How can we coun­ter­act anti­se­mit­ic stereo­types in lit­er­a­ture, espe­cial­ly when those stereo­types are embod­ied in as infa­mous a char­ac­ter as Fagin, the Jew­ish vil­lain of Charles Dickens’s Oliv­er Twist? For both Alli­son Epstein and Nan­cy Churnin, the answer lay in writ­ing their own books about him. Epstein’s recent nov­el, Fagin the Thief, retells Dickens’s sto­ry from Fagin’s per­spec­tive, por­tray­ing him as sym­pa­thet­ic despite his flaws: left to fend for him­self as a child, accept­ed by nei­ther London’s East End Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty nor soci­ety at large, he even­tu­al­ly becomes a pater­nal fig­ure to a num­ber of out­casts and aspir­ing pick-pock­ets. Dear Mr. Dick­ens, a pic­ture book by Nan­cy Churnin, cen­ters on Eliza Davis, a real-life Jew­ish con­tem­po­rary of Dick­ens who peti­tioned him — suc­cess­ful­ly — to recon­sid­er his por­tray­al of Jews. In the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion, Epstein and Churnin dis­cuss how their works can change our under­stand­ing of Fagin and his creator.

Bec­ca Kan­tor: Your books bring lay­ers of nuance to Charles Dick­ens and his nov­el Oliv­er Twist. Alli­son, you write that either ​“san­i­tiz­ing Fagin or dis­own­ing him” as a Jew in your retelling of Oliv­er Twist would have felt ​“like a loss” to you. Nan­cy, your por­tray­al of Dick­ens acknowl­edges both the author’s empa­thy for many oppressed groups and his anti­semitism. What inspired both of you to explore these moral­ly com­plex fig­ures in your work?

Nan­cy Churnin: The seed of Dear Mr. Dick­ens was plant­ed in my child­hood when my par­ents — my moth­er in par­tic­u­lar, who was a teacher — shared their love of books with me, but held back when it came to Charles Dick­ens. My moth­er had lost a grand­moth­er, aunts, uncles, and cousins whom she had nev­er met when the Nazis marched through Bia­lystok, Poland on their way to Rus­sia, killing as many Jew­ish peo­ple as they could on the way. All her life she had night­mares about this. She refused to watch movies about Nazis because they were too ter­ri­fy­ing. Even when she fell deep into demen­tia at nine­ty-five, one of her first delu­sions was that the Nazis had bro­ken into her home and she was in danger.

My moth­er told me how painful Dickens’s por­tray­al of Fagin was to her and how it not only made her feel left out of Dickens’s com­pas­sion­ate uni­verse, but also made oth­ers view her neg­a­tive­ly as a Jew­ish per­son. She didn’t want me to read Dick­ens because she didn’t want me to see myself neg­a­tive­ly, too. But I loved Dick­ens! He was such a great writer with such an expan­sive vision and con­science. And yet, I was per­plexed by how he could have had no com­pas­sion for the Jew­ish peo­ple, who had been per­se­cut­ed in his native Eng­land and elsewhere.

As an adult, when I dis­cov­ered a schol­ar­ly arti­cle about Dick­ens that includ­ed a few lines about how Eliza Davis had writ­ten to Dick­ens and changed his heart, I knew I had to tell this sto­ry. I had to tell it for my moth­er, for me, and for every­one who need­ed to see the pow­er of speak­ing up as Eliza Davis did. I also want­ed to show the nobil­i­ty of acknowl­edg­ing when you are wrong, as Charles Dick­ens did, and of doing teshu­vah (even though he per­son­al­ly might not have known that word) by tak­ing action to do bet­ter. After cor­re­spond­ing with Eliza Davis, Dick­ens became an advo­cate for the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty and cre­at­ed his first pos­i­tive Jew­ish char­ac­ter, the kind­ly Mr. Riah in Our Mutu­al Friend.

