CANR
WORK TITLE: Fagin the Thief
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://allisonepstein.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Lansing, Michigan.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, M.F.A. (fiction); University of Michigan, B.A. (creative writing).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Editor and writer. Editor for a philanthropic consulting firm.
AWARDS:Northwestern University, Distinguished Thesis award, 2019–20, for Let the Dead Bury the Dead.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
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Allison Epstein is a historical fiction author and professional editor based in Chicago. She writes historical fiction with reimagined plots. Her debut novel, the 2021 A Tip for the Hangman, is an Elizabethan thriller featuring playwright Christopher Marlowe, known as Kit, pressed into service as a spy for the crown. In 1585 England, Protestant Queen Elizabeth hires Kit to intercept a plot to put Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. When caught, he claims to be a double agent and narrowly escapes. But the money is good and allows him to publish his plays. Epstein mixes modern language with period detail. Despite “rapid-fire POV changes necessary to advance the action-packed plot,” the book is still “a fun escapade,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly.
Epstein’s second historical novel, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, is an immersive alternate history set in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1812 after the defeat of Napoleon. Tsar Serge’s second son, the wayward Grand Duke Felix is banished to Catherine Palace to live off an allowance and stay out of the way. He’s joined by his lover, Capt. Sasha Dorokhin of Russia’s Imperial Army. When Sasha discovers and rescues a mysterious woman, Sofia, and brings her into the palace, she disrupts their lives and even the country. Sasha warns she might be a witch, but Felix is captivated by her. Sofia also infiltrates the fictional Koalitsiya rebellious movement that calls for legal protections for workers.
“Epstein interweaves a brisk plot with Eastern European folktales that reveal a vila’s insidious power,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic. A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the book, saying: “Epstein’s unique retelling is richly enhanced by Slavic folklore, and the confusion between duty to family or country is expertly portrayed.”
Turning to the classics of Charles Dickens, Epstein published Fagin the Thief, a sympathetic reimagining of the origins of Oliver Twist’s famed pickpocket, liar, and rogue Jacob Fagin. Fagin is born in a Jewish enclave in Victorian London and endures antisemitism from all classes of English society. After his mother dies, he finds himself alone at age 16 and is taken under the wing of a pickpocket and learns the craft. He sets up a home for orphaned children, teaches them to steal, and gathers a crew of famous characters—Jack Dawkins (a.k.a. the Artful Dodger), Toby Crackit, Charley Bates, Oliver Twist, and the incorrigible Bill Sikes.
In an interview with Kay Daly at Chicago Review of Books, Epstein described her desire to redeem Fagin as a character: “Fagin is a stock character of the evil Jew who preys on children… Dickens is so close to giving Fagin a whole life, and then he just doesn’t do it. And I find that infuriating… Dickens put all of these beautiful raw materials right down on the table, and then he wasn’t interested in playing with them. So I will.”
In Kirkus Reviews, a contributor commented: “Epstein captures the bravado and vulnerabilities of Jacob’s motley crew of orphans, and the gritty ambience of the alleys, cellars, and seedy pubs they inhabit.” Epstein does right by the misunderstood Fagin “by lending him a humanity that Dickens’s caricature did not. It’s a lively, finely drawn reimagining and a deeply reverent corrective,” noted Michael Pucci in Library Journal.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2023, review of Let the Dead Bury the Dead; December 15, 2024, review of Fagin the Thief.
Library Journal, December 2024, Michael Pucci, review of Fagin the Thief, p. 81.
Publishers Weekly, December 21, 2020, review of A Tip for the Hangman, p. 55; August 7, 2023, review of Let the Dead Bury the Dead, p. 36.
ONLINE
Allison Epstein homepage, https://allisonepstein.com/ (June 1, 2025).
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (February 25, 2025), Kay Daly, “‘Jewish and Interesting’: An Interview with Allison Epstein about ‘Fagin the Thief.’”
Bios
Short (<200 characters)
Allison Epstein is a historical fiction author and professional editor based in Chicago. She is the author of A Tip for the Hangman, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and Fagin the Thief.
Standard, Third Person (<100 words)
Allison Epstein earned her MFA in fiction from Northwestern University and a BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A Michigan native, she now lives in Chicago, where she enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets. She is the author of historical novels including A Tip for the Hangman, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and Fagin the Thief.
Long, Not Formal, First Person (200 words)
I’m a historical fiction writer with an MFA in fiction from Northwestern University. I finished my BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2014. I was born in Lansing, Michigan, and currently live in Chicago, where I share a home with a grumpy cat named Mina.
My first novel, A Tip for the Hangman, was named one of Barnes & Noble’s Most Anticipated Reads of February 2021 and one of the Chicago Tribune‘s most anticipated 2021 releases. My second novel, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, received the 2019–2020 Distinguished Thesis award from Northwestern University in an earlier form.
When asked during grad school to generate a list of themes and objects that appear repeatedly in my writing, I came up with the following: church schisms, rats, high-stakes dinner parties, the Decembrist revolt of 1825, Anne of Cleves, salmon, librarians, puns, people who are very wrong but believe themselves to be very right, and passive-aggressive breakfasts.
I also write a twice-monthly newsletter called Dirtbags Through the Ages, which profiles the weirdest and wackiest people and events from across world history. There are a lot of swears in it, but my mom subscribes and enjoys it, so you might too.
By day, I work as an editor for a philanthropic consulting firm. By night, I am in bed by 10:30.
