Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (1888) – an overview

Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy

Amy Levy (1861 – 1889), a British novelist and feminist essayist, lived the life of the “New Woman” with a circle of literary and lesbian friends, especially her probable lover Vernon Lee.  The wealthy, fictional Sachs family in 19th-century London is the subject of Reuben Sachs (1888), arguably Levy’s best-known work.

Levy’s novel The Romance of a Shop (also published in 1888), is a “New Woman” novel about four sisters trying to make it in business.

In 1886, Levy had published “The Jew in Fiction,” in the British Jewish Chronicle. She said that no novelist so far had succeeded in “grappling in its entirety with the complex problems of Jewish life and Jewish character. The Jew, as we know him today … has been found worthy of none but the most superficial observation.”

The Sachs family lives in the most prestigious parts of London, England (Levy’s parents lived in Bloomsbury). The Sachs are “a family of Portuguese merchants, the vieille noblesse of the Jewish community.” 

In the Sachses’ London Jewish community, “with its innumerable trivial class differences, its sets within sets, its fine-drawn distinctions of caste, utterly incomprehensible to an outsider, they held a good, though not the best position.”

Levy’s short novel was written in response to what she considered the over-sentimental treatment of the Jewish characters and naïve, romantic view of Zionism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) with its “little group of enthusiasts, with their yearnings after the Holy Land.”

 

The story of Reuben Sachs as well as Judith Quixano

Despite the man’s name in the title of Levy’s Reuben Sachs, the novel is at least as much about Reuben’s cousin Judith Quixano. Judith’s patrician Portuguese ancestry is revealed in this description:

She was twenty-two years of age, in the very prime of her youth and beauty; a tall, regal-looking creature, with an exquisite dark head, features like those of a face cut on gem or cameo, and wonderful, lustrous, mournful eyes, entirely out of keeping with the accepted characteristics of their owner.

Judith (whose name references the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes), who has been adopted by her aunt and uncle after her family lose their money, doesn’t have a financial inheritance of her own and, despite her good looks, she knows her adoptive parents will find it difficult to marry her off into another good Jewish family.

Judith is in love with Rueben and vice versa, although they are first cousins. It looks for a while as if they will marry, but Judith receives a marriage proposal from the non-Jewish, wealthy Bertie. She reluctantly accepts.

Material advantage; things that you could touch and see and talk about; that these were the only things which really mattered, had been the unspoken gospel of her life. 
      Now and then you allowed yourself the luxury of a fine sentiment in speech, but when it came to the point, to take the best that you could get for yourself was the only course open to a person of sense.
      The push, the struggle, the hunger and greed of her world rose vividly before her. Wealth, power, success—a flaunting success for all men to see; had she not believed in these things as the most desirable on earth? Had she not always wished them to fall to the lot of the person dearest to her? Did she not believe in them still? Was she not doing her best to secure them for herself?

Judith regrets her decision almost immediately and wishes she had held out for Reuben. Then she hears that Rueben has died. The novel ends on a low note, with Judith’s dark thoughts.

It seemed to her, as she sat there in the fading light, that this is the bitter lesson of existence: that the sacred serves only to teach the full meaning of sacrilege; the beautiful of the hideous; modesty of outrage; joy of sorrow; life of death.

. . . . . . . . . 

Amy Levy, British poet and novelist

 

Amy Levy

. . . . . . . . . . .

A commercial success; criticized by the British Jewish press

Although it was a commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, the British Jewish press hated Reuben Sachs, with its merciless portrayal of such shallow, unsympathetic characters. Jewish World said of Levy: “She apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity.”

The Jewish Chronicle didn’t even review it, despite having published Levy’s earlier essay, but referred to it as being “intentionally offensive.”

The year after Reuben Sachs appeared, and soon after Levy’s death, the future Zionist campaigner Israel Zangwill, who coined the phrase “melting pot” in the title of a play, was commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society of America to write Children of the Ghetto, concerning a group of characters in the Jewish East End of London.

In the novel, Esther Ansell, many of whose views seem to echo Zangwill’s own, writes a novel, Mordecai Josephs, under a male pseudonym; no one knows she is the author; her novel seems to be based on Reuben Sachs. Everyone in Esther’s set hates the book and the way it betrays the mercenary and unspiritual bourgeois Jewish inhabitants of London, exactly the criticism the Jewish press had of Reuben Sachs.

Levy took her own life at the age of twenty-seven and became the first Jewish woman to be cremated in England; Oscar Wilde, who had published her stories in his Woman’s World, wrote an obituary for her.

. . . . . . . . .

Excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.

Contributed by Francis Booth, the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938; High Collars & Monocles: 1920s Novels by British Female Couples; and A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young Adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. 

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