영어로 읽는 고전 _ 이스라엘 쟁윌의 거장
이스라엘 쟁윌의 《거장》은 19세기 후반에 쓰인 소설이다. 이야기는 빈곤과 상실에 시달리는 노바스코샤의 시골 가정에서 성장하는 젊은 맷 스트랭의 삶을 중심으로 전개된다. 소설은 가혹하고 용서 없는 풍경을 배경으로, 가족 역학, 개인적 열망, 그리고 예술적 표현의 추구라는 주제를 탐구한다.
소설의 도입부는 선원이었던 맷의 아버지가 바다에서 목숨을 잃은 뒤 스트랭 가족이 직면하는 시련들을 부각시키며 독자에게 이 가족을 소개한다. 서사는 아카디아의 혹독한 겨울에서 시작되며, 가족은 슬픔을 감당하면서 동시에 생존이라는 현실적 문제와 맞서야 한다. 예술적 재능을 지닌 맷은 자신의 처지가 놓인 현실과 씨름하며, 어머니의 감정적 격변과 가족의 주택 담보 대출 상환이라는 다가오는 책임을 헤쳐 나가는 동생들의 보호자 역할을 맡게 된다. 가족 고통의 상당 부분은 어머니의 불안정한 행동에서 비롯되며, 이는 극적인 대립으로 이어진다. 이와 함께 맷은 가족에 대한 의무와 창작적 성취에 대한 갈망 사이에서 균형을 찾으려는 내면의 갈등과도 싸워야 한다.
Classics Read in English _ The Master; a Novel by Israel Zangwill
With The Master, Israel Zangwill leaves behind the familiar terrain of London's Jewish quarters and plants his story in soil as different as could be imagined: the frozen, wind-scoured coast of Nova Scotia, where the Atlantic does not glitter but threatens.
Young Matt Strang inherits nothing from his father except absence. The elder Strang was a sailor, and the sea took him the way it takes so many men in this part of the world — without explanation, without return. What it leaves behind is a family unmoored: a widow whose grief curdles into something volatile and unpredictable, a clutch of younger siblings too small to understand what has been lost, and a mortgage that does not pause to observe mourning.
Into this breach steps Matt — not because he is ready, but because there is no one else. He is still a boy when the weight of the household falls on him, and Zangwill renders his predicament with an honesty that refuses comfort. Matt chops wood, settles debts, absorbs his mother's eruptions, and holds the family together through sheer, grinding stubbornness. But there is another life inside him — one that sees the frozen Acadian landscape not only as a hardship to be endured but as something to be rendered, captured, transformed into art. He draws. He imagines. He carries within him a hunger that survival alone cannot satisfy.
The tension that drives the novel is not between good and evil but between two equally legitimate claims on a single life: the duty to care for those who depend on you, and the need to become the person you were meant to be. Zangwill does not pretend these two imperatives are easily reconciled. The Acadian winter is not a metaphor — it is a fact, cold and unyielding — and the novel's power lies in its refusal to soften either the landscape or the choice it forces upon a boy who deserves better than the hand he has been dealt.
Among the contents
Despite its long stretch of winter, in which May might wed December in no incompatible union, ’twas a happy soil, this Acadia, a country of good air and great spaces; two-thirds of the size of Scotland, with a population that could be packed away in a corner of Glasgow; a land of green forests and rosy cheeks; a land of milk and molasses; a land of little hills and great harbors, of rich valleys and lovely lakes, of overflowing rivers and oversurging tides that, with all their menace, did but fertilize the meadows with red silt and alluvial mud; a land over which France and England might well bicker when first they met oversea; a land which, if it never reached the restless energy of the States, never retained the Old World atmosphere that long lingered over New England villages; save here and there in some rare Acadian settlement that dreamed out its life in peace and prayer among its willow-trees and in the shadows of its orchards.
At Minudie, at Clare in Annapolis County, where the goodly apples grew, lay such fragments of old France, simple communities shutting out the world and time, marrying their own, tilling their good dyke land, and picking up the shad that the retreating tide left on the exposed flats; listening to the Angelus, and baring their heads as some Church procession passed through the drowsy streets.