Social Media Links
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rapscallison/
Substack: https://rapscallison.substack.com
Allison Epstein
Agent
Bridget Smith
Allison Epstein earned her MFA in fiction from Northwestern University and a BA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A Michigan native, she now lives in Chicago, where she works as an editor. When not writing, she enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets. She is the author of historical novels including A Tip for the Hangman, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, and the forthcoming Our Rotten Hearts.
Find Allison on her website, or follow her on Twitter @rapscallison.
“Jewish and Interesting”: An Interview with Allison Epstein about “Fagin the Thief”
by Kay Daly
February 25, 2025
Our interview with Allison Epstein about her new novel, "Fagin the Thief."
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Allison Epstein specializes in novels inspired by literary history. Her past works have taken us on a deep dive into the life of one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (Christopher Marlowe in A Tip for the Hangman” and into an alternate history of early 19th-century Russia (Let the Dead Bury the Dead).
Her latest offering, Fagin the Thief, expands the world of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, an old chestnut that’s seen so many theatrical and cinematic adaptations. But Epstein’s novel isn’t merely a retelling. Instead, she expands our perspective to go beyond “reviewing the situation” to empathizing with the full sweep of 19th-century England’s poor underclass. Her Fagin is smart, wounded, caring, heroic, craven, and unapologetically Jewish. Epstein transforms Dickens’ morality tale to a complex exploration of the life of an underdog that invites us to question the pat answers Dickens provided in his early novel about morality and the complex ways people are shaped by their own traumas.
I recently spoke with Epstein about her new novel. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kay Daly
So far, you’ve written biofiction about Christopher Marlowe, a novel inspired by War and Peace, and now a quasi re-telling of Oliver Twist. What draws you to history and, more specifically, literary history?
Allison Epstein
I think of myself as an amateur history nerd. I don’t have any formal training as a historian, but I will pick up any historical topic and follow it way down a rabbit hole, much farther than I need to. My academic training actually is in classic literature—you know, the classic English major. So writing literary history brings together those two aspects of what I love. I’ve written things adjacent to Shakespeare and adjacent to Dickens, and both Shakespeare and Dickens are held up as great writers, as if they have produced these things out of all context—you just absorb them as the workings of a great genius. When you think about them more in terms of a historical person who wrote this book in a historical context, it really comes to life. They’re flawed men who wrote flawed books, as great as they are, and that I find it really energizing to imagine what the author might have been living through, what the characters in that time might have been living through.
Kay Daly
What drew you to the project of telling Fagin’s story beyond the bounds of Oliver Twist? Do you have a history with this novel, or was there something else that planted the seed?
Allison Epstein
I came into my love for Oliver Twist through my love for the Broadway musical. The Fagin in that show is really just a whimsical uncle figure who’s got a little bit of mystery. He’s got all the best songs in the show. When I got old enough to actually read the book, it was an extremely different experience. Dickens was telling a morality tale with characters who served a particular purpose but were not built out as people. Bill Sykes is a really dramatic example. He’s a villain who has no motivations other than ‘he is a villain.’ Fagin is a stock character of the evil Jew who preys on children. There’s no way around that. But to me, he’s still interesting because he’s as close as Dickens got in that book to writing a character. You can tell when Fagin’s talking on the page. He’s a different kind of person. He’s funny, and he’s got his own little schemes on the side, and he has really complicated relationships with people in his circle. He cares for people, and he betrays them. He hates them and he loves them at the same time. Dickens is so close to giving Fagin a whole life, and then he just doesn’t do it. And I find that infuriating, because I love the raw materials that he put down, and then he gave up and turned it into an antisemitic stock figure. Dickens put all of these beautiful raw materials right down on the table, and then he wasn’t interested in playing with them. So I will.
Kay Daly
You mention the musical. There have been so many adaptations, on stage and screen, of this story. Did you look to any of those for inspiration? What do you think of the ways Fagin has been depicted?
Allison Epstein
I’ve really immersed myself in Oliver Twist adaptations in the last couple of years. What I’ve seen is you can have an interesting adaptation of Fagin, but you can’t have an interesting adaptation of Fagin that’s Jewish. So many adaptations step back so fast, as if to say, “We’re making this interesting, compelling villain who’s sashaying onto the stage doing all these interesting things. He can’t be Jewish when he does that, because then that’s an antisemitic caricature.” So they either make him interesting and captivating, or they make him boring. But his only character trait is that he’s Jewish. I’ve seen several adaptations where you just see him praying and speaking with an exaggerated Yiddish accent, and that’s the extent of the characterization. And that’s part of what I wanted to do in this book. I want him to be Jewish and interesting at the same time.
Kay Daly
There’s a certain audacity in retellings, which Fagin the Thief is in part—as well as an affection for the work you’re retelling. What was it like to confront this giant of the English literary tradition?
Allison Epstein
There’s a reason that I chose Oliver Twist for a Dickens retelling and not, say, Bleak House or David Copperfield. Oliver Twist is a strange book. It’s a classic, and it’s compelling in certain places, but there are also parts of that book that don’t work and don’t make sense. You see the sparks of genius that Dickens will give us in a book like Bleak House. But you also see one-hundred-and-fifty pages about a side plot that nobody needs. No one cares about the brother in Oliver Twist! That gave me a sense of, not exactly permission, but that it did not feel like a great book that’s untouchable. It felt like a fascinating book that I loved, that had problems that I desperately wanted to fix. And it sounds incredibly arrogant to say, “Yes, I can fix Dickens’s problems.” Charles Dickens is a better writer than I will ever be. But it did feel like the book is alive enough that there’s space to kind of step into it and say, What didn’t he add in this world? He added everything to David Copperfield. He didn’t add everything to Oliver Twist in that way. There’s very clearly a world that exists beyond the snapshot that he showed us in that book.
