Young Champion, The.
[Aguilar, Grace] Isaacs, A.S. The Young Champion. One Year in Grace Aguilar’s Girlhood. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1913.
8vo.; blue-grey cloth stamped in red, white and blind; light wear.
First edition of an early Aguilar biography, fictionalizing a year in her youth; told with some liberties which Isaacs acknowledges in the preface: “There has been no conscious attempt to idealize her character or exaggerate her importance.
To make her the centre of a group of happy girls of her age, it was thought, would serve to add to her influence. That certain liberties have been taken with Mrs. Hall’s friendship, may be excused for a similar reason. There is no exact evidence that she met Moses Montefiore or Benjamin Israeli, or that she quoted from Shakespeare on a certain walk with her friend in the streets of London. But here again the critic need not be too severe. In fiction the end often justifies the means.
The third of Isaacs’s four volumes conceived as instructional tools, and brought out under the auspices of the Jewish Publication Society, The Young Champion molds the image of Grace Aguilar into a model for young girls:
Few lives can be more helpful to our young people to-day, to our girls in particular, than that of Grace Aguilar. She possesses the distinction of being a modern author, instead of an ancient heroine. Doubtless some are still living that knew her, for she died only sixty-five years ago…In the hope that the story may prove readable to our young people, and, brief though it be, suggestive to their parents—for it touches on topics that can no longer be ignored by those who wish Jewish foundations to be permanent, and who see little prospect for the strengthening of Jewish ideals except in the old-fashioned balance-wheels—this little volume is submitted to the public...” (Preface)
Abram Samuel Isaacs (1852-1920) was a prominent member of the New York Jewish community during the late 19th- and early 20th century, as a rabbi, editor, and educator. It is this last role, it seems, that he took most seriously. In addition to his credentials as a professor of Hebrew and German at New York University; his editorship of the Jewish Messenger and American Hebrew; and his publication of two adult studies—and early work on the poet Moses Chaim Luzzato (1878), and What is Judaism (1912)—he cast an eye to the fabric of the Jewish community of the future in preparing four books for younger readers: Stories from the Rabbis (1894) and Step by Step (1910), about the early life of Moses Mendelssohn; The Young Champion (1913) and Under the Sabbath Lamp (1919).
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