The Big Bow Mystery: A Magic Lamp Classic Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781438223261)

Born to eastern European emigrants, Israel Zangwill dedicated his life to championing the cause of the oppressed. Jewish emancipation, women's suffrage, assimilation-ism (the idea that Jews should cease to be Jews and melt into the populations of countries in which they lived, ) territorialism and Zionism (understood as a national liberation movement) were all fertile fields for his pen. His brother was also a writer, the novelist Louis Zangwill, and his son was the prominent British psychologist, Oliver Zangwill. Zangwill received his early schooling in Plymouth and Bristol. When nine years old he was enrolled in the Jews' Free School in Spitalfields in east London, a school for Jewish immigrant children. The school offered a strict course of both secular and religious studies while supplying clothing, food, and health care for the scholars, and today one of its four houses is named Zangwill in his honour. At this school young Israel excelled and even taught part-time, finally becoming a full-fledged teacher. While teaching, he studied for his degree in 1884 from the University of London, earning a BA with triple honors. In later life, his friends included well known Victorian writers such as Jerome K. Jerome and H. G. Wells. Zangwill died in 1926 in Midhurst, West Sussex after trying to create the Jewish state in such diverse places as Canada, Australia, Mesopotamia, Uganda and Cyrenaica