Kay Daly
I was captivated by your empathetic portrayals of both Fagin and Bill Sykes, as well as your beautifully tragic rendition of Nancy. You’re clearly writing against the grain of Dickens’ intent. In the current cultural climate, there are many who embrace these kinds of critical reading practices, while others view them as unfair to the author’s intent or off-limits because you’re taking the original author out of their context. What would you say to such a critique?
Allison Epstein
My intent is not to condemn Charles Dickens as an antisemite. I find that an incredibly uninteresting line of argument. What I am interested in is the character and the text. And I think we can look at a character written in a book from two-hundred years ago, and say, This is not a whole person, without saying, therefore this book should not be read. I find it worrisome that a problematic character or problematic attitude from a past book means that that book shouldn’t be read. I think that book should still be read. And I don’t think a racist character in a book means that the book is racist. I don’t think it means that we should throw out the baby with the bathwater necessarily. I think what it means is, when we’re approaching these texts from a time that’s not ours with a standard that’s not ours, it becomes twice as important for us as modern readers to come into it with nuance and awareness so that we can say, “This book is brilliant. In some ways, this book is also harmful in some ways.” How do we reconcile that? How do we think about it? I think we need to be able to hold both of those ideas in our heads at once and acknowledge that this book, if written today, would probably not become a classic because of how it portrays particular groups. There are still things in this book that are important, that are true, that are compelling. Both of those are true at the same time.
Kay Daly
I absolutely loved getting Fagin’s point of view on Oliver, who is presented by Dickens as all purity and innocence and light, which Dickens tacitly attributes to the fact that Oliver really comes from the upper classes, despite his workhouse origins. How do you conceive of Oliver in your retelling, and what was your intent? Are you reflecting Fagin’s character, or Oliver’s?
Allison Epstein
I feel that Oliver is almost certainly—were he a real person—not as innocent as Charles Dickens projects him to be. That is the quintessential innocent child flung into a literal den of thieves. Oliver is no more a fully drawn person than Bill Sykes is a fully drawn person. To me, for Oliver to be interesting, there has to be something in him that’s not pure and good. I would make the argument that he survives a pretty terrible set of circumstances in the original novel, and that seems very unlikely for someone who is not at least standing up for himself a little bit, who’s not witnessing the game that’s going on around him. So I think we don’t give them enough credit if we think, “Oh, he didn’t know that any of these people were bad, and he didn’t know he shouldn’t be friends with the Artful Dodger.” He knew something, I feel fairly certain that made sense to me.
Kay Daly
See Also
Interviews
Pushing Against the Form: An Interview with Nate Lippens
You speak a lot to the experience of antisemitism in Victorian London, which is deeply enmeshed in Dickens’ original novel, though not critiqued. What was your experience confronting these prejudices unglossed, and how much was that experience a motivation for your writing of Fagin the Thief?
Allison Epstein
Essentially, the first sentence we meet Fagin, he is an ugly, old Jew leaning over a fireplace. Dickens uses his name and “the Jew” interchangeably, and he’s described as reptilian. He’s slithering through the world. You can’t trust him for a second. The physicality of it is frightening. If I see you hammering the word Jew repeatedly four times a page, every page for an entire book, it hits you every single time, like, “Okay, I get it. You can back off a little bit.” But as a person interested in classic literature, I can say that is not a Dickens problem. I used to play a game with myself in graduate school. I would pick up a book before 1900 and say, “I wonder how long I can get before someone does something weird about the Jews in this book?” Wow. You almost can’t make it through a book without a classic author just tossing it off. Sometimes it’s just a joke and it’s not relevant to the plot at all. I love many of those books, but it’s just a thing that happens all the time, and once you look for it, you can’t stop noticing it.
Kay Daly
Of historical fiction, some people will bluntly say, “I don’t like historical fiction” or “I’m not interested in reading those stories.” Have you encountered those kinds of attitudes? If so, what is your response?
Allison Epstein
I do hear people say, “I’m not interested in historical fiction,” the same way that I hear people say, “I don’t like learning about history.” And I wonder how much of that is the way that historical fiction is presented as well as the way that we learn history. I love learning about history. I don’t love being taught history. And I think that when you’re reading a book that’s a nonfiction historical book, the biggest compliment a reviewer can give it is that it is readable. That should be the baseline for a book of history because the past is full of everything that goes on today. It’s just as human and alive as the present moment is. And I don’t think we were always encouraged to experience history that way. We think of history as a set of names and dates and figures rather than people, and what I love about historical fiction is that it takes those figures and makes them people again. But if that’s not something you expect when you hear the word history; you expect something dry. You expect to be lectured about a particular battle of World War II, I’m not surprised people aren’t interested in that.
Kay Daly
Your acknowledgements end with a charming note: “Charles Dickens: You made a mistake with Bullseye. Don’t worry. I fixed it.” I’ve got to ask: What mistake did you fix? And were there other “mistakes” you fixed?
Allison Epstein
It’s the scene where Sykes dies, and as the last sentence of that entire scene, Dickens also throws the dog off the roof and has him break his head open on a rock. It’s just horrifying and completely unnecessary. And I feel very strongly that that’s a mistake, that poor dog, who never did anything to anybody.
