Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy

Loyal Books

Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy is a arts podcast hosted by Loyal Books. It has 10 episodes, with the latest published January 2022.

Reuben Sachs is a London lawyer whose political aspirations do not include marriage to Judith Quixano, the daughter of a respectable but unexceptional family. But without Reuben, a woman like Judith might have a bleak future in mid-19th century England: a loveless marriage or lifelong dependency are apparently her only options… A feminist, a Jew, and a lesbian, Amy Levy wrote about Anglo-Jewish cultural mores and the lives of would-be independent women in Victorian society. Levy was as repelled by contemporary literature’s occasional paragon (e.g., Daniel Deronda) as by its more frequent anti-Semitic stereotypes. REUBEN SACHS was her attempt at an honest, warts-and-all account of middle class Jewish life in late-19th century London. While many of Levy’s contemporaries condemned the book as a shanda fur die goyim (an embarrassment), Oscar Wilde wrote: “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make REUBEN

arts ·en-us ·10 episodes