At Florian’s we sat down to coffee. We could not get a seat outside; the band was playing “La Bohême,” and the municipality was throwing red and green limelight on San Marco in honour of a royal birthday. There was no waiter either, inside, and Sickert amused himself with drawing an almost life-sized head of Zangwill with a piece of charcoal which he had in his pocket, on the marble table. It was a bit of a caricature, but far the best likeness I ever saw of the great Jewish novelist. When the waiter did come, without waiting to take our orders, he went to fetch a damp cloth to clean the table. Ars longa, vita brevis—I would not let him touch it, and told the proprietor what a prize he had as I went out. I have often wondered what the fate of that table was. Zangwill, the apostle of Zionism, has always been intensely proud of his nationality, so he has never minded cutting jokes about it. He brought the house down at a Vagabond Christmas dinner, where he was taking the chair, by remarking in his opening sentence, “It’s a funny thing to ask a Jew to do.” This was the dinner at which he introduced to English audiences the story which had lately appeared in a German comic paper. A carpenter was in a crowd waiting to see the Emperor pass. He had an excellent position, but he was very uneasy because he had promised to meet a conceited young brother-in-law, and the brother-in-law had not turned up.
“Will the Jackanapes never come!” cried the carpenter. A policeman promptly arrested him.
“I was speaking of my brother-in-law,” gasped the poor carpenter.
“You said ‘Jackanapes’; you must have meant the Emperor,” said the policeman.
When I asked Zangwill what made him turn to book-writing, he said—
“I never ‘turned’ to book-writing, because I never thought of doing anything else, and I have said all I have to say on that subject in the chapter of My First Book, published by Chatto & Windus, a book which should be a sufficient mine to you for all your friends. I was told at the Grosvenor Library that the middle-class Jews boycotted all my books—in revenge for the Jewish ones—but the Jewish ‘intellectuals’ have always rallied round me, for I remember that the Maccabeans gave me a dinner to celebrate the birth of Children of the Ghetto—a dinner, by the way, at which Tree announced, amid cheers, that he had commissioned me to adapt Uriel Acosta. I never took the commission seriously, but I gave him a one-act play, Six Persons, which had a long run at the Haymarket (giving Irene Vanbrugh her first good part), and still survives, twenty years after, having been played quite recently at the Coliseum and the Palladium by Margaret Halstan as well as by Miss Helen Mar somewhere else.
“An anecdote I remember telling at this dinner was: A man said to me, ‘My son has had typhoid, but he enjoyed himself reading your book.’
“‘Where did he get it from?’ I asked, because it was the old three-volume days, and I knew he could not have bought it.
“Thinking of the typhoid, he replied, ‘From the drains.’
“This theory of the origin of my book is, I believe, favoured in high ecclesiastical quarters.”