I don’t know if I would call it fixing a mistake, but one aspect of the original that troubled me, and that I wanted to think about, was Bill and Nancy. Both of them in the original novel don’t seem real to me, and Dickens really doubled down on it. “This is how an abusive relationship works. Some are just bad, and some people who are just good get trapped in just bad relationships.” That, to me, doesn’t feel right or respectful to people who are in those relationships. It’s not a personal experience I’ve had, but it’s a personal experience that I’ve seen, and I always find the one note that Dickens gives it to be very disrespectful to Nancy. She’s a whole person who’s smart and paying attention, and she has a personality, and she has wants and dreams. She wouldn’t be in a relationship that was awful from day one because she feels she doesn’t deserve anything. That’s not how those situations start. There has to be something there that’s worth holding on to. And Dickens doesn’t give Nancy darkness to her light, and he doesn’t give Bill light to the darkness. That bothers me every time I read it, not only because Bill is a human being, but also because Nancy is a person who’s in love with the person who is hurting her, and that that theme is as relevant now, as it was for Dickens.
FICTION
Fagin the Thief
By Allison Epstein
Doubleday
Published on February 25, 2025
Allison Epstein: A Love Letter to the Fictional Thief
"As a historical crime writer, there’s one trope I love more than almost anything, and that’s an old-timey thief with an elaborate scheme."
February 25, 2025 By Allison Epstein
VIA DOUBLEDAY BOOKS
As a historical crime writer, there’s one trope I love more than almost anything, and that’s an old-timey thief with an elaborate scheme. If we had all day, I’d take you on a tour of all my favorite robbers and scoundrels, both real and fictional. Take Jeanne de la Motte, the French con artist who stole a diamond necklace worth about $17.5 million in today’s money by paying a sex worker to dress up as Marie Antoinette. Or the Gilded Age crime boss Marm Mandelbaum, who had a secret elevator hidden in her chimney to whisk away stolen goods when the police came to visit.
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When it comes to old-timey thieves in fiction, though, there’s one book that looms large, and that’s Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. We’re all familiar with the world of the Artful Dodger and his mysterious teacher Fagin, and after years of working on an Oliver Twist retelling, I deeply understand these characters’ lasting allure. There were plenty of reasons I sat down to write Fagin the Thief—digging under the surface of a two-dimensional villain, for example—but honestly, a core attraction was that writing about thieves is fun.
As someone who’s spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about how and why someone would go about picking a pocket or two, I’ve developed some theories about why readers continue to fall in love with fictional robbers and thieves. Fundamentally, fiction about thieves blends the thrillingly unknown and the darkly recognizable in ways that can’t help but capture readers’ imagination.
Stories about thieves are relatable, at least in a way that crime fiction about serial killers or unsolved murders might not be. The classic trope of the thief with a heart of gold is seductive because it takes the honorable values so many of us aspire to and flips them through the looking-glass into deviance. Equity, justice, and an exciting train robbery? Small wonder we’re a fan.
But the less-savory type of thief can be much more interesting. A fictional thief’s motivations are frequently dark, but if we’re honest, they aren’t unfamiliar. Survival, jealousy, resentment, exhaustion. A sense that if the rich can exploit others, surely there’s nothing wrong with exploiting them a little in return. And the desire for something nicer than we’re used to: something sparkling to hold up to the light, which we would appreciate, we’re sure, in a way its rightful owner never would.
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If it sounds like I’m about to say something cringeworthy like “no ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism,” well, there’s a reason Dickens wrote his original novel as equal parts entertainment and social commentary. There is no property crime without ownership, and in 2025 as in 1825, there’s no ownership without exploitation. Under a fair system, thieving wouldn’t come with the same sense of punching up to spite the rich.
To me, this makes fiction about thieves and other petty criminals more socially subversive than crime fiction about murder. In a murder mystery, we’re usually rooting for the killer to get caught; in fiction about thieves, we’re rooting for the criminal to get away with it.
This same sense of relatability makes crime novels about thieves ideal for characters with rich, complicated, and familiar interior lives. Novels centering violent crime or murder face a particular structural challenge here: it’s difficult to write a character who has the emotional response most of us would have to a murder and engages in the kind of high-stakes plot we expect from a crime thriller. If someone I love was murdered, I doubt I’d be teaming up with the local cops to search for clues. I’d be having twice-weekly sessions with my therapist and bursting into tears while doing basic tasks. The resulting book might be an interesting slow-paced reflection on grief, but few would call it a crime thriller.
But a story about a theft or heist isn’t quite so grim—which, paradoxically, can let a book delve into even darker places. Because the stakes of pickpocketing aren’t inherently life or death, a fictional thief doesn’t need to be grimly resilient or hell-bent on revenge to soldier through the horror of the inciting incident and keep the plot moving. They can be cowardly, selfish, prideful, jealous: any number of small, unheroic traits we can begrudgingly recognize in ourselves. And what happens to these imperfect characters under incredible pressure? What kind of pain, struggle, betrayal, horror, and growth comes out of that crucible? I can’t stop reading pages to find out.
Books about thieves can start off with a crime that’s exciting and even attractive, then slow-simmer into the mess of guilt and grief and terror and anger that gives a story its staying power. Every twist and complication can hit with the full emotional weight we would expect in our own daily lives, while maintaining the propulsive energy that keeps these stories thrilling.
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And if done well, every page you turn can feel like looking in a mirror.
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Allison EpsteinDoubleday BooksFagin the ThiefHeist Novelshistorical fiction
Allison Epstein
ALLISON EPSTEIN earned her M.F.A. in fiction from Northwestern University and a B.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A Michigan native, she now lives in Chicago. When not writing, she enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets. She is the author of the historical novels A Tip for the Hangman and Let the Dead Bury the Dead.
