#sjpost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VogHwP0C5VY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96rC4X_KWl4

so i dont know if you know anything about traditional klezmer music but

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkmFgQ9fM94

basically both of the fagin songs in oliver! seriously riff off of traditional jewish sounds.

which is

uh

but wait!

fun fact, the guy who wrote oliver! was super jewish. lionel bart was born with the name baglieter. his family escaped pogroms in the ukraine.

at the time oliver! came out, it was obviously intended to make fagin sympathetic; the second song i linked to is entirely about fleshing out fagin's motivations, and why he is the way he is. it's p similar to eisner's fagin the jew, which basically revolves around the idea that fagin does what he does due to antisemitism forcing him into a very cruel box just to survive. oliver! takes a similar route, but a lot of lines are thrown in to make it clear fagin genuinely loves the kids in his little pack, and doesn't like making them 'rob for him', but doesn't know any other way to safely go about things. ('don't want no one to rob for me / but who will find a job for me?')

i've always considered fagin and shylock to be the prototypical antisemetic characitures of eng lit. fagin though is inarguably my favorite. beyond my obvious fondness for him (dickens is one of my mother's favorite authors, and oliver! is my favorite musical hands down) fagin is also just really, really interesting.

people have been trying to 'fix' fagin from day one. the first guy to make the attempt was charles dickens himself. some time after writing oliver twist, dickens befriended the davis family. the davises, jews in victorian london, expressed their displeasure with the portrayal of fagin, and dickens agreed with them and took many references to fagin's jewishness out of the book.

dicken's idea of fixing fagin was to make him less jewish, or not jewish at all.

other adaptations have taken different routes. oliver! makes fagin sympathetic and comedic, rather than the repulsive evil miser he was in the original. eisner makes fagin a villain, but explains why he is the way he is, and removes the blame entirely from fagin. other adaptations (the bbc version is a particular favorite of mine, hardy's portrayal of sykes is probably my favorite ever, and sophie okonedo's nancy is basically how i view nancy in my head now when i read the book) have made fagin into a completely tragic character with no say in his fate, who gets stuck in a mire and dragged down by the vicious antisemitism of the victorian era.

this is interesting, but none of it has ever sat completely right with me. i don't like taking away fagin's jewishness-- he's a huge figure in the canon of jewish characters in eng lit, and that can't be erased. but i don't like giving him motivations that arent there-- his unctuous insincerity and greed is a founding part of his character. the problem, in my opinion, lies in the fact that fagin's greed is tied irrevocably to his jewishness.and it's tied irrevocably to his jewishness because he's the only jewish character in the book.

if i were to make an adaptation of oliver twist, i'd make other characters jewish, to balance out fagin. i'm not saying i totally omg headcanon x characters as jewish-- i know they're not, i am capable of liking something that has shit wrong with it-- but if i were king for the day, i know what i'd change in an adaptation.

it could work, i think. dickens probably didn't see nancy as black, but casting a black actress to play her works incredibly well with the original subtext of the work re: victorian racism. likewise, casting an actor younger than nancy to play sykes really underscores a lot of the subtext inherent in their relationship, and syke's relationship to fagin. pushing the envelope in that way can really flesh out and make explicit a lot of quieter implications that are harder to see in a stage adaptation with no text.

so what characters would i make jewish? i can't make dodger jewish, really, if i'm going to disconnect the 'greed' from the 'jewishness' in fagin's character, i can't make any more of the poor characters jewish, since they're all deep into crime and greed etc etc. and most of the richer characters of substance (and if im making a stage adaptation, i'd want to cut it down to the bare bones) end up being related to oliver. could i make oliver twist jewish?

at first i thought that was a dumb idea, but now that i think about it, i really like it. a huge theme in the novel is the weird nature of oliver's character, he's almost etherially innocent, but no one knows where he comes from, and there's this line of changelingness, that he could be anything and nobody knows. oliver would spend a huge chunk of the novel not knowing he was jewish until he finally met his family. his family could just be subtly jewish in the way most rich victorian jews were, trying to keep their culture and religion private and primly cultivated to avoid unnecessary attention while still being themselves.

it would also work well with the weird conditions of oliver's inheritance. oliver can't inherit if he shames the family name, so a lot of tension is made of monks trying to get fagin to corrupt oliver and get him caught stealing. it could mirror all the weird curcumstances often faced by real victorian jews of high standing who often felt it was their responsibility to set 'a good example' to lessen the weight of antisemitism on other poorer jews. oliver's mother agnes would presumably not be jewish (oliver was born out of wedlock) which would be a large part of why agnes had no support when she became pregnant and had to run away and eventually leave oliver orphaned in the lurch.