"Ghetto" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... patiently enough for payment. Some needy employees, some poverty-stricken families—had thus installed themselves there, and in the long run contrived to pay a trifle for their accommodation. In consequence, however, of the demolition of the ancient Ghetto and the opening of the new streets by which air had been let into the Trastevere district, perfect hordes of tatterdemalions, famished and homeless, and almost without garments, had swooped upon the unfinished houses, filling ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the old adage; for it is still emphatically a dirty street. It has never been able to shake off the Hebraic taint of filth which it inherits from the ancestral thoroughfare. It is slushy and greasy, as if it were twin brother of the Roman Ghetto. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... think this unlikely; especially as it would have been pretty hard to take it away. It is more likely, I think, that the archaic Jews were really not unamused and perhaps not unsympathetic spectators; for the Zionist problem is complicated by a real quarrel in the Ghetto about Zionism. The old religious Jews do not welcome the new nationalist Jews; it would sometimes be hardly an exaggeration to say that one party stands for the religion without the nation, and the other for the nation without the religion. Just as the old agricultural ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... without fear and without reproach. But a career like his is manifestly possible only to a few. The agricultural laborer chained to the soil, and the trader—often the despised Jew confined to the Ghetto—had no part in the life of chivalry. Outside of Christendom the Saracen was to be converted or slain, and he was far oftener slain ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... fair Rebecca, whom you brought with you from the Ghetto of Venice, and whom it pleases you here to give out to be your wife, married at Venice. I hope, however, that you have not committed so heinous a sin as to take a Jewess to wife, for then you should not escape with the gallows, but ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... backward little country town or village, have burrowed: the thought of Virgil's line with it all. The mangy green grass in front, where the children fly kites and the inconceivable skeleton horses graze, is the site of the former Ghetto; and behind its remaining synagogue, the little belfry, the houses of the Cencis, are down at heel carts and ragged peasants round the little isolated Ghetto fountain; and on the other side the Aventine, the bridge of—was ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... man rambled on. He was back in the days when social New York foamed with beauty, when it held more loveliness to the square inch than any other spot on earth. He was back in the days when Fifth Avenue was an avenue and not a ghetto. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... up as he passed. And at the appointed hour the duke reappeared, took leave this time of the man in the mask, and retraced his steps towards his palace. But scarcely had he turned the corner of the Jewish Ghetto, when four men on foot, led by a fifth who was on horseback, flung themselves upon him. Thinking they were thieves, or else that he was the victim of some mistake, the Duke of Gandia mentioned his name; but instead of the name checking the murderers' daggers, their strokes were redoubled, and ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... murderous deeds of old— The grisly story Chaucer told, And many an ugly tale beside, Of children caught and crucified. I heard the ducat-sweating thieves Beneath the Ghetto's slouching eaves, And thrust beyond the tented green, The leper's cry, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... prayer-bell, and steals through painted windows into the dazzling confusion of pictured and gilded glories that glitter and gleam from roof and wall within. And it goes, too, across the Tiber, up the filthy and noisome Ghetto, where, hemmed in by ghostly superstition, the sons of Israel are growing up without vital day, like wan white plants in cellars; and the black mournful obelisks of the cypresses in the villas around, it touches with a solemn glory. The castle of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... his way through one of the quiet corners of the Trastevere. He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again regarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and woeful language ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... out of which literature is made; the raw stuff of art. Her capacity to handle English—after so short a residence in America—shows that she possesses also the instrument of expression. More fortunate than the poet of the Ghetto, Morris Rosenfeld, she will have at her command the most popular language in the world, and she has already produced in it passages of true literature, especially in her impressionistic rendering of the sea and the bustling phantasmagoria ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin |
