영어로 읽는 고전 _ 이스라엘 쟁윌의 게토 비극집
이스라엘 쟁윌의 “게토 비극집”은 19세기 후반에 쓰인 단편소설 모음집이다. 이 책은 게토에서 살아가는 유대인들이 직면하는 시련과 고투를 탐구하며, 신앙, 가족, 정체성이라는 주제를 부각시킨다. 작품은 인물들의 삶 깊숙이 파고들어, 그들이 감내하는 정서적·사회적 고난을 섬세하게 조명한다.
“게토 비극집”의 도입부는 런던 이스트엔드에 사는 유대인 부부 질라와 요셀을 소개한다. 이들은 오랫동안 아이를 갈망해 왔다. 일 년간의 금식과 기도 끝에 질라는 아들을 낳고, 부부는 아이에게 브룸이라는 이름을 붙인다. 그러나 행복도 잠시, 가족은 브룸의 허약한 건강과 결국 찾아오는 실명이라는 시련에 맞닥뜨리게 되고, 이는 그들의 신앙과 회복력을 혹독하게 시험한다. 사회적 압력과 전통과 근대성 사이의 갈등에 직면하면서, 이들의 이야기는 게토에 사는 이들이 겪는 시련에 대한 가슴 아픈 탐구의 서막을 연다.
Classics Read in English _ Ghetto Tragedies by Israel Zangwill
If Ghetto Comedies showed us how laughter can coexist with sorrow, Ghetto Tragedies strips that laughter away and asks what remains.
Israel Zangwill's collection opens with a story so quietly devastating that its pain creeps up on the reader almost without warning. Zillah and Jossel are an ordinary couple in London's East End — devout, humble, sustained by the simple conviction that God listens. For a year they fast and pray for a child, and when a son finally arrives, they name him Brum and believe the heavens have answered. For a brief, luminous moment, the world is whole.
Then it begins to fracture. Brum is fragile from birth, and when blindness follows, it falls on the household not as a single blow but as a slow, relentless unraveling. Zangwill does not dramatize the suffering with grand gestures. Instead, he lets it accumulate in the smallest details — a mother's hand lingering on her son's face, a father's silence at the dinner table, a prayer repeated one too many times with a voice that no longer quite believes. The tragedy is not spectacular; it is domestic, intimate, and for that reason all the more unbearable.
What Zangwill captures with extraordinary precision is the way faith both sustains and torments. Zillah and Jossel cannot abandon the God who gave them Brum, yet they cannot reconcile that same God with the darkness that has taken their son's sight. Caught between devotion and doubt, between the old world's certainties and the modern world's indifference, they embody a struggle that extends far beyond their small household — the eternal human reckoning with a universe that does not always reward the faithful.
Among the contents
It was not till she had fasted every Monday and Thursday for a twelvemonth, that Zillah's long yearning for a child was gratified. She gave birth—O more than fair-dealing God!—to a boy.
Jossel, who had years ago abandoned the hope of an heir to pray for his soul, was as delighted as he was astonished. His wife had kept him in ignorance of the fasts by which she was appealing to Heaven; and when of a Monday or Thursday evening on his return from his boot factory in Bethnal Green, he had sat down to his dinner in Dalston, no suspicion had crossed his mind that it was Zillah's breakfast. He himself was a prosaic person, incapable of imagining such spontaneities of religion, though he kept every fast which it behoves an orthodox Jew to endure who makes no speciality of sainthood. There was a touch of the fantastic in Zillah's character which he had only appreciated in its manifestation as girlish liveliness, and which Zillah knew would find no response from him in its religious expression.
