It’s a dark cold late afternoon. It’s sleeting, at times snowing. My breath’s white as I stand outside 226–228 Mile End Road, across the road from Stepney Green tube station. Forty-four years ago there was a monumental masons here or about here.
226 is now ‘2 Tasty Halal Meals’ and 228 is the ‘Golden Dragon – Chinese Food to Take Away’. Was it 228? Or 226? They both seem newer buildings even though in yellow brick and local style.
As I write this in a notebook the sleet makes the ink dissolve and run down the page. I take refuge in a telephone box to finish writing.
I’ve forgotten the name of the masons so need to check this up. I walk through the sleet and rain west along the Mile End Road to the Whitechapel Library by Aldgate East tube. It’s closed.
A hot sunny spring day. I go to the Whitechapel reference library to check the Kelly’s Directory for 1961 but am referred to the local-history library in Bancroft Road. So I walk this time east along the Mile End Road to the fine but now very neglected library. (The place where, in my late teens, I discovered American literature. William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and so many more. That was from 1958 onwards.)
The library has a 1962 Kelly’s Directory and there I find – ‘216– 218 Harris & Son Monumental Masons, E1’. I was looking at the wrong building. The memory was wrong. The monumental masons’ showroom and yard was four doors west of where I’d thought.
I walk back and find it’s ‘Lucky Groceries Ltd – Rahim Bros’. A two-floor building painted white – now a greying off-white – with a big and spacious Bangladeshi grocery on the ground floor. I can see out the back a large loading yard where the stone yard used to be. Another Jewish monumental mason has disappeared, leaving only A. Elfes Ltd at 17 Osborne Street at the bottom of Brick Lane. (They specialized in polished black granite, beside the usual and cheaper white marble. If I remember right.)
Satisfied with my searches I walk back west along the Mile End Road and stop for a beer at the Blind Beggar opposite London Hospital. Sat there I suddenly realize this was the pub where Jack the Hat was murdered. Or was he? The next day, phoning Robert Sheppard, I find Jack the Hat was killed by Reggie Kray in Stoke Newington. It was George Cornell who was shot in the Blind Beggar – by Ronnie Kray for calling him ‘a fat poof’. The bullet was still lodged in the jukebox until recently, or so the legend goes. One more mangled memory.
This is a memory of a memory of a memory. Box in a box. Picture within a picture. Borges and the Camp Coffee bottle.
Needing work I saw a handwritten notice LABOURER WANTED in the window of Harris & Son, a monumental masons opposite Stepney Green tube. I went in and got the job. Starting as a labourer, polishing large slabs of marble, I soon moved up to be a monumental mason’s mate. There were four masons and six or seven labourers. We made elaborate marble and granite gravestones – half the inscription would be in Hebrew, the other half in English. Blacklead lettering on the white marble and blacklead or gilded lettering on the red granite headstones. My own work was to prepare and sandblast the simpler decorations for the cheaper headstones, paint temporary grave markers on white marble tablets with the names and dates of the deceased, and to do the lead lettering. (Soot was used to cover small imperfections in the lettering when the rabbi was due to inspect the stones.)
One of the masons, LouEsterman, to this day remains an ideal for me. A neat-built man about five foot nine and in his early forties, I’d guess. He was a superb stonemason. He faultlessly cut the long inscriptions. He would carve wreaths of flowers and flowing decorations on a slab of marble, after making the briefest of pencil sketches on the stone. And yet, with all this natural skill and flair, he was never smug or opinionated. He always seemed open and looking. He always had a generous spirit. He had that beautiful gift of, for want of a less clumsy phrase, intellectual humility. This, I realized, was what one should hope for more than anything else, what an education should teach more than anything else.
If in a lunch break I should be sitting in the stone yard looking at a book of Picasso’s paintings, there would be none of the usual mockery then current, the jokes about how a monkey could paint better, and so on. Lou would want to discuss why Picasso had made a painting the way he did. He’d want to work it out. I’ve found the same willingness and freshness since then, and nearly always among craftsmen like the bookbinders when I worked in a library. I found it too when I finally met Tristan Tzara. Tzara epitomized the questing spirit, never taking anything for granted but always searching and pushing the boundaries further. But Lou was really the first to directly show me this. I love and dearly respect such clear modesty. We never met again after my time in the yard, but the seed had been sown. That memory I get right and will continue to do so.
