – Margaret Harkness and Israel Zangwill – who lived and wrote during the period of this story. Some of my characters’ observations allude to their actual writings. Z and Maggie, though, are fictional hybrids that, in my mind at least, developed a life of their own.
I have tried to keep true to the actual murder case and trial of Israel Lipski, making use of Home Office records and a multitude of contemporary accounts, as well as combing the resources of the British Library, Cambridge University Library and the National Archive at Kew. However, I would like to pay special tribute to one author in particular who helped pave the way – Professor Martin Friedland, whose exceptional work brought the Lipski trial out of the shadows of history and helped shine a light on the person, the time and the society which made this case so compelling.
brief bibliography
Englander, David. A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain 1840-1920; Leicester University Press, 1994.
Friedland, Martin L. The Trials of Israel Lipski; Macmillan, 1984.
Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914; Duckworth, 1975.
Fishman, William J. East End 1888; Duckworth, 1988.
Harkness, Margaret. In Darkest London; Black Apollo Press, 2003.
Kriwaczek, Paul. Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation; Phoenix, 2006.
Mackay, John Henry. The Anarchists; Revisionist Press, 2009.
McLaughlin, Joseph. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot; University Press of Virginia, 2000.
Udelson, Joseph H. Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill; University of Alabama Press, 1990.
Vital, David. A People Apart: A political History of the Jews in Europe; Oxford, 1999.
Young, G. M. Portrait of an Age; Phoenix, 2002.
Zangwill, Israel. Children of the Ghetto; Black Apollo Press, 2004.
