further reflections on `the jew question` : Fagin with a new twist
By Norman Lebrecht, Evening Standard (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)29 September 2005
Two masterpieces of English literature are undeniably anti-Semitic. In The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare depicts Shylock as a heartless usurer, a racial stereotype that many in his audience would have associated with the moneylenders that Jesus so righteously drove from the Temple in Jerusalem.
In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens describes Fagin as "the Jew" - not once, by way of identification, but repeatedly, relentlessly, emphatically, to such an extent that the wicked old receiver of stolen goods is hardly ever mentioned by name, only by racial and religious origin.
In the first 38 chapters of Oliver Twist there are 257 references to "the Jew" against 42 to "Fagin" or "the old man". A more vicious stigmatisation of an ethnic community could hardly be imagined, and it was not by any means unintended.
Dickens, when challenged some years later, said that he had made Fagin Jewish because '"that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew". There is no evidence to support this, nothing in the London crime statistics of the 1830s to suggest that Jews controlled gangs of boy pickpockets.
What the great social campaigner was spouting in this novel was ignorance tinged with old malice. There is an unmissable hint in Fagin, "villainous looking and repulsive", of the archetypal Jew who kidnaps Christian boys for their blood, an ancient libel that provoked many a pre-Easter pogrom.
Dickens's odious prejudice might be excused as conventional for its time were it not so excessive and Oliver Twist so compelling a novel, one of the most gripping narratives in the English language, infinitely transmissible from generation to generation. And with each fresh reading or dramatisation, the spectre of racial hatred hovers in the margins, gnawing at the unconscious.
A new film of Oliver Twist approaches, a cause for excitement and concern. There hasn't been a straight feature film adaptation since David Lean's in 1948, a monochrome morality tale in which Alec Guinness, as Fagin, held his character at arm's length to avoid any taint of infection and Kay Walsh (who died five months ago) was far too nice as Nancy to be Bill Sikes's moll.
In the filmed version of the musical Oliver! 20 years later, Ron Moody played Fagin for merry laughs and the raw menace of Oliver Reed's Sikes cornered the market in evil. Instead of dealing with racism, film has artfully dodged the issue.
Roman Polanski's new movie, with a script by the British playwright and novelist Ronald Harwood, is addressed at a target audience of children, the director having declared that he wanted for once to make a movie that his nine-year-old daughter could enjoy.
Polanski and Harwood are the new A-team of their art form, a latterday Verdi and Boito who found each other late in life and, with The Pianist, won an Oscar each for a harrowing tale sensitively told.
Both men are consciously Jewish. Neither, says Harwood, was bothered by Dickens's anti-Semitic overtones. "I can honestly say we never talked about it," insists Harwood. Polanski, asked if he ever discussed the moral dimensions of the story with his scriptwriter, said: "I wouldn't insult him. We're both grown men."
Harwood, transparent in his candour, has impressed on me that he "had no view on prejudice, all I wanted was to tell the story". But the way he approached the plot, and the way Polanski filmed it, is indicative itself of the problem they faced.
Polanski's Oliver Twist is an adventure story pure and simple, a ragstorags account of Oliver's progress from poorhouse to thieves' den, lit up by a glimmer of deliverance from the kindhearted Mr Brownlow. Polanski, in Harwood's view, empathises with Oliver from personal experience. "Roman was in the Krakow Ghetto: this is about a little boy who survives."
Harwood eliminates all subplots and secondary characters, all pre-history and post. The revelation of Oliver's true parentage, so important to snobbish Victorians, is erased. In its place we have flashes of Dickensian wit. "You are quite a literary character, Mr Bumble," says a passer-by, seeing the beadle with a book in hand.
A new study by an Australian academic, John Waller, argues that Dickens took his story from the memoirs of a poorhouse boy, Robert Blincoe, published in 1832, five years before Oliver. The Real Oliver Twist (Icon Books) may have uncovered a source of Dickensian detail, but no affinity of character.
As for Fagin, there is no telling where he came from. Dickens admitted that he knew no Jews at the time. Yet, like Shakespeare before him, he allowed the villain a certain endearing avuncularity. One feels Fagin's sorrow as he gives up Oliver to the custody of Sikes.