[Lee Harwood]
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Majer Bogdanski, who died on 4 September 2005.
In 1965, East London historian Bill Fishman called this extraordinary man ‘the last of the dreamers of the ghetto’. Eighteen years later Avram Stencl was found on the streets of Whitechapel, where he had collapsed. He was dressed like a beggar, penniless, practically unknown. He died shortly afterwards. Bill said Kaddish at the funeral. He still cannot talk about Stencl without tears in his eyes: ‘That he should end his days like this is such a tragedy. We have forgotten London’s foremost Yiddish poet.’
I first heard Stencl’s name in my grandparents’ house in Westcliff-on-Sea (or Whitechapel-on-Sea, as many called it). My grandfather had been a great friend. They were Landsleit who met in White-chapel and shared a mutual passion for the Yiddish language. After the war, like many others, my grandfather moved the family from the bombed-out streets of East London. Their new home in Essex became a refuge and a meeting place for the artists, poets and radicals of the Jewish East End.
Stencl regularly visited my grandparents’ seaside home. My father remembers seeing him sitting in the front room, arguing passionately with my grandfather, laughing, playing cards, talking of art, politics and friends. ‘He was like a warm and affectionate uncle. Stencl would pinch my cheeks, vigorously, and speak at great speed in Yiddish. I only ever understood half of what he told me. He always brought flowers for my mother, who adored him. As soon as he arrived, she’d put a plate piled high with steaming hot hamisha food in front of him, whilst lamenting the holes in his jumper and his fingerless gloves. To her it was a mitzvah to feed him, an honour to have such a great man in her house.’ As far as my grandfather was concerned, Stencl was a genius. ‘Poetry was the most important thing in his life.’
This was the most romantic statement I had ever heard. Half-remembered details of Stencl fuelled my teenage fantasies of the Jewish East End. Determined to discover this landscape for myself, I moved there after finishing a Fine Art degree at Sheffield University. Then, during many years tracing the remnants of Jewish Whitechapel, my fascination with Stencl grew. It seemed impossible to talk about the vanished East End without hearing about him. Elderly people spoke of him with the greatest affection. ‘He was a great poet.’ ‘A real gentleman.’ ‘A righteous person who never walked past a beggar without giving him something.’ ‘A legend.’
For a decade I filled box files with newspaper articles, recorded interviews, images and stories about his life. I began to construct a brief biography. Avraham Nachum Stencl was born in 1897, in Czeladz, a small mining town in southern Poland. Descended from a long line of Hassidic ultra-orthodox rabbis, he attended Yeshiva and grew up in an atmosphere steeped in Jewish learning. From a very early age he knew that he wanted to be a poet.
In 1917, when he received his military call-up papers, he left home with his father’s blessing. He moved to Holland and joined a Zionist community – with the intention of emigrating to Palestine as a pioneer. Personality clashes influenced his decision to leave the community. He began travelling in Germany, living and working with peasants, writing poetry about people and landscape. He moved to Berlin in 1921, just when Franz Kafka and his lover, Dora Diamant, were settling in the city. Stencl was in love with Dora – according to her biographer Kathi Diamant. They shared a common background, coming from ultra-orthodox Hassidic communities in the same area of Poland. In Berlin they met at the Romanische Café. Stencl said: ‘For those fleeing from the pogroms in the Jewish Ukrainian shtetls, from the famine in Russian cities, and from the revolution, a kind of Jewish colony formed itself in the west of Berlin and the Romanische Café was its parliament. It was buzzing with famous Jewish intellectuals and activists, well-known Jewish lawyers from Moscow and Petersburg, Yiddish writers from Odessa and Kiev, with party-leaders from the extreme left to the extreme right wing – it buzzed as in a beehive.’1
Stencl stayed in Berlin for fifteen years, writing poetry. He published many books in the 1920s and 1930s. His achievement was acknowledged by the literary establishment. Thomas Mann was one of his greatest admirers. He lived a bohemian, café life, while enjoying an intense relationship with expressionist poet Else Lakser-Shuler (who was twenty-eight years older than him). He slept rough on park benches and on friends’ floors. He wrote constantly and took occasional jobs – as a farmhand or in a cemetery.