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Allison Epstein on the Differences Between Publishing Her First and Second Novels
Allison Epstein, MFA Fiction Alumnus
My second novel, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, comes out in October, and I’m coming to terms with no longer being a debut author. It’s not my first rodeo anymore. What has the process taught me? Mostly that it takes more than two rodeos to be good at rodeos.
In some ways, I found publishing a book to be easier the second time. With my debut, I had no sense of how to calibrate my expectations. I scoured each “Most Anticipated” list hoping to see my name and constantly came away disappointed. Now, I take joy in the press I receive, but I know my book’s not ending up on Good Morning America. (Do I still hope? Sure. I’m human.)
I also have a better sense of how much control I have over sales—which is to say, not much. That’s been freeing. For publicity, I planned a few book events in cities where I have friends and family, and I’m blurbing other writers’ books to build relationships in my genre, and I’m trying to be chill otherwise. My team reassures me I don’t need to be on TikTok.
In other ways, though, publishing has been significantly harder the second go-round. I took eight years to move my debut, A Tip for the Hangman, from empty Word doc to published book. I was on the hook for a final draft of book two in 18 months, during a global pandemic that obliterated all my routines. Besides, there were eyes on me now. My editor and agent had expectations. What if I couldn’t deliver? What if my debut was a fluke, and a midlist fluke at that?
There were multiple points writing Let the Dead Bury the Dead that I thought this would be the book that beat me. I’m delighted to say it wasn’t. I’m so proud of how it came together, and I hope it finds readers who care about it as much as I do. But I’m not sure the process of publishing a book ever gets easier. Every project is different and comes with its own challenges, whether they’re thorny craft problems or new bumps on the emotional roller coaster of publishing. All I can do is keep working and hope I figure it out.
Anyway, I’ve been distracting from my publishing nerves by revising my third novel. Maybe it takes three rodeos to get good at rodeos. We’ll see.
Allison Epstein is the author of the historical fiction novels A Tip for the Hangman and Let the Dead Bury the Dead, both from Doubleday Books. Her third novel, Our Rotten Hearts, will be published in 2025.
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October 5, 2023
What do you do with a problem like Fagin, the petty-thief ringleader and most indelible character in Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist" - and one of the most vicious antisemitic stereotypes ever committed to paper?
Even Dickens himself didn't know. In the years after publishing his famous tale of the impoverished, golden-hearted orphan Oliver, who is bleakly introduced to the London underworld by the leering, greedy Fagin, he came to deeply rue the vitriol that his villain channeled into the world. After Dickens befriended a Jewish couple in the 1860s who told him of the harm the character had done to their community, the author set to work excising mentions of Fagin's Jewishness from subsequent editions of the novel. And, in a final act of penitence, he wrote a Jewish character, Riah, into "Our Mutual Friend," who is, in his saintliness, almost as unbelievable as Fagin is in his wickedness.
Over the decades, many have tried to bring more nuance to the character, including the beloved Broadway musical "Oliver!," which painted him as comic more than menacing; a turn-of-the-century BBC miniseries adaptation of "Oliver Twist," which gave him a backstory as a magician in Prague; and the lauded cartoonist Will Eisner's graphic novel "Fagin the Jew," which imagined his early life in London's slums. Now, yet another writer is trying their hand at rescuing Fagin from the depths of iniquity. Allison Epstein's "Fagin the Thief" is a sorrowful, reflective novel, pockmarked with episodes of real insight and beauty. But it does not ultimately succeed in its efforts to humanize its central figure - in part because it, too, is riddled with stereotypes, of a storytelling kind, in a way that its premise may have made impossible to avoid.
A blurb on the book's cover touts "Fagin the Thief" as transforming its antihero as "Wicked" did the Wicked Witch of the West. And as in "Wicked," Epstein's novel opens with the reflection that its central character had a mother and a father.
As with Elphaba in "Wicked," the tight-knit community into which Fagin is born views him with suspicion from birth. (What sets him apart isn't the color of his skin but rather his parentage: his father - who haunts him through the book - who was hung as a thief before he was born.) Like Elphaba, Epstein's Fagin is tormented by a sense of an unrealized internal power, one that sets him apart from the herd-minded milieu in which he is raised; and he has a drive to care for society's downtrodden, an obscure need to help those who cannot help themselves - even though he knows that in a world as unequal and unforgiving as his own, any civic-minded aspirations are sure to prove delusional, if not to outright backfire.
Why these comparisons? Only to note that entries in the subgenre of character rehabilitation - other examples of which include Madeline Miller's "Circe," John Gardner's "Grendel" and the "Maleficent" film franchise - tend to follow a familiar path. We see the central character at a time when they had not yet hardened into their final form; when they were subject to the tenderness and vulnerability of childhood; when they had the option, perhaps, to choose a different path. And then we see how the path on which they did infamously end up looked more complicated from their initial perspective, a navigation not between right and wrong but between survival on their own terms and submission.
Jacob Fagin, in Epstein's telling, is obsessed with survival, perhaps because of his start as an outsider among outsiders; he is painfully aware that almost everyone he knows expects him to come to no good. So Fagin commits himself to that mission, despite his beloved mother, Leah's, profound wish for him to choose a different life. He strikes out alone as a teenager and becomes so accustomed to being rebuffed by the world that he cannot accept true affection when it comes his way.