I was able to get my moth­er an advance copy of Dear Mr. Dick­ens a few months before her demen­tia became pro­nounced. Eliza Davis’s abil­i­ty to ​“teach” Charles Dick­ens to be a bet­ter per­son made her feel val­i­dat­ed in her pro­fes­sion as a teacher who believed that kids can be taught to be their best selves. The fact that Dick­ens could and did change renewed her hope in the essen­tial good­ness of peo­ple. While we read it togeth­er, I felt I was see­ing an icy crys­tal of dis­trust in peo­ple melt and the joy of pos­si­bil­i­ty and hope bloom. As the demen­tia began tak­ing hold a few months lat­er, she thought I had writ­ten Dick­ens the let­ter and would grab my arm, ask­ing anx­ious­ly if he had respond­ed. It felt good to tell her that yes, he had, in a kind and car­ing way.

Alli­son Epstein: I’ve had a messy rela­tion­ship with the char­ac­ter of Fagin since I first encoun­tered him, lis­ten­ing to my grandmother’s 1994 Oliv­er! Cast album. The ver­sion of Fagin from the musi­cal is easy to love: the show sands off Fagin’s rougher edges, leav­ing a fair­ly harm­less ras­cal who cares earnest­ly for ​“his” boys in com­par­i­son to the uncom­pli­cat­ed vil­lain Bill Sikes. Most mod­ern stag­ings mute Fagin’s Jew­ish­ness for fear of falling into an anti­se­mit­ic stereo­type, and the script makes no men­tion of his faith at all. At a recent event to dis­cuss Fagin the Thief, one read­er told me that she had seen the stage show of Oliv­er Twist and many oth­er adap­ta­tions, but until she picked up my

book, she’d had no idea Fagin was Jew­ish. This was star­tling to hear, espe­cial­ly giv­en — Nan­cy, as you point out — the direct lines Dick­ens draws between Fagin’s Jew­ish­ness and his crim­i­nal­i­ty. But it sup­port­ed some­thing I’ve noticed for years: while mod­ern audi­ences love the idea of Fagin the Scoundrel, they don’t know what to do with Fagin the Jew.

Here’s where I con­fess that while Dickens’s por­tray­al is a hate­ful one in many ways, Fagin has always (maybe a lit­tle per­verse­ly) been a Jew­ish char­ac­ter I want to lay claim to. Fagin is smarter than any oth­er char­ac­ter in Oliv­er Twist, and he’s ter­ri­fy­ing­ly tal­ent­ed as a crim­i­nal. He’s dis­tinc­tive: many oth­er char­ac­ters in the book have inter­change­able voic­es, but not Fagin. And there are brief moments in which Fagin’s behav­ior com­pli­cates the idea that he’s unre­served­ly evil — almost as if Dick­ens couldn’t stop him­self from let­ting a more well-round­ed char­ac­ter flash through. My goal in writ­ing Fagin the Thief was to take the raw mate­ri­als Dick­ens pro­vid­ed and strip off the hate with­out strip­ping off the iden­ti­ty or the dynamism of the orig­i­nal char­ac­ter. I want­ed to let him have his own sto­ry: one that was painful, com­pli­cat­ed, and ful­ly human, just as Dick­ens allowed so many of his non-Jew­ish char­ac­ters to have.

BK: You not only had to con­sid­er the rela­tion­ship between your sto­ry and his­tor­i­cal fact, but also how faith­ful your sto­ry would be to Oliv­er Twist. How did you nego­ti­ate this? I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigued by how you approached cer­tain plot­lines in Oliv­er Twist—includ­ing Fagin’s ulti­mate fate — that you real­ized would have been his­tor­i­cal­ly inaccurate.

AE: I real­ly enjoyed research­ing Lon­don life between 1790 and 1840, and I turned to mod­ern his­to­ri­ans as well as social sur­veys, maps, and doc­u­ments from the peri­od. But the cor­ner­stone of my research was pret­ty straight­for­ward: I read as much Dick­ens as I could. Dickens’s nov­els are so deeply root­ed in their time and place that very often his­tor­i­cal fact and the world of Dick­ens are very similar.