In 1936, accused of being a communist, he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. On his release, he escaped to England. It is rumoured that he was smuggled out in a coffin, by an athlete returning from the Berlin Olympics. Or perhaps with the aid of a former lover, the German schoolteacher Elisabeth Woeheler, who learned Yiddish and translated much of his poetry. Woeheler died in 1974 and left Stencl all her money.
Talking about Germany, Stencl said: ‘I loved the country, I walked and talked with philosophers and poets of all faiths. Then Hitler came with his storm and hatred. That is all I want to remember now.’2
Stencl’s first English home was in Hampstead, where he may have attempted to meet up with his old friend Dora Diamant. He said: ‘I don’t like the attitude of the Jews there. We were hearing about the pogroms in Poland and the troubles and they carried on laughing, going about their business. So I took a taxi and said take me to Whitechapel. The driver was Jewish and we conversed in Yiddish. When I saw Whitechapel, the streets, the people, I felt like I was coming home. The driver helped me find a room and I’ve lived here ever since.’
Stencl arrived in Whitechapel just before the war. Coming from the rich culture of Berlin, this part of London could have been a disappointment. But Stencl loved it dearly. The vibrant Jewish street life – markets, cafés, Yiddish theatres – became the inspiration for much of his poetry. He called Whitechapel his ‘holy acres’, his ‘shtetl’, his ‘Jerusalem in Britain’. He began to publish Loshn un Lebn (Language & Life), a monthly journal of Yiddish writing. He not only worked as editor, he also provided many of the contributions. Israel Narodcizcky, who ran a commercial press on the Mile End Road, printed the journal without charge. During the war, when the bombing affected the production of other papers, most Yiddish writers in England published in Loshn un Lebn.
Stencl survived on money made from selling the magazine outside meeting places, cafés and lecture halls. He cried: ‘Koyfts a heft!’ (Buy a pamphlet!) His constant presence at Jewish events made him a familiar face. He stood, in all weathers, making his pitch – even approaching people who worked in the markets. He has been described as a beggar. Emanuel Litvinoff said that ‘his work became humiliating as the community that supported him died away’.
Stencl is frequently recalled, at his usual table in a Lyons tea shop, scribbling in a notebook. Or walking the streets of White-chapel, tipping his hat to everyone he met. He achieved a mythical status. His voice reminded people of the world they had left behind. His dedication to the preservation of Yiddish made him a legend.
In 1936, with the help of Dora Diamant, Stencl established the literarische shabbes nokhmitogs: regular Saturday meetings now called the ‘Friends of Yiddish’. Communists, anarchists, Bundists, Zionists, the orthodox and the secular, famous writers and factory workers, all attended these gatherings. Stencl managed to keep this wild mix of Yiddish speakers unified. ‘He began the meetings with a loud bang of his fist on the table, promptly at three, and then a short speech often based on current affairs or something from the Talmud or Kabbalah.’3 Guest writers came from abroad, others performed the Yiddish classics. They sang or discussed politics. Meetings were noisy, demonstrative. No subject was taboo, so long as it was discussed in Yiddish.
My grandfather met Stencl at one of these affairs. The only recorded evidence I have of their friendship is a few minutes of video from a documentary, shot in the late 1970s.4 It shows Stencl, my grandfather (Gedaliah Lichtenstein) and Majer Bogdanski singing at a Friends of Yiddish meeting at Toynbee Hall. This is indeed the only film I own of my grandfather. Overwhelmed to discover such rare footage, I take stills of the three men. I am amazed to see how much alike they appear.
I know my grandfather travelled to the East End every Saturday to attend the Friends of Yiddish meetings. He continued this practice
Avram Nachum Stencl
Gedaliah Lichtenstein
Majer Bogdanski
until Stencl’s death in 1983 – by which time, he also suffered from ill health. He died three years later. Stencl’s only surviving relative, his great-niece, Miriam, donated his writings and personal effects to SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies). After a lengthy correspondence with the curator, and the production of letters of reference from the British Library, I received permission to inspect the Stencl archives.
Last summer I examined the contents of more than eighteen boxes marked: ‘A/521728: A. N. Stencl – Poet of Whitechapel’. Most were filled with papers, printed and handwritten in Yiddish. Not being able to unlock the language, I concentrated on two boxes of ephemera: photographs, passports, newspaper articles, letters in English and other languages.
At the top of the first box was a fat brown envelope containing personal documents. A tea-stained ‘final demand’ gas bill covered with handwritten script. A receipt for a donation, made by Stencl, to Great Garden Street Synagogue. Evidence of payments for lost library books. A street map of Berlin. Invitations to literary events connected with the Yiddish language. Membership cards for the Beaumont Day Centre Luncheon Club. Personal letters in Yiddish from Paris, Jerusalem, Poland, New York, Amsterdam. Receipts from Jerusalem hotels.
Apart from the domestic bills, most of the papers seemed to relate to some form of Jewish life. There were notes from the Burial Society of the United Synagogue: ‘a guidance of persons visiting graves’. A pictorial calendar of Israel (dated 1973). A 1951 catalogue from a Jewish art festival. Flyers for Yiddish concerts and plays that he attended. I found a special grant awarded to Stencl, by the United Synagogues, to obtain kosher foods for Passover in 1970. And there were letters of thanks from numerous Jewish charities for donations.
In the second box were letters – dated 1951 – from a woman called Julie, all in English. In one letter she writes: ‘You are very wicked, but you are also a dear. I forgive you some of your many sins because you send me chocolate and because you make me laugh.’ Julie could not read or speak Yiddish and seemed to have little appreciation of Stencl’s poetry. The letters quash the myth that Stencl could not speak or understand English. He must have communicated successfully with this woman, but the relationship was obviously troubled and fizzled out after a few months. Stencl remained a bachelor till his death.
Another dusty pale blue envelope contained letters in Yiddish, yellowing pages, faded ink, from his father (I presume in Czesto-chowa) to a Berlin address. Later I found a telegram from Czesto-chowa, dated 1920. ‘Heint fater gestorben = kadsz.’ Which Bill Fishman translated for me: ‘Father died today = Kaddish.’ A stern reminder to Stencl from his family: to fulfil his religious duties by saying a prayer of mourning.
Preserved inside a pink envelope were several birthday cards and New Year cards from ‘Your niece Miriam and family’.
Tucked between newspapers was a red leather British passport (1970). A small black-and-white photograph of the now familiar poet and a description of the man. Name: STENCEL – Abram Nachum. Born: Czeladz, Poland. 9.1.1897. Occupation: Poet/Writer. Height: 5'8”. Eyes normal, nose long, complexion fresh. Address: 7 Greatorex House, London E1.’ The stamps inside reveal the only evidence of trips abroad, visits to Israel.
From newspaper articles mentioning Stencl, I scribbled down fragments, as I tried to build a portrait of the man. ‘His presence is convincing; of medium height in his shabby brown suit he has the stooping shoulders of the Talmudic scholar. His features vitalize the frame. Intense blue eyes under once-fair greying hair; a small hawk nose brooding over full lips in a square jaw; the traditional gesticulation for emphasis and a quick change of expression from an almost beatific smile to mild anger provoked by any sign of flattery’ (Bill Fishman, Elam, 1965). ‘His work breathed the spirit of the great rabbis; it was saturated with Hebrew knowledge and wisdom’ (Mr Goldsmith, Jewish Chronicle, 31 March 1967). ‘He went on writing poetry, sometimes in despair but with a steady and sustained flicker of hope that one day his legacy would be found valuable. Not to go on, to remain inactive while facing the threatened disappearance of yet another Yiddish-speaking community, would be to allow Hitler yet another posthumous triumph’ (‘A. N. Stencl – Poet of White-chapel’ by S. S. Prawer, TLS, 3 May 1985). ‘The occasion was the 25th anniversary celebration of Loshn un Lebn, London’s only existