Stahl, I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl, thanks for joining me here at nice Jewish books. Contrary to my usual practice, I'm going to give a long introduction to today's guest author and her book. So let's see how quickly I can skip through almost 200 years of literary history. One mark of a great work of literature is its influence over time, from 1837 to 1839 Charles Dickens published his work in a serial format until it was eventually collected into a three volume set called Oliver Twist, the story of the adventures and misadventures of the orphan Oliver and his encounters with the master thief Fagan. According to Wikipedia, the novel refers to Fagan 274 times in the first 38 chapters as the Jew, while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned. In 1854 the Jewish Chronicle asked why Jews alone should be excluded from the sympathizing heart of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed. In addition to being in print, the work has been the subject of audio adaptation since 1947 at least 20 movies starting in 1909 including the famous musical and numerous radio, television and stage productions. So just because something is a work of great literature doesn't mean it is a perfect piece. So that brings us to the present day, and I am well, I am so happy to welcome Alison Epstein, who took on the character of Fagan in Fagan the thief. Welcome Allison. Thank you so much for having me. So I would like to divide our discussion in two, first talking about Dickens Fagan and then talking about your take on him. So can you tell me a little bit about how Charles Dickens had this character?
Yeah? Dickens very much. I think wrote Oliver Twist to be a morality tale where characters are either wholly good or wholly bad. It's very black and white. It reminds me, in some ways of a fairy tale that you might tell the children to teach them something about life. And in that setup, Dickens's Fagan is very much the wicked, corrupter of children. He has, I would say, virtually no redeeming qualities. I really had to go searching to find a couple in the original text. But he's portrayed as you're, you're straight down the middle, conniving anti semitic caricature of a Jew who's in it only for the money, and he is taking advantage of children by bringing them into his home and teaching them how to pick pockets on the streets of London, and then taking the majority of what they steal for himself. So it's, it's, I would, I would say it's a compelling picture. It's, it's a character that a lot of people have remembered and thought about over the last 200 years. I wouldn't say it's a terribly nuanced picture of a person.
Can you talk a little bit about the broader picture of what Jewish life was like in the early 1800s because I know that people might not know that England is on that long list of country which, at various times, kicked out all the Jews. Yes,
it's a lot. It's a long list of countries in England. I want to say it was in the 1200s expelled all Jews from England, and that lasted for 100 200 years. By the time we get to Dickens's day in the 1800s early 1800s that had been repealed, and there were Jews living in London and throughout England. But there's always a sort of undercurrent to everything I've been able to read and research about Jewish life in the period that that that period of having been expelled from an entire country is very hard to shake out of a national mindset when you've sort of decided as a culture, this is a group of outsiders, and we can make them outsiders again at any time when we would like to that really carries through sort of how Jewish people are perceived and seen popularly. I think Dickens's portrayal of Fagan is sort of a indication of that, in that he is in this, in the milieu of London. He's part of the world around him. But at the same time, it's something worth remarking on, that this is a Jewish person, it's something worth pointing at. So there's a there's a real tension there that it feels to me at this. Period that Jews are allowed in society with several caveats and don't get too comfortable,
right? And certainly there were other non Jewish thieves around this one. So I'm curious about Fagan's name, which I know you didn't choose his his last name, but it seems that when he says it, people immediately recognize it as Jewish, but it doesn't sound familiar to me. Do you know? I know you didn't choose it, but do you know its origins?
I do. Actually, it's a strange story. It's uh, when Charles Dickens himself when he was very young, his his his father went to debtors prison for financial mismanagement of the family's fortune. And so when when Dickens was very young, probably less than 10, he went to work in a boot blocking factory in London. And one of the people he worked with when he was a child in this factory was named Bob Fagan, and he just latched onto that name and said, Someday, I'm going to do something with that name. And this is what he ended up with. If I was Bob Fagan, I'd be very irritated that this is what family name, but that is where he got it. And I don't believe it was a Jewish name originally, but in the in the world of my book, I did give it a little bit of extra weight, just because I didn't particularly want to call begin a Jew 274 times in my book. So it made this something of a signifier as well.