Fagin the Thief starts decades before Dickens’s sto­ry picks up, so I had plen­ty of free­dom when decid­ing what Fagin’s child­hood and young adult­hood would look like. But as my sto­ry and the orig­i­nal start­ed to con­verge, I decid­ed that my book would stay as close as pos­si­ble to the events of Oliv­er Twist. I want­ed to under­stand Fagin rather than reha­bil­i­tate him, which made my guid­ing ques­tion ​“Why might this hap­pen?” rather than ​“What hap­pens next?” But I made some excep­tions. Where I devi­ate from Dickens’s plot, it’s almost always because the way I’d come to under­stand the char­ac­ters meant that their actions in Oliv­er Twist no longer made sense to me. If Fagin as I’d writ­ten him would have made a dif­fer­ent choice than Dickens’s Fagin, I gave myself per­mis­sion to col­or slight­ly out­side the lines.

Inter­est­ing­ly, there’s one big instance of Dick­ens using artis­tic license in Oliv­er Twist. With Fagin, he had cre­at­ed a fairy-tale vil­lain who need­ed to receive the ulti­mate pun­ish­ment for his crimes, so of course Oliv­er Twist end­ed with Fagin being hanged. In real­i­ty, at the time the book was pub­lished, recent legal reforms had dras­ti­cal­ly reduced the use of the death penal­ty in Eng­land, and Fagin’s crimes of theft and receiv­ing stolen goods were no longer pun­ish­able by hang­ing. For me, com­ing across that detail in my research opened up a world of pos­si­bil­i­ties. If Fagin lived in a sto­ry writ­ten by an author who wasn’t active­ly seek­ing to harm him, what might his fate be?

BK: That’s such an intrigu­ing ques­tion. Nan­cy, although Dear Mr. Dick­ens is non­fic­tion, I imag­ine that you still need­ed to be selec­tive in choos­ing his­tor­i­cal details that would tell a sto­ry sim­ple and engag­ing enough for chil­dren to fol­low. How did you go about doing this? Are there any facts about Eliza Davis or Charles Dick­ens that you were intrigued by but decid­ed not to include in your book?

NC: I find it fas­ci­nat­ing that Dick­ens chose to name his antag­o­nist after Bob Fagin, a young boy who had been kind to him and showed him how to do his work in Warren’s Black­ing Fac­to­ry, where Dick­ens had been forced to work when his fam­i­ly was thrown into the Mar­shalsea debtor prison. Steven Mar­cus wrote a ter­rif­ic arti­cle for Com­men­tary mag­a­zine in 1962 called ​“Who Is Fagin?” that explores why Dick­ens may have cho­sen Bob Fagin’s name for his infa­mous vil­lain. Remem­ber, Fagin spoke kind­ly and act­ed car­ing­ly to the young boys in his charge. At the same time, he was train­ing them to do some­thing awful — steal­ing — and for Dick­ens, work­ing in the black­ing fac­to­ry was awful. It felt like every moment there was a moment stolen from his life, or at least the life he wanted.

Regard­ing Eliza Davis, an ele­ment that fas­ci­nat­ed me was that she wasn’t the first one to reproach Dick­ens for his por­tray­al of Fagin, which is some­thing I men­tion in the back mat­ter, but didn’t have the space to go into in detail. The Jew­ish Chron­i­cle in Lon­don had asked, in 1854, before Davis wrote her first let­ter, why ​“Jews alone should be exclud­ed from the sym­pa­thiz­ing heart of this great author and pow­er­ful friend of the oppressed.” Dick­ens brushed off the newspaper’s words. But it wasn’t easy for him to ignore Eliza Davis. That’s because he knew and liked her. Davis and her hus­band, a banker, had pur­chased Tavi­s­tock House in Lon­don from Dick­ens in 1860. Dick­ens had been leery of deal­ing with Jew­ish peo­ple. He wrote to a friend, ​“If the Jew Mon­ey-Lender buys (I say ​‘if,’ because of course I shall nev­er believe in him until he has paid the mon­ey.)” To Dickens’s sur­prise, the mon­ey was paid with­in a few days and the deal­ings were so pleas­ant that Dick­ens wrote to anoth­er friend, ​“I must say that in all things the pur­chas­er has behaved thor­ough­ly well, and I can­not call to mind any occa­sion when I have had mon­ey-deal­ings with any­one that have been so sat­is­fac­to­ry, con­sid­er­ate, and trusting.”

