Zangwill, Suffragist, Chanticleer

(Israel Zangwill, the novelist, is a defender of militant suffragists – News Item)

O, Israel, we are surprised

     That you’re so full of go and snap!

Your readers would have ne’er surmised

     You were a wild, bloodthirsty chap.

We knew you held a forceful pen

     And scribbled for the just and right;

But never thought you’d turn from men,

     Advising women they should fight.

“Great revolutions are not made

     With rose water;” nay, nay, they’re not.

You say you’ll wait, not run afraid,

     “When one or ‘tother will be shot.”

O, Israel, can this be you,

     You who have ever been so meek?

What brought this pessimistic view,

     Is it your liver, Izzy, speak?

O, Israel, cast not aside

     Your gentle pen for brick or broom!

If you are bound to fiction ride

     Don’t ride the route that means your doom.

Right about face! And don’t advise

     Your sisters to forget their sphere;

O, Israel, who’d e’er surmise

     In you a suffrage chanticleer!

Dec. 02, ‘09

     Israel Zangwill (21 January 1864 – 1 August 1926) was a British author at the forefront of cultural Zionism during the 19th century, he was a close associate of Theodor Herzl. He later rejected the search for a Jewish homeland and became the prime thinker behind the territorial movement.

     Zangwill endorsed feminism and pacifism, but his greatest effect may have been as a writer who popularized the idea of the combination of ethnicities into a single, American nation. The hero of his widely-produced play, The Melting Pot, proclaims: "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians – into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Zangwill

chanticleer  - rooster