Fagin the Thief: A Novel

"Epstein has created a character much more memorable than Dickens' original."

Allison Epstein imaginatively solves the problem of what to do with Fagin, the antisemitic caricature of a thieving Jew created by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. Epstein explains the problem and her solution in her author's note.

"Every modern adaptation of Oliver Twist has to deal with the Fagin problem somehow. One option is to make a Riah of him: the quirky grandfather, a devout Jew backed into a corner who tries to defend his boys against the world. The other option is what Dickens did in later editions of Oliver Twist, which removed more than two hundred instances of the word Jew. Fagin still gets to prowl the narrow London streets this way, a colorful and captivating villain with his ten-dollar words and silk handkerchiefs. But in order to be interesting, he can't be Jewish in any way that matters. Both of these options—sanitizing Fagin or disowning him—feel like a loss to me."

Epstein chooses a third way. Fagin stays a thief, but one who cares about the boys he teaches. More than that, she gives him a complicated backstory and context. She explores the why and how of Fagin's life, his choices, limited as they were by his Jewishness. Like Percival Everett's James, which retells Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man Huck runs off with, Epstein reclaims Fagin as his own person, not simply a negative stereotype.

Fagin, given a first name here of Jacob, becomes the master of a gang of boys by accident. Bill Sikes is running from the police when Jacob helps him escape, all too aware of the dangers that face the youth.

"Bill will continue to steal with the subtlety of an elephant in a hothouse garden, and he'll get himself arrested or transported or hanged or all three one after the next. . . . Bill will walk out the door and, unless he is both very clever and very lucky, he'll be dead before he turns sixteen. Just as Jacob should have been."

Jacob, who has been on his own since he was 16 and his adored mother died, has compassion for the boy. Without thinking he offers to teach Bill some skills, to ward off the inevitable future he glimpsed.

"The agreement is made, though neither of them would get caught saying so . . .

'I can show you how it's done. Twenty-six and never spent a day in jail yet, and I'd defy you to find another man in Saffron Hill who can say the same. . . .’

Jacob waits. Bill can walk out, continue living by his own rules, shape his life the way he thinks best. Or he can stay here, swallow his pride, and accept there are some things he doesn't yet know. That he does, in fact, need someone to guide him."

Bill stays and becomes a master thief, proud and arrogant. Yet also a kind of son to Jacob. After him, more boys drift into Jacob's orbit, even a couple of girls.

". . . word spreads, and even before Maggie left, two more youths had turned up at his door; one after the other. Boys, these, thin and shivering, battered hats in hand. He doesn't turn them away, though he considers it—it's a liability, having children so green under his roof, but there's a mutual benefit to be had."

They become a kind of family, as children come and go. There's thieving, but also real caring among them.

"It goes on this way, their queer assortment of lives patchworked into the house. The pieces don't fit together, but then, Jacob himself has never fit anywhere, so he's accustomed to a few rough edges."

Epstein creates a vivid world, one of poverty and grime, but also of a kind of caring. Jacob, for all his crimes, has a heart, feeding his young students and trying to help them be able to feed themselves. More than that, he provides a sense of community among the orphaned and abandoned. He could easily form an army of children stealing for his own profit in exchange for a place to sleep.

"If he were a more ambitious sort, he might do it, but something stops him. Not scruples, exactly, but a sense that if he brought them in through tricks and persuasion, it would be different, in some nameless way that would sour everything. They choose him, they seek him out, and were it the other way round, he would no longer quite know himself."

So yes, scruples, or at least a kind of moral code, an inheritance from his loving mother, guides Jacob in his relationships with these ragged children who would be alone in the world if not for him. Dickensian London was not a kind place for the young or the poor, even worse for the young poor.

The novel carries us through to a dramatic ending, one that both mirrors Dickens' own ending for Fagin and rewrites it. Epstein has created a character much more memorable than Dickens' original. She takes the basic history and allows the reader to see it through a different perspective, one that's much more interesting and nuanced—and a lot more fun to read.