Eventually, in his 30s, Fagin effectively adopts an inept teenage pickpocket named Bill Sikes, setting the tenor for the rest of his life. He will take in other abandoned children to train as thieves; he tells himself it's a smart business choice, but it's obvious that his real motivation is his compassion for their lonesomeness and a desire to help. (Oliver is one of them and, interestingly, portrayed as a creature of real wiliness - not, as Dickens painted him, an ill-fated innocent.) And Fagin will increasingly live in abject terror of Sikes, whose unpredictable violence is the main threat in "Oliver Twist," and whom Epstein portrays as the real (wounded) menace.
Literature thrives on familiar plotlines, but there is something about this particular one, the striving to give depth to a character unjustly inscribed in history as pure evil, that tends to thwart itself. The drive to humanize is a drive to make something understandable. But parsing a person as if they were an equation - one part traumatized childhood, one part hardscrabble launch into independence, one part secret soft spot - tends to make them come across as more inscrutable, not less.
We still read "Oliver Twist" despite the antisemitism - and the fact that it is extraordinarily depressing - because there is life in it. Fagin is horrid, and Oliver is in some ways an idealized blank, but around them is a cast that cannot help but sparkle. Yes, it is an old story - an innocent is taken advantage of, with justice served in the end - but it never truly feels like one, because it is full of fresh views. That freshness is missing from "Fagin the Thief." The characters too often feel present because they are useful, rather than real.
"Fagin the Thief" is elegant and, in its own way, moving. It easily held my attention. I slipped straight through it, as its title character might slip through a crowd in London's Haymarket, scoping out an unwitting target. But unlike Fagin, I never quite closed my grasp on my mark. He remained a distant profile, alluring in an off-putting kind of way, perhaps better left uncaught.
- - -
Talya Zax is an editor at the Forward.
- - -
Fagin the Thief
By Allison Epstein.
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Zax, Talya. "Charles Dickens's Fagin gets rehabilitated, again." Washington Post, 8 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A830154890/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=02272b32. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
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HOST: SCOTT SIMON
SCOTT SIMON: Sometimes, there are second chances in literature. Charles Dickens' Fagin, the central scoundrel in his 1838 novel "Oliver Twist," leads a crime ring that exploits hungry orphans to rob unsuspecting Londoners. Fagin sings in "Oliver!," the musical inspired by "Oliver Twist."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "OLIVER!")
RON MOODY: (As Fagin, singing) In this life, one thing counts. In the bank, large amounts. I'm afraid these don't grow on trees. You got to pick a pocket or two. You got to pick a pocket or two, boys. You got to pick a pocket or two.
SIMON: That's Ron Moody in the 1968 film. His portrayal and Dickens' own novel present Fagin as calculating, miserly and cruel, depictions that have often been accused of being antisemitic. But what made Fagin who he was? Allison Epstein's new novel gives us Jacob Fagin from the age of 6 growing up in grimy London slums, what he does to get by, and what he becomes. Her new novel, "Fagin The Thief." And Allison Epstein joins us from the studios of WBEZ in Chicago. Thank you so much for being with us.
ALLISON EPSTEIN: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: Why did you want to give this almost signature rapscallion a backstory?
EPSTEIN: Well, I'm glad we started with the clip of Ron Moody, actually. That was my introduction to the character of Fagin. And then as I got old enough to read the actual "Oliver Twist," I very quickly realized this is a very different kind of character in the Dickens novel than in the musical. It's a two-dimensional stereotypical portrayal without question, but there's still something alive and interesting about him in a way that I just didn't want to let go of.
SIMON: Yeah. Tell us about this small enclave of Stepney in London where he grew up.
EPSTEIN: That's one thing that Dickens really never talks about in "Oliver Twist" is where does Fagin come from? He just appears out of a cave in the eastern side of London. And I really had to think, you know, where would a person like that grow up? Where would a person like that come from? And as I was doing research, there were little enclaves of Jewish families that would settle in London as they would emigrate. And they kind of would stick together. And I was just really in love with that idea of a small culture kind of keeping its own sense of togetherness.
SIMON: There's a very vivid scene in which young Jacob sees a man hanged for being a thief, and his mother wants him to see it. Why?
EPSTEIN: In the novel, she's pretty convinced that that's the road that he's on for his trajectory. In my novel, I imagine that Jacob Fagin's father was a thief as well, and he was hanged for thieving, which was, of course, very common at that time. And it seemed like it was a fate that was coming for my character of Fagin sort of from the moment he was born. And his mother, of course, sees that coming and tries to stop it. But as you can imagine, from where we know Fagin from, that's maybe not as successful as she had hoped.
SIMON: And she dies when Jacob is young. What does that leave him? What are his options in life?
EPSTEIN: She is the most important person in his life, Jacob's mother. And once she passes away, he really is standing sort of on the precipice of the rest of his life, and there's no one next to him to help him decide where does he go next. So the most important thing for him becomes survival. What do I have to do today to make sure that I am alive to see tomorrow?
SIMON: Let me ask you - something you address in the afterward - is Dickens' original portrayal of Fagin so grotesquely antisemitic that even Dickens regretted it?
EPSTEIN: He did, eventually. It took him some time. The novel was published originally in the 1830s, and it was, of course, serialized. As the novel wrapped up, he received a letter from a Jewish woman from London who was sort of taking him to task for his portrayal of Fagin. She commented that, you know, Dickens is such a wonderful hero and champion of the oppressed, but at the same time, he seems to have no particular sympathy for the character of Fagin. He refers to him almost exclusively as the Jew. And Dickens, at first, kind of pushed back against that feedback. But to give him credit, the next time he came about to write a Jewish character in one of his novels, it was a very different portrayal, let's say, than how he approached Fagin.
SIMON: And I'm interested in - dare I call it - this dynamic. Fagin - Jacob Fagin settles in an abandoned building that becomes his criminal headquarters but also a kind of refuge for children like him, right?
EPSTEIN: Yeah. That was something that was important to me as I was working on a retelling of the original, to think about sort of in a different way because, of course, in Dickens' portrayal of Fagin, he's always kind of portrayed as a child snatcher and an opportunist who sees these small, vulnerable children and takes advantage of them. And there's certainly still some of that. I wouldn't call my Fagin an altruist in any particular way. But I did think, you know, there's a reason that someone would go into a life like that. And one thing that seemed clear to me was part of it is identification. That's a life that he had and is trying to help others from - to not have.
SIMON: There's a short line in the novel that, among many others, stays with me in particular. And it is said of Fagin, quote - I'm quoting you, of course - "if he wants to eat today, he has work to do."
EPSTEIN: Yeah, there's no way around what has to happen. We can judge him and his court of thieves all we like for a life of lawlessness, but if they don't turn to that, what is the alternative? It doesn't seem possible to me that, you know, he would go out and get an ordinary job at a law firm and come back home at 5 p.m. to a nice home.
SIMON: Yeah.
EPSTEIN: That's not the path that he's on. That's not the opportunity he's being offered.
SIMON: Reimagining and rewriting Dickens, what do you come to appreciate and maybe not like about his work?
EPSTEIN: I am repeatedly impressed by how strong Dickens is of a storyteller and how much of a picture he can paint of the world that his readers both knew and didn't know. In "Oliver Twist," in particular, there's a real bifurcation between the kind of polite world of society that Dickens does give, but then this underworld that his readers would have been completely unfamiliar with, and Dickens brings it to life so well. He is the absolute perfect source for someone writing historical fiction because he gives you everything you need to understand the time that he's living in. It's brilliant.
SIMON: Yeah.
EPSTEIN: As far as what I don't like about Dickens - it's a funny question because I think sometimes we have a tendency for writers like Dickens or, you know, like a Shakespeare, we'll take them and put them on such a pedestal and a canon that we'll think this author is a genius and, therefore, this author could not have written a book that could be any better - it's already perfect the way that it is. And I think the more time I spent with Dickens for this project, the more I was able to see him as a working writer who was trying to figure things out, who would make a plot decision in a novel that maybe didn't make any sense or maybe that's not the route I would have chosen. There's things I disagree with in his writing, things I would do differently. That doesn't mean I write off Dickens as a fraud and an impostor, just that he's just out there making a living, doing an incredible job of it.
SIMON: Yeah. Allison Epstein, her new novel, "Fagin The Thief." Thank you so much for being with us.
EPSTEIN: Thanks so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD HOUGHTEN'S "AMIGOS")
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"Allison Epstein's 'Fagin the Thief' gives the Oliver Twist character a backstory." Weekend Edition Saturday, 21 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828414970/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1401bebc. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
Epstein, Allison FAGIN THE THIEF Doubleday (Fiction None) $28.00 2, 25 ISBN: 9780385550703
A Dickensian world revisited.
Historical fiction writer Epstein rescues Dickens' Fagin from his reputation as a slimy character who exploits orphans, training them in thievery in the clotted, filthy streets of Victorian London. Epstein's Jacob Fagin is a lonely, emotionally wounded man; a master pickpocket to be sure, but also a victim of virulent antisemitism from all classes of English society, which treats the "skinny red-haired Jew" as vermin. Growing up in poverty in a Jewish enclave with a vigilant, caring mother, he takes Hebrew lessons with a neighborhood rabbi in the mornings, and, by the time he's 11, wheedles his way into becoming the apprentice to a deft, gaudy pickpocket. It's a skill, he realizes, "he must learn by doing," and soon practice perfects his sleight of hand. He's 16 when his mother dies, succumbing to whatever pestilence has swept through their mean streets--cholera, typhus, consumption, scarlet fever, influenza--and he's left homeless. Epstein traces his fortunes and misfortunes as he manages to survive, settling into an abandoned building that becomes a refuge for orphans and runaways who want to learn his trade: Jack Dawkins, known as the Artful Dodger; Toby Crackit; Charley Bates; briefly, Oliver Twist; and the incorrigible Bill Sikes, who's fled an abusive, alcoholic father. Sikes graduates from pickpocket to housebreaker, from a swaggering boy to a violent man so filled with anger that Jacob comes to fear for his life. Epstein captures the bravado and vulnerabilities of Jacob's motley crew of orphans, and the gritty ambience of the alleys, cellars, and seedy pubs they inhabit. She brings to her portrait of Fagin--and even Sikes--a tenderness and empathy that renders them as palpable: men, haunted by loss, longing to be loved.