And you also gave him a first name, which apparently Dickens had not.
He had not. No, he is just Fagan on on occasion, Mr. Fagan when he's being polite. But no, he has. He's one of the, I one of the very few characters in Oliver Twist that doesn't get a first name. So I did have to, if I was going to spend an entire novel's length of time with this character, I had to first decide, okay, what is his What is his name? So in my book, his name is Jacob. Is there any significance to that? I wanted him to have a name that felt that connoted Jewish culture. And so I was going through sort of an Old Testament style list of names to see what might suit him. And when I was thinking about Jacob as the patriarch. That was exactly the kind of character that I was trying to convey for Fagan. This is a character in in the Torah known for, you know, trickiness and sort of wiling your way around the established rules in order to for your own benefit. I'm thinking of him stealing his brother's birthright in particular, that seems like a very, a very Fagan move, but Jacob is also known for having, it's a catastrophic number of children, and so thinking about Fagan and his band of boys throughout London, that sort of made me smile to myself as well.
All right, wonderful. So that kind of leads us into your Fagan. What inspired you to to work on him as a character?
Yeah, I I have a very love hate relationship with Dickens's. Fagan, You listed a number of different kinds of adaptations that Oliver just has had when we were starting this conversation, and the one that I first encountered Fagan in was the Broadway musical. I'm very much a theater child, so I went to the regional theater production when I was eight or nine, and as I fell in love with the show, and I fell in love with the character of Fagan, because in that in that show, that adaptation really makes a conscious effort to kind of smooth off some of the offensiveness that Dickens put in the original and it makes begin truly just a fun, captivating character. And to the best of my memory, that's one of the first Jewish characters in fiction that I encountered at that time. And so I felt a little like sense of identification with him when I first saw him. And then by the time I was old enough to read Dickens, I remember thinking, Well, I really enjoyed that play. Let's see what the what the original pagan was like. And oh, it is. It is a different reading experience for someone who was going in looking forward to seeing Fagan again. So there is a sense of annoyance and betrayal in that, in that experience. But there was also just, there are raw materials in Dickens's Fagan that I find fascinating. The setup for a character who could be interesting is right there. But Dickens was doing something different in his book. He was only aiming for that one note of the wicked Jew who serves as the villain. And so it I kind of kept waiting for somebody else to write the book that told the story. Dickens didn't tell I was like, I'll just take the bookstore while I'm here. Has anyone else written the Fagan book? I want to read it. Where is it? And then no one wrote it. So eventually I had to sit down and, okay, what would I want
it to be? That's wonderful. So you started out with his early home life. He's being raised by a struggling, single mother. His father had been forgot to check my grammar, hanged or hung. His father had been hanged as a repeat thief, and so his mother was a struggling. Seemed stress, but very loving and supportive of Hinton. Can you talk more about that background? Yeah, that
was another thing that they sort of had to invent out of out of thin air, because Dickens is really gives Fagan no context at all. It feels as though Dickens's Fagin kind of springs out of a hole in the ground and says, Here I am, and I'm evil and I'm fully grown, and I came from nowhere. So one of the questions that I knew I had to answer when figuring out, you know, how does the person end up in a place like Fagan ends up? You have to know where that story starts, where they come from. And the relationship between Fagan and his mother, Leo was one that really started to come together to me as I was thinking about, you know what? What shaped him in the way that he is. He grows up in a community that is predominantly Jewish, but he is not, I would say, a particularly devout child. So that was important to me as well, to give him a context the Jewish community to be in, but not to rewrite the character of Fagan as a holy, good person that we should be emulating in our daily lives. That was I wasn't interested in writing Fagan the hero. I wanted to write Fagan the person. Where does he come from? Where does he grow up? What kind of love does he experience? What kind of love is he missing, and just kind of go from
there? Yeah, that's one thing that really struck me, is that this is not a redemption story for him, you know, or and it's not villain porn, which I see a lot of recent movies being, you know, so much is focused on the horrible things that happened to the villains growing up that it justifies the horrific things that they do. So he, he has a very loving mother, you know, who works, you know, very hard for him and wants the best for him. He does study with the rabbi and picks up the Hebrew and speaks Yiddish. He's very active, so I'm not at all validating his choice of career. What careers would have been open to a very active, bright kid. Exactly
that was, that was one of the other things I was thinking through. One of the questions I kept coming back to working on this is where, where in Fagan's life is the moment where he goes wrong? Where did he make the wrong choice that ends up with him making his living as a pickpocket, trying to stay out of out of trouble with the law. And for the life of me, I can't find one moment where I where I think, Oh, this is where you could have turned left instead of right and made a success of yourself and had a wonderful career and been wealthy and had a happy family. There's just he's living in a time and a place, in a context that does not leave very many options for him, with the kind of background that he has, the kind of skills that he has, and the kind of personality that he has, this is really, I think, the only way that he could feel himself in the world was through crime. Unfortunately,
I almost feel like today he would have been diagnosed with ADHD or something. Just, yeah, he's not
gonna sit down and do his homework. I'll tell you that, right, yes.
