영어로 읽는 고전 _ 이스라엘 쟁윌의 게토 희극집
이스라엘 쟁윌의 “게토 희극집”은 20세기 초에 쓰인 단편소설 모음집이다. 이 작품들은 게토에서 살아가는 유대인 인물들의 경험에 초점을 맞추며, 변화하는 사회 속에서 그들이 겪는 투쟁, 정체성, 그리고 인간관계를 포착한다. 쟁윌은 유머와 비극을 절묘하게 섞어 이 인물들의 삶을 그려내면서, 수용과 소속감을 향한 여정에서 그들이 마주하는 복잡성과 시련을 부각시킨다.
“게토 희극집”의 도입부는 유대인 화가 이스라엘 쿼리어를 소개한다. 그는 '슬픔의 사람(Man of Sorrows)'을 그리기 위한 모델을 찾고 있다. 탐색 과정에서 그는 브라이턴의 길가에 앉아 있는 검은 수염의 남자 쿼리어를 만나게 되는데, 이 남자는 그가 화폭에 담고자 하는 깊은 슬픔을 온몸으로 체현하고 있다. 화자가 쿼리어의 과거—러시아로부터의 탈출과 런던에서 겪은 고난—를 알아가면서, 이 초반부의 장면들은 고통, 정체성, 그리고 잔혹한 세상 속에서 존엄을 찾으려는 노력이라는 주제를 더 깊이 탐구하기 위한 토대를 마련한다. 초반 장들은 모델 개인의 역사뿐만 아니라 유대인 공동체의 집단적 역사를 암시하며, 이후 이어질 이야기들을 위한 가슴 저미는 배경을 확립한다.
Classics Read in English _ Ghetto Comedies by Israel Zangwill
The title Ghetto Comedies is itself a provocation. There is comedy here, yes — Zangwill was far too sharp a writer to let sorrow have the stage entirely to itself — but it is the kind of comedy that catches in the throat, the kind that exists only because tragedy has already claimed the ground beneath it.
The collection opens with a painter in search of a face. Israel Quarriar, a Jewish artist, needs a model for his depiction of the Man of Sorrows — a figure bowed under the accumulated grief of an entire people. He finds what he is looking for not in a studio or a synagogue but on a Brighton curbstone, in the person of a dark-bearded stranger whose stillness carries a weight that no pose could imitate. As the stranger's story unspools — flight from Russia, destitution in London, a life stripped down to its barest essentials — Zangwill quietly collapses the distance between the biblical archetype and the living man. The Man of Sorrows, it turns out, does not need to be imagined. He is sitting right there, breathing, waiting for someone to notice.
In this single opening gesture, Zangwill sets the terms for everything that follows. Each story in the collection is, in its own way, a portrait — of individuals caught between cultures, between hope and resignation, between the urge to laugh and the impossibility of forgetting. The comedy is never an escape from pain; it is a way of surviving it, a defiant insistence that even in the ghetto, life refuses to be only sorrowful.
Among the contents
I cannot pretend that my ambition to paint the Man of Sorrows had any religious inspiration, though I fear my dear old dad at the Parsonage at first took it as a sign of awakening grace. And yet, as an artist, I have always been loath to draw a line between the spiritual and the beautiful; for I have ever held that the beautiful has in it the same infinite element as forms the essence of religion. But I cannot explain very intelligibly what I mean, for my brush is the only instrument through which I can speak. And if I am here paradoxically proposing to use my pen to explain what my brush failed to make clear, it is because the criticism with which my picture of the Man of Sorrows has been assailed drives me to this attempt at verbal elucidation. My picture, let us suppose, is half-articulate; perhaps my pen can manage to say the other half, especially as this other half mainly consists of things told me and things seen.
And in the first place, let me explain that the conception of the picture which now hangs in its gilded frame is far from the conception with which I started—was, in fact, the ultimate stage of an evolution—for I began with nothing deeper in my mind than to image a realistic Christ, the Christ who sat in the synagogue of Jerusalem, or walked about the shores of Galilee.