I didn’t have room for these exchanges about Tavi­s­tock House in a book for chil­dren in which I want­ed to focus on Eliza Davis’s deter­mi­na­tion to speak up. But I believe that it may have been Dickens’s appre­ci­a­tion for Davis’s good char­ac­ter that gave her the con­fi­dence to per­sist in con­tact­ing him.

BK: In Dear Mr. Dick­ens, Eliza Davis is tak­en aback when she reads ​“over and over” that Fagin is referred to sim­ply as “‘the Jew’ … the word hurt like a ham­mer on [her] heart.” In Fagin the Thief, Fagin is sim­i­lar­ly upset when peo­ple first call him ​“the Jew,” but, as a thief, he also comes to see the val­ue of anonymi­ty. To echo Shake­speare, what’s in a name? How is Fagin — and the way he has been per­ceived by read­ers — shaped by what he is called?

NC: Tak­ing away an individual’s name and refer­ring to him by the group with which he is asso­ci­at­ed — in this case ​“the Jew” — allows oth­er peo­ple to dehu­man­ize him. It’s the first step toward oth­er­ing, demo­niza­tion, and scape­goat­ing, which we see again and again through­out his­to­ry. When a writer as pow­er­ful and oth­er­wise com­pas­sion­ate as Dick­ens refers to Fagin as ​“the Jew,” it gives even oth­er­wise kind read­ers license to not only see Fagin through the lens of being part of a group that they are being encour­aged to fear, but also to see oth­er mem­bers of that group as being the same as Fagin. Every time Fagin is called ​“the Jew” is an asser­tion that all Jew­ish peo­ple are like Fagin and that non-Jew­ish peo­ple should be wary of them.

AE: I sec­ond that! Some­thing else that’s trou­bled me is the way ​“the Jew” reads as ​“the only Jew.” Fagin is utter­ly iso­lat­ed from any form of com­mu­ni­ty. There’s one oth­er Jew­ish char­ac­ter in Oliv­er Twist: an inci­den­tal tav­ern-work­er named Bar­ney, whose sole trait is that his ​“words, whether they came from the heart or not, made their way through the nose.” But aside from that, it’s as if Fagin appeared one day out of a hole in the ground, a being with­out context.

My ver­sion of Fagin has com­pli­cat­ed feel­ings about being referred to as ​“the Jew.” The first time he’s addressed this way, it baf­fles him. He’s grown up in a Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in East Lon­don, and being Jew­ish is so nor­mal for him that he’s star­tled that oth­er peo­ple think it’s worth men­tion­ing. But as the world con­tin­ues to ham­mer on the idea that his Jew­ish­ness pro­vokes fear and dis­like, Fagin decides to go along with it. It’s less painful to accept the iden­ti­ty he’s been hand­ed than to repeat­ed­ly try and fail to make oth­ers see him dif­fer­ent­ly. He can’t change the per­cep­tions of any­one around him, and so he accepts — wise­ly or not — the idea that the only per­son who will ever see him clear­ly is himself.