So, so he's starting this life of pickpocketing, and he noticed another man doing it, and sort of imposed himself as an apprentice to this to this thief. And you know, his mother was very upset by it, but he continued to do it anyway. So he continues to be a thief. You know, despite his beloved mother's very strong disapproval
of this. He is very clear that this is not what she wants for him. Yeah, that's one thing you'll say about her as a character. She's never subtle about what she wants him to
right? And while she is close with the neighbors and with the Jewish community, he is not they all see that he is trouble. And I'm not sure that they blame her for her husband's death, but they do seem to blame him, you know, or rather, see that he's a bad seed or something, and really have no patience or kindness for him, right? So when she dies, when he's I think it was 16, the community does not take care of him. You know, they come in to help bury his mother or prepare her for burial. But no one offers to take him in, to apprentice him to to do anything. And he's told, while the landlord's gonna come and, you know, put you in the poor house,
you better get out of town if you don't want that to happen. Yeah,
right. So he finds refuge with another family that was taking in borders. So it was a single woman who was with a child, who was working, and then a couple with two children, three
children, four. I'm trying to remember it was, it was a very crowded room. Not all I saw. I remember.
So he starts boarding with them and contributing to the household with his earnings, right? And it seems like one important theme for him is recreating family. So the single woman, Molly, is kind to him, but the other couple, who's there, the farmingtons, I think, are very distrustful, but the kids love him, and he becomes a great storyteller. He amuses them, and when he sees that the family doesn't have food for them. He brings them food sometimes. So while he had a mother growing up, he never really had this, a larger family or sense of community, and he gets the hints of it in this household, even though he's still going out, going out and thieving. And that carries on for about four years, until he makes the horrible mistake of giving a cheap bracelet to one of the little girls. It's like he stole it and it wasn't even worth pawning, so he gave it to her, and when their parents saw they absolutely flipped out, and he had to flee the house.
Yeah, that's one of the sadder moments in the story for me, because that was one of the first times that that Jacob was, I think, trying to connect with somebody genuinely they would. He was his only real successful connection with a person up until that point, had been his mother, and then his mother passes away, and he has nothing. He has no connection. He's he's not really put in any effort to make connections with anybody else in his community. So there really is nothing for him to draw on there. And with these children, they don't know enough about the world to know that they shouldn't trust him. So there was sort of a chance for him to have to be seen by somebody for what he was doing and who he was. And it was nice. Well, it lasted, but it doesn't last forever,
right? So he finds an abandoned building that he kind of claims as his own, and scrubs it and decorates it with various items that he steals. And then fairly soon, he sees another young kid, a pickpocket, being chased by the police, and rescues him, and this is going to be one of the biggest relationships for the rest of his adult life. So he rescues Bill Sykes, and well, I mean, it takes a while for him to Sure. He saves them once the kid runs again, he saves them. Again, it takes a while for them to actually build a relationship. But again, he seems to want to try and be creating some sort of family situation by mentoring this kid and telling him how not to get caught by the police and how, you know, a thief has to think differently from the police, who know a map of the city really well, but don't know which doorways will be open and where they can slip in and out and hide. Yeah,
their relationship is so messy, and it's one of my it was my favorite part of writing this book was the relationship between Bill and Jacob, because they're just perfectly positioned to be exactly what the other person needs and the worst possible thing for them at the same time. So it's just really a push pull there that was interesting for me.
