영어로 읽는 고전 _ 이스라엘 쟁윌의 용광로
이스라엘 쟁윌의 《용광로》는 1908년에 초연된 희곡이다. 가족을 몰살시킨 포그롬에서 살아남은 러시아계 유대인 이민자 데이비드 키하노의 이야기를 따라간다. 미국에서 그는 민족적 분열로부터 자유로운 사회에 대한 자신의 비전을 기리는 "아메리칸 심포니"를 작곡한다. 러시아계 기독교인 이민자 베라와 사랑에 빠지면서, 두 사람의 로맨스는 과거와의 극적인 대면에 직면하게 된다. 이 희곡은 미국의 민족 동화를 상징하는 용어로서 "용광로(melting pot)"라는 표현을 대중화시켰다.
Classics Read in English _ The Melting-Pot by Israel Zangwill
Some works of art change the way people talk. Israel Zangwill's The Melting-Pot, first staged in 1908, gave America a metaphor for itself — and the nation has been arguing about that metaphor ever since.
At the center of the play stands David Quixano, a young Russian Jewish immigrant whose family was slaughtered in a pogrom. He carries within him both an incurable wound and an incurable hope. The wound is memory — the screams, the blood, the village that ceased to exist in a single night. The hope is America, which David envisions not as a country but as a crucible, a place where the hatreds of the old world are melted down and recast into something new. He pours this vision into music, composing an "American Symphony" that aspires to be the sound of a nation finally free from the tyranny of ethnic division.
Then he meets Vera Revendal — a Russian Christian immigrant with her own complicated past — and love becomes the test case for everything David believes. Can two people whose histories should make them enemies choose each other instead? Can the melting pot actually do what David's symphony promises?
Zangwill raises the stakes to an almost unbearable pitch when the past intrudes upon the present in a revelation that forces David to decide whether his faith in America's transformative promise is a philosophy he truly lives by or merely a beautiful composition he performs. The confrontation is devastating precisely because both sides — forgiveness and remembrance, future and past — carry equal moral weight.
The play gave the English language one of its most enduring political metaphors, but what is often forgotten is the anguish embedded in the image. Zangwill's melting pot is not a comfortable place. It is a furnace, and what it demands of those who enter is nothing less than the surrender of the very grief and identity that made them who they are.
Among the contents
The scene is laid in the living-room of the small home of the Quixanos in the Richmond or non-Jewish borough of New York, about five o'clock of a February afternoon. At centre back is a double street-door giving on a columned veranda in the Colonial style. Nailed on the right-hand door-post gleams a Mezuzah, a tiny metal case, containing a Biblical passage. On the right of the door is a small hat-stand holding Mendel's overcoat, umbrella, etc. There are two windows, one on either side of the door, and three exits, one down-stage on the left leading to the stairs and family bedrooms, and two on the right, the upper leading to Kathleen's bedroom and the lower to the kitchen. Over the street door is pinned the Stars-and-Stripes. On the left wall, in the upper corner of which is a music-stand, are bookshelves of large mouldering Hebrew books, and over them is hung a Mizrach, or Hebrew picture, to show it is the East Wall. Other pictures round the room include Wagner, Columbus, Lincoln, and "Jews at the Wailing place." Down-stage, about a yard from the left wall, stands David's roll-desk, open and displaying a medley of music, a quill pen, etc. On the wall behind the desk hangs a book-rack with brightly bound English books. A grand piano stands at left centre back, holding a pile of music and one huge Hebrew tome.