In Polanski's film Ben Kingsley endows the villain with tragic inevitability: a lonely old man, scrabbling for trinkets of security and a little human warmth. The story ends in his prison cell, gallows rising in the square outside.
Instead of Dickens's happy ending, showing Oliver's acceptance into polite society, the apotheosis is cruel and appropriately sanctimonious. In this, and most other ways, the film is true to the spirit of the story and of the author's ambiguities: for the blurring of anti-Semitism is something in which Dickens himself ultimately conspired.
In 1860, Dickens sold his London home to a Jewish banker, James Davis. "The purchaser of Tavistock House will be a Jew Money-Lender," he told a friend. Some time later he added: "I must say that in all things the purchaser has behaved thoroughly well, and that I cannot call to mind any occasion when I have had moneydealings with anyone that has been so satisfactory, considerate and trusting."
He took quite a shine to the banker's wife, Eliza Davis, who reproached him in a letter of 1863 for the "great wrong" he had committed in Oliver Twist. Two years later, Dickens created, in Our Mutual Friend, the noble character of Riah, an elderly Jew who finds jobs for downcast young women in Jewish-owned factories.
"I think there cannot be kinder people in the world," exclaims one of the girls. "There is nothing but good will left between me and a People for whom I have a real regard and to whom I would not willfully have given an offence," wrote Dickens to Mrs Davis.
He set about revising Oliver Twist in the light of her criticisms, removing almost all mention of "the Jew" from the last 15 chapters. In one of his final public readings in 1869, a year before his death, Dickens cleansed Fagin of stereotypical caricature. A contemporary report observed: "There is no nasal intonation; a bent back but no shoulder-shrug: the conventional attributes are omitted."
This attempt to make amends redeems Oliver Twist, for me, from the index of anti-Semitic English literature, a list that stretches from Chaucer through Marlowe to Trollope and Belloc, Agatha Christie and TS Eliot. It was certainly Dickens's final intention that "the Jew" should be incidental in Oliver Twist, and in his film Polanski has given the story a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal. plus - a review. movie better than dickens? The best of Twists
Reviewed by Nick Curtis, Evening Standard (28 September 2005)
Novelist John Irving claimed recently that Roman Polanski's film of Oliver Twist was "better than Dickens".
I wouldn't go that far. But on its British premiere last night it struck me as a version of Dickens's novel that ranks equally with David Lean's starkly emotive, black-and-white 1948 adaptation and Carol Reed and Lionel Bart's counter-intuitively, gloriously upbeat 1968 musical, Oliver!
Polanski streamlines but generally does not sanitise the orphan Oliver's story. Inviting inevitable comparisons with his own wartime childhood in the Cracow ghetto, he has cut away subplots and characters to concentrate on how awful it is to be a child, alone and poor.
The film often feels as if it's shot from a nine-year-old's perspective and is the more urgent and pacy for it. And when Polanski turns the camera around, the soulful, largely mute face of his remarkable young star, Barney Clark, speaks volumes.
The director shows a delicacy and sureness of touch that was long missing from his work, until The Pianist (and its three Oscars) announced his return to form in 2002. Polanski's handling of the character of Oliver's protector/exploiter Fagin is particularly adroit.
Although Ben Kingsley looks and sounds much like Dickens's original racist caricature of a Jewish miser, Fagin's race is never alluded to here and he is a warmly sympathetic character compared with the workhouse officials or Jamie Foreman's psychotic Bill Sykes. This strikes me as an admirable way of neither airbrushing out nor apologising for a literary genius's most offensive attitudes.
Of course these days a certain prettification is necessary, even for a film largely financed, and shot, in Europe. Leanne Rowe's affecting Nancy and Harry Eden's charmingly cocky Artful Dodger both have strangely clean hair, teeth and skin, and the characters of Oliver's rich saviours are sketches of sweetness.
But these are quibbles. This Oliver Twist may not be better than Dickens, but it's level pegging with the best earlier adaptations, and up there with Polanski's own best work. High enough praise, I think.
Oliver Twist opens on 7 October (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)
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