BK: The idea of l’dor vador—from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion — imme­di­ate­ly struck me when I read your books. Both of them high­light the impor­tance of parent/​child rela­tion­ships in mod­el­ing val­ues and beliefs. Nan­cy, one of the ways Eliza Davis com­pels Dick­ens to recon­sid­er his por­tray­al of Jews is to encour­age him to reflect on the way future gen­er­a­tions will remem­ber him. It also seems sig­nif­i­cant that Eliza’s young son is present for much of the book; even at moments when he isn’t men­tioned in the text, he often appears in the illus­tra­tions. Why did you fea­ture him so promi­nent­ly? How did you work togeth­er with Bethany Stan­cliffe, your book’s illus­tra­tor, to make this happen?

NC: There were so many rea­sons why Dear Mr. Dick­ens shouldn’t have worked as a book for chil­dren — which is some­thing that a num­ber of edi­tors were quick to tell me ear­ly in my jour­ney. Chil­dren would not know who Dick­ens was, they cer­tain­ly wouldn’t know who Eliza Davis was, they wouldn’t be inter­est­ed in an exchange of let­ters, and Eliza was an adult rather than a child pro­tag­o­nist. I trust­ed chil­dren to be wis­er and more empa­thet­ic than adults gave them cred­it for, and I have not been dis­ap­point­ed. As for the child pro­tag­o­nist, I felt that Eliza’s youngest pro­vid­ed the lens through which we could under­stand why Eliza did what she did and how impor­tant what she did was. I could have fic­tion­al­ized the book by telling it from his point of view. But I want­ed kids to know the truth of this sto­ry, which is why every detail has been checked by three Dick­ens schol­ars. I want­ed to stick to the truth of Eliza’s belief in l’dor vador—the impor­tance of speak­ing up for her child and the next generation.

That idea crys­tal­lized when I stud­ied the sec­ond let­ter she wrote — the one that changed Dickens’s heart. The first let­ter adhered more to the post that had been addressed to him ear­li­er in The Jew­ish Chron­i­cle. But Eliza’s sec­ond let­ter seemed more in tune with her under­stand­ing of the way Dickens’s mind worked — his con­cern with the past, present, and future as he had anthro­po­mor­phized them in the Ghosts of Christ­mas Past, Present, and Future in A Christ­mas Car­ol. And that is why I think that sec­ond let­ter was so effective.

Giv­en that con­struct as a frame­work for the sec­ond let­ter, Eliza’s son nat­u­ral­ly and organ­i­cal­ly becomes a lens into how Dick­ens will be per­ceived in the future. This became very emo­tion­al for Bethany Stan­cliffe because she was a young moth­er and told me she iden­ti­fied with Eliza, visu­al­iz­ing her sto­ry through the eyes of a moth­er like her­self want­i­ng to help cre­ate the world she want­ed her child to live in. It was also very emo­tion­al for me, because that lit­tle boy’s hurt at read­ing about ​“the Jew” remind­ed me of my mother’s descrip­tions of the pain she had felt as a girl when she first read Oliv­er Twist. It brought back my own feel­ings when I first read those hurt­ful pas­sages as a child, too.

BK: The lega­cies passed down from par­ents to chil­dren is also a cen­tral theme in Fagin the Thief. Fagin eschews roman­tic and sex­u­al rela­tion­ships; his clos­est bonds are with his moth­er and his band of young thieves, whom he treats almost as sons. Alli­son, could you tell me more about the rela­tion­ship between Fagin and his mentees, and how you chose to char­ac­ter­ize it this way?

AE: Any­one look­ing to under­stand Fagin the char­ac­ter needs to under­stand why he choos­es to make his liv­ing by train­ing chil­dren to steal. Dick­ens invites his read­ers to blame Fagin’s self­ish­ness and exploita­tive nature for it, but that nev­er rang true to me. Train­ing kids isn’t the eas­i­est way to get by: he’s pay­ing for their room and board as well as his own, and as any ele­men­tary-school teacher will tell you, get­ting a bunch of unruly pre­teens to qui­et down and pay atten­tion to your les­son isn’t for the faint of heart. So it seemed obvi­ous to me that some­thing else had to be at play.

