Zangwill Israel

This book is beautiful. <p> Not beautiful like lovely writing in particular, though certainly israel zangwill wrote well, but beautiful in intricacy and fun and a level of cleverness so profound it boggles the mind. I suspect that the king of the schnorrers impact on later jewish humorists has been vastly understated. I am thinking particularly of groucho marx (who had a brilliant career more or less playing a sort of comic version of our main character here), but also through him a...

Author Israel Zangwill best typifed the comic spirit of London&apos;s Jewish ghetto by immortalizing the <I>schnorrer </I>(beggar) &#8212; in particular, the character of Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, a Sephardic panhandler who developed begging into a fine art. The robust and often hilarious tale tells how Manasseh combines insolence with resourcefulness to reduce London&apos;s best-known philanthropist to a fish handler; how he reacts to his daughter&apos;s love...