ABSTRACT
Yiddish literature, whether for children or adults, often utilizes animals to critique social issues. These animals, especially those in children’s literature, usually take on human qualities in order to teach moral lessons. For example, dogs and their wild cousins, wolves, quite often represent the persecution of Jews by their Christian neighbors and the resilience of the persecuted Jews. In works by non-Jews, especially Alice Jackson’s Oliver Twist Retold for Boys and Girls, Jewish “wolves” are depicted as parasitic outsiders to Christian society. Rather than feeling the effects of persecution, Jewish wolves instead prey upon innocent Christians. This chapter will look at Jackson’s (and others’) portrayals of Fagin, one of the most famous Jewish characters in British literature, as wolfish and compare those portrayals to children’s stories by Anglo-Jewish writers Israel Zangwill and Samuel Gordon. They both overturn the image of Jews as devouring wolves, instead incorporating images of wolves from Talmudic and mystical traditions, where wolves are depicted as loyal to the Jewish people and devoted to the Jewish religion.