In my telling, Fagin’s deci­sion to take in Bill Sikes and the parade of young thieves who fol­low him is almost acci­den­tal — he doesn’t under­stand why he’s doing it even as it hap­pens. But the read­er under­stands that Fagin sees him­self in his mentees: chil­dren nobody wants, who spite the world by stay­ing alive in it anoth­er day. His fos­ter-par­ent­ing is an attempt, how­ev­er sub­con­scious, to break the cycle of aban­don­ment he expe­ri­enced with his own par­ents and men­tor. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly pro­nounced in the case of his father, who I imag­ine was hanged as a thief before Fagin was born.

As I wrote, the ques­tion of parental lega­cy became tan­gled up with the idea of fate. Does Fagin have a choice as to what kind of life he inher­its from his father? Can he cre­ate a dif­fer­ent kind of lega­cy, or has the world closed off all paths but the one that leads to prison? There are no easy answers to those ques­tions, but Fagin wres­tles with them as the sto­ry unfolds.

BK: Dear Mr. Dick­ens begins with a ques­tion to the read­er: ​“Think of some­one famous you admire. What would you do if that per­son said or wrote some­thing unfair? Would you speak up?” Are there unique ways in which the writ­ten word — whether in a nov­el, a children’s book, or a let­ter — can expand read­ers’ views?

NC: That belief, that the writ­ten word can expand read­ers’ views, is the rea­son I became a writer. The world can be a dark place. Injus­tice feels like a wave that seems far away at one moment and then floods our boat, leav­ing us des­per­ate and scram­bling to sur­vive. But words can become light­hous­es of hope and guid­ance. How many peo­ple were inspired by Dickens’s A Christ­mas Car­ol to rethink the way we treat oth­er peo­ple after being remind­ed that all of us are ​“fel­low-pas­sen­gers to the grave, and not anoth­er race of crea­tures bound on oth­er jour­neys”? It is my hope that chil­dren and their adults read­ing Dear Mr. Dick­ens will real­ize, sim­i­lar­ly, that we are all on this jour­ney togeth­er. Bethany Stan­cliffe shows this so elo­quent­ly on the final spread, where you see Dick­ens on one side and Davis on the oth­er, the two linked by a ver­ti­cal spread of let­ters. I hope know­ing that we are all one human fam­i­ly, inclu­sive of dif­fer­ences, encour­ages read­ers to do as sib­lings might and should do: speak up when they see some­thing wrong, as Davis did, and acknowl­edge the wrong­do­ing and do bet­ter in the future, as Dick­ens did.

AE: I believe fic­tion has a unique pow­er to inspire empa­thy and under­stand­ing in read­ers. I have to, or I wouldn’t be able to keep writ­ing sto­ries in the kind of world we live in today. Sto­ries ask us to see the world through some­one else’s eyes, as if their expe­ri­ences, hopes, fears, and dreams are our own. And I’ve always believed that if you real­ly under­stand some­one, you can still dis­agree with them, but it’s very dif­fi­cult to hate them.

This is a big respon­si­bil­i­ty for fic­tion writ­ers, and not all books embrace it. Sto­ries can present two-dimen­sion­al car­i­ca­tures that rein­force the most hate­ful beliefs we hold as a soci­ety. But they can also take a per­son we’ve been taught to hate and explain — enter­tain­ing­ly, but earnest­ly — what might have made them the way they are. That’s what I hope read­ers take away from Fagin the Thief. I don’t want read­ers to think of Fagin as a hero to be admired. But I want them to see that all char­ac­ters in the book are peo­ple: flawed, com­plex, beau­ti­ful, and trag­ic, just like each and every one of us. And if my read­ers find them­selves sur­prised by the empa­thy they feel for char­ac­ters they thought were irre­deemable vil­lains, maybe they’ll pause the next time they feel tempt­ed to define some­one as an enemy.