In our latest Mid Sussex Reading Challenge book review, Wendy from Haywards Heath reviews Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy – her June read. June’s challenge was to read a book under 200 pages, which gave Wendy the opportunity to read something that had been sat on her shelves for a while!
Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy – reviewed by Wendy from Haywards Heath
For my June challenge, a book under 200 pages, I plucked Reuben Sachs from my own bookshelves, where it has been lurking for many years, waiting for me to pluck up my courage to read it. Handsomely bound by Persephone Books Ltd of London, it was stuffed with newspaper clippings about the author and the book’s reception when first published in 1888.
The author, Amy Levy, was an extraordinary young woman. The first Jewish student at Newnham College, Cambridge, she published Xantippe – poems in defence of Socrate’s maligned wife, when she was 20! An ardent feminist, she became part of a group of emancipated women who included Olive Schreiner, Beatrix Webb and Eleanor Marx. With this marvellous pedigree, what took me so long to get around to opening this modest volume, only 148 pages in length?
Reuben Sachs is billed as both a feminist plea and a satire on the materialism of late-Victorian Jews. To me, her characters came across as caricatures rather than flesh-and-blood people. She describes everything from their dress to their furniture in scathing tones, which as satire, borders on outright cruelty. Here is Adelaide, embarking on a shopping expedition with her cousins:
She had to the full, the gregarious instinct of her race, and Whitleys (a department store), was her happy hunting ground.
Reuben Sachs, Amy Levy
Over ‘benching’, the orthodox Jewish post-meal grace, she described a family patriarch ‘mumbling and droning in his corrupt Hebrew’ while everyone else at the table takes no interest. As someone brought up by non-observant Jewish grandparents in the 1940s and 50s, these scenes are uneasily familiar to me. Brought up to resist the idea of anyone being defined as a ‘typical’ Jew, I am not surprised that the book was heavily criticised for being anti-Semitic. This was despite Sach’s enthusiastic praise from her peer and fellow satirist, Oscar Wilde.
It is suggested that Levy’s ‘tendency to melancholy’ resulting from increasing deafness, and the simplistic condemnation of her novel as anti-Semitic by some, may have contributed to her suicide at the age of 27. A sad story, a sad young woman; I do think that if she had not been Jewish herself, she might have been slated even more vigorously. As it was, I am glad to have read it, though I did not find it enjoyable. I would certainly not recommend it to anyone with strong racial or cultural sensitivities. The dialogue is barbed, often clever, but it is written in the rather stilted/mannered style of the period, which is not to everyone’s taste. I think it is worthwhile as a period piece, whatever one’s view on anti-Semitism.
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The views expressed in this review are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of West Sussex Libraries.
Mid Sussex Reading Challenge 2020 