Vivid characters populate a riveting narrative.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Epstein, Allison: FAGIN THE THIEF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819570270/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ef1dc857. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
Epstein, Allison. Fagin the Thiel. Doubleday. Feb. 2025. 336p. ISBN 9780385550703. $28. F
Acclaimed historical novelist Epstein (Let the Dead Bury the Dead) retells Dickens's classic Oliver Twist through the perspective of its chief villain, Fagin, in the process redressing the criticisms of antisemitism that have dogged Dickens's novel for nearly two centuries. Readers first meet Jacob Fagin as he prepares breakfast for his gang of child criminals, includingjack Dawkins (the Artful Dodger), Nancy, and, of course, Oliver. Nan's boyfriend Bill Sikes is planning a heist and wants the assistance of one of Fagin's wards, setting in motion a chain of events that will be familiar for readers of Oliver Twist. Epstein also takes readers back decades to Fagiris childhood, when he lived with his mother in a Jewish enclave of London and fell under the sway of an infamous pickpocket. After his mother's sudden death, Fagin was forced to survive on his wits, scrounging and hustling with ruthless impunity, forging the reputation that Dickens would immortalize. VERDICT In creating an origin story for the legendary thief, Epstein deftly addresses Oliver Twist's longstanding "Fagin problem," not by sanitizing or disowning him, as other adaptations have done, but by lending him a humanity that Dickens's caricature did not. It's a lively, finely drawn reimagining and a deeply reverent corrective of a literary monument.--Michael Pucci
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Pucci, Michael. "Epstein, Allison. Fagin the Thiel." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 12, Dec. 2024, p. 81. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A820431124/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=45e360c1. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
Epstein, Allison LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD Doubleday (Fiction None) $28.00 10, 17 ISBN: 9780385549097
Upheaval in Tsarist Russia.
After Napoleon's army retreated from Russia in 1812, years of brutal war left the populace impoverished, roiling with political unrest, and seething with rebellion. Epstein captures the tensions and contradictions of the time in a dramatic page-turner involving the tsar's wayward younger son, Grand Duke Felix; Felix's lover, Sasha, a soldier just returned from the war; and Sofia Azarova, a mesmerizing woman whom Sasha rescues when he finds her prostrate in the snow. Felix is an aristocrat out of central casting: "Tall, strong shouldered, and slim-waisted," Sasha observes; at 28, "he still looked like a storybook prince." His imperious father has exiled him to the sumptuous but far-off Catherine Palace, where he can draw on an ample allowance to indulge his "zest for grandeur." But Felix's life changes irrevocably when Sasha walks in carrying Sofia in his arms. Beautiful, fascinating, and undeniably charismatic, Sofia entices Felix, as if in a spell. Sasha warns him: There is something uncanny about her. She could be a witch, a vila, an evil spirit. But with Sofia's arrival, Sasha realizes, "the trust between them had become fragile," and Felix cannot heed his warning. Nor can Marya resist Sofia's power. Marya is a member of the rebellious popular movement Koalitsiya, which agitates for "legal protections for workers and peasants, a reformed imperial council, religious freedom, [and] a clear path to emancipation for the country's twenty million serfs." Sofia infiltrates the movement, seductively manipulating Marya, at the same time as she insinuates herself into the palace. Violence, betrayal, murder, assassination: Sofia incites mayhem. "This was a woman who could change the shape of the world with a thought," Marya comes to believe. Epstein interweaves a brisk plot with Eastern European folktales that reveal a vila's insidious power. Sofia, hardly human, was "like a creature from legend, an ancient spirit hungry to watch something beautiful burn."
A vividly imagined tapestry of turbulent times.
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"Epstein, Allison: LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A762669104/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2799002d. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
Let the Dead Bury the Dead
Allison Epstein. Doubleday, $28 (368p) ISBN 978-0-385-54909-7
Epstein (A Tip jor the Hangman) imagines an alternate history of Russia in the aftermath of the War of 1812 in this solid exploration of family loyalty and political revolution. After the war, Capt.Sasha Dorokhin of Russia's Imperial Army returns toCatherine Palace in TsarkskoeSelo, where his lover, Grand Duke Felix--the younger son of Tsar Sergei--has been banished from Saint Petersburg for questioning his farher's politics and harassing the palace maids. When Sasha discovers an unconscious woman, Sofia Azarova, outside the palace and carries her inside co safety, her seemingly otherworldly control over natural event prompts him to request her removal--but Felix allows her to stay. Sofia's influence at court grows, but when she con vi nces Felix that a series of riots demanding land and money for the people have merit, the tsar becomes enraged, forcing Felix to flee with her--and driving a wedge between Felix and Sasha, who chooses duty over love when Felix joins the fictional Koalitsiya rebellion. Sofia, meanwhile, ignites a showdown between the palace and the people that has devastating consequences. Epstein's unique retelling is richly enhanced by Slavic folklore, and the confusion between duty to family or country is expertly portrayed. Historical fiction fans will be spellbound. Agent: Bridget Smith. JABberwocky Literary. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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"Let the Dead Bury the Dead." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 32, 7 Aug. 2023, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A762480731/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5b7cc73c. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.
A Tip for the Hangman
Allison Epstein. Doubleday, $26.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-385-54671-3
Epstein's diverting debut gallivants through Elizabethan England clutching the breeches of playwright Christopher Marlowe, here in service to the queen as a spy. Kit, as Marlowe is called, is rarely caught writing his "mighty line." He's too deep into espionage, uncovering Catholic conspiracies. Having infiltrated the household of Mary, Queen of Scots and foiling the Babington Plot, Kit has a crisis of conscience over Mary's execution. After he is caught spying by Catholic rebels, he gets out of the jam by claiming to be a double agent working on their behalf, then travels to the Netherlands to counterfeit gold coin for the Catholic cause. His Protestant minders track and arrest all involved, but while Kit's treasonous friends go to the gallows, he is set free. Epstein takes liberties with Kit's ultimate fate (the circumstances of his murder remain disputed), but in Kit she also creates a Marlowe too all-over-the-map to be plausible. Kit's lover, Tom, accuses him of seeking out danger, but rapid-fire POV changes necessary to advance the action-packed plot prevent the reader from getting a full sense of him, and the romance passages are the stuff of bodice rippers. Still, it's a fun escapade. (Feb.)
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"A Tip for the Hangman." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 52, 21 Dec. 2020, pp. 55+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650072563/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ea0c560c. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.