![]() ![]() It’s not just that characters in the novel speak in familiar talmudic aphorisms or bestow Sabbath night blessings on their children. For Jewish audiences, then and now, the novel takes its reader home. Published in 1876, the novel took its British audience to a terra incognita: to the Judengasse, to the synagogue, to the Sabbath table, and to the inner sanctuaries of Jewish thought. I had that very thought when I first learned about Daniel Deronda, George Eliot’s philosemitic, proto-Zionist novel. ![]() There’s no mistaking it- Daniel Deronda’s telling your story. Sentences which you can finish before he does. Sketches of scenes you could fill in from your own memory. My experience reading Daniel Deronda was a little like turning on the radio to Paul Harvey, who, in his deep and dignifying voice, begins to tell “the rest of the story.” At first, you listen with mild interest. ![]()
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