Yeah. So Fagan continues to adopt other kids and and train them, and then, you know, and as they get older, they wander on, and another kid will find his way in, but his relationship with Sykes continues. So we find that Sykes has been raised by this really cruel father, and he, in turn, has become cruel to some of the younger kids that he works with and when, when he's an adult, he's. And he's a bully. So I'm wondering if that's your stance on the nature versus nurture that these are both similar people. They're both thieves and pickpockets. They're both using children to help them. But Fagan, you know, is trying to give the boys a home and, you know, make sure they're fed and clothed, and Sykes is just using them to help himself.
Yeah, yes and no. I think part of it certainly is that, that I think Bill's relationship and fear of his own father really shapes the way that I wrote him through the rest of that book. But I'm not sure that I would agree necessarily that it's purely this is what he saw, and this is what he's replicating. To me, Sykes is the frightening part about Sykes is that he responds to his own fear with violence, I think more than anything, what what Bill was afraid of is being weaker than somebody else, and he he was when he was a child, and that was the the most i i think we throw around the word trauma a lot these days, but I do think there's real trauma to him there that feeling that he can't protect himself and he can't keep himself safe from what's going to happen to him. And so as he grows up, he wildly overcompensates for it, for the to make sure that he's never the weakest person in a room again. And I think Jacob is responding to the fear of different kind of fear, and so it shows up in him in a different way
whenever Fagan is able to help Sykes, instead of Sykes being grateful, he's resentful that that he had been vulnerable enough to need the help and then vulnerable enough to be forced to it, to be forced to accept the help.
Yes, I've had to depend on somebody else, and that weakens my position. And you think you're helping me, but you're actually making everything so much more difficult for me. So yeah, it's a it's a tricky relationship they have.
So Fagan is based on the book Oliver Twist, but he actually has a only very small appearance in your book. Can you talk about Oliver Twist?
Yes, that was one of the more fun parts of this for me, because I wanted to ground my book sort of in the story of Oliver Twist. But this is not Oliver's story. And when Oliver meets Fagan in the original novel, Fagan is, you know, late middle age, so there's a whole life ahead before Oliver is ever born and shows up on the scene. So I knew Oliver was only ever going to be like a quick flash in the pan in Fagan's life. So it was always going to be sort of a walk on role for me. But the thing that I wanted to do with Oliver was that I always find him incredibly irritating. In Dickens's book. I find him unrealistic. He's always he's a real eternal optimist who's never done anything wrong and just believes in the goodness of everybody's heart. And I don't believe that. I don't think that's realistic for a kid who's growing up in the kind of circumstances that Oliver was. I think it makes for a great sort of fairy tale story. But I wanted to write Oliver as a bit more worldly than Dickens. Let him be. He sort of knows what the game is that everybody's playing, and he's, I think, to an extent, in it for himself, as much as anybody else is around him. And that was, that was sort of a fun way for me to think about that character.
Did you have to do besides reading Oliver Twist? Did you have to do a lot of research for your book?
Yeah, it that's my favorite part of writing historical fiction. I always spend, like, way too much time in the beginning reading, as much as I can about everything. So I had a lot of different kinds of Victorian writers who were doing, like, social surveys of London and what this neighborhood was like, what that neighborhood is like. There's one particularly good book that like is not light reading, but it was like 800 pages of descriptions of different kinds of crime in London at 1810 to 1840 and how you would rub a shop this way, and what kind of clothes you would wear to break into somebody's house like this is amazing. Some of my previous books have been set much earlier than this one, so there's not that much like written material from the time. So this was just great for me. I was reading and there and there was books upon books upon books about exactly what I wanted to know. So it was really fun.
So were there any favorite tidbits that you weren't able to put in the book?
There's a lot of really fun stuff about how women would rob shops. I didn't have any. Chance to talk about the kind of clothes that they would use to do it. But my favorite detail was, if a woman was robbing a shop, she would have, you know, like a muff, those big, like, cylindrical things you would put your hands in to keep them warm, but they would hollow it out so you could just, like, stick stuff in there and then carry it out, like your own little private suitcase full of things. I just thought that was great. That's very creative.
Yeah, you also talked about Jacob's coat that is many pockets, yes, everything, so that he would have lots of places to put all his, oh, yeah, finding and
that's and still to this day, women don't have that many pockets. So we have to come up with new ways to do it, I know,
yeah, that's a whole other discussion. But women did carry, like these little purses, and I'm not sure how you pronounce it. Ridicules
a reticule, yeah. And they would be sort of like tied on to their waist, but you can just kind of take some little scissors and snip those off, and then you have all of their stuff in your hands. So it's a different, different kind of game than robbing somebody today. But I feel like if you dropped me into 1830s London, I could probably pick somebody's pocket. I feel like I thought now
that you've researched it that much, yes,
I can say I've never robbed anybody in real life, so I can promise you.
So since you brought up women besides Leah, there's not too many women who are a permanent part of his life. One is Nan. Hope I'm remembering the name right. One is Nan, who's at this point, much younger than he is, and they decide to work together, and that he takes the place of a father taking his daughter on a trip, and one or the other will cause a distraction, while the other will steal something. And they have this, you know, really wonderful companion, companionable relationship, until Bill Sykes comes into the picture and they immediately fall for each other.
Yes, unfortunate to both of their detriment, I would say, yes, yeah, that relationship was really tricky for me to get my head around, because it is so painful to read about in Oliver Twist, the relationship between Bill and Nancy is just it's agonizing the how how cruel bill is to her, and how much Nancy has convinced herself that that's all that she deserves. So when I knew that I was going to write those two characters, I wanted to kind of keep the pain of that relationship, but think about what Dickens hadn't really told us, which was, how was it at the beginning? What was it like at first? There must have been something there that brought them together, that that made them think this is worth staying together for even though it hurts, and that was a real mental process to wrap my head around. But I think it was worth it to really understand what what they were both about as people.
And I got the impression that she thought that she could help heal him, you know, and make him whole with her, that her kindness would kind of rub off on him.
I think that's what she was hoping, yeah, that no one has really cared for Bill in the way that she was doing, and maybe that was all he had been missing. I don't think we can ever really plan to personally change somebody by loving them enough. I don't think that works, but it's it's always a tempting
thing to think so. Is there anything you'd like to bring up about the book that I haven't thought to ask yet? The
only thing we haven't talked about that I always kind of like to talk about is that we I was able to sneak in a little bit of a ghost story in there, just because my editor was questioning it. And I was like, No, I was like, No, I feel very strongly that this is a ghost story. That's one of the first things that I had in mind when I started writing it, that I I knew that my version of Fagan was going to be, I think, the most haunted character I've ever written, sort of both literally and and emotionally.
So his father, who he didn't know at all, appeared to him at various times. Yeah,
sort of there's a figure of Jacob's father sort of following him at key points throughout the story, never really speaking to him, but always watching behind him. And to me, that added sort of a level of of sort of pressure to him that it was always imagined from the day that Jacob was born, that there's only one way forward for him, and it's to be exactly what your father was, to go off on the wrong path, end up as a thief, get yourself hanged and no one will remember you three days out. After you're dead, and so the figure of the ghost is sort of that fear of the inevitable following him, and it was just an interesting way to make him feel that of something very abstract is really present in the book I also had, and I like to say this because I didn't think about it, but I had a reader who told me that when they were reading the book, they thought that the figure of the ghost was Dickens's version of Fagan, following my version of Fagan around, the imagined version of what we all think Fagan is. I was like, that's way smarter than anything I came up with. I really like that.
Okay, I was so impressed with that. Conlin, I lost my turn. So one thing that his mother, when she was alive, did to try and keep him away from thieving, was to take him to a hanging, you know. And she said, This is what I experienced with your father, who I had to watch, you know, and forced him to look and it only worked for about a week, yeah, and, and he just couldn't keep away from it.
And I think, I mean, when you're, you're that age, and you feel like you know better than anybody else. You know, I certainly was like that as a kid too. You can hear the warnings from your parents, but Well, I won't be like that. I I'm smarter than that. I'm better than that. I know what I'm doing. There's there's only so much that you can really convey to somebody else what they should be afraid of. They have to feel that for themselves.
Yeah, and even watching it happen to someone else, you don't that's not me. Think that that could be that's not me. Yeah, right, exactly. Are there any projects in the works that you would like to mention?
I am very slowly starting to think about working on something else at this point. Fagan the thief took up so much of my brain for so long that now that I'm sort of putting it out in the world, there's just nothing there for a while. So I took a lot of naps, and I watched a lot of TV, and I read a lot of things, and now I'm starting to, like, dip my toe back into the research part and start thinking about what the next book might be about. So it's all very sketchy still at this point, but I will say I have a lot of books about Renaissance France, and I'm seeing if there's a story in there. So it's fun, but still super undefined.
All right, fun. I look forward to seeing whatever happens with me, too. So if you would like to offer a call to action for tikkun olam, for repairing the world. What would it be? Gosh,
there. I mean, the world needs so much repair right now that I feel like I could tell you 500 things, but just, I mean every, every small bit of something makes a difference. So I'll share the one that's on my mind right now, which is anybody in the US who's listening, if there's anything that you can do to support your local public media station, I know that every NPR and PBS station across the country has had catastrophic amounts of federal funding cut from their budgets in recent months and in the time that we live in now, being able to get access to news about what's happening that's not biased, so that we can know what to think for ourselves, is never been more important. So last night, I doubled my monthly donation to my local member station, WBEZ Chicago. If you would like to do the same to mine or your own, I would encourage listeners to do that.
Yeah, wonderful. Yes, I subscribe locally to radio and TV station. Yes, they're definitely in need of our support. Don't know if it's their logo or if it's national that they're defunded but not defeated. Oh, I love that. So that could be my local station. So I wanted to just throw in one other thing a tangent. I don't know if you know the book, Dear Mr. Dickens, I do. Yeah. So there was a children's book published in 2021 by Nancy Chernin, about Eliza Davis, who was a young woman when when Oliver Twist was printed and was published, and so she wrote to him, saying, you know, you know, I love your work so much. But why are you doing this? Jewish people,
it's such a good letter, because she really just says it right to him, as you are. I think one of the the phrases in it is you, you stand up for the poor and downtrodden, but you have no sympathy at all for I think she, she calls it the downtrodden Hebrew, and it's just there's no way around that. She points out of and says, I need you to tell me why you did this.
Yeah, and he did, in fact, kind of changes his ways in future books. From, from what I understand, he
did, yeah, in the one of his future novels, our mutual friend is the other Dickens novel that has a Jewish character in it. And if you put Fagan next to Raya from that book and look at them, you think, Oh, this, this man has had, he's done some real thinking. There's, there's almost nothing to compare between those two.
Yep, and that's definitely another message that resonates today.
Yes. So can speak to somebody and actually hear their side of the story, and not just what you thought it was in your head that that's the only way that anything's ever really going to change, right?
Absolutely. So if someone would like to contact you, what is the best way?
Yeah, you can find me at my website. Alison epstein.com that's got links to all the places you can find me. I'm on Instagram and sub stack these days for social media at rapscallison, that's rapscallion with an S in it. It's my favorite plan I've ever made. Please do get in touch. That would be lovely.
Great. Well. Alison Epstein, thank you so much for speaking with me about Fagan the thief. Thanks
so much for having me. This was really fun. You.
Foreign if you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite bordened brick or online bookstore or at your local library. Thanks to dionki for use of his frylch, which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries, and you can find more about it at www.jewishlibraries.org/nice
Jewish books. I would like to thank AJL and my podcast mentor Heidi Rabinowitz, Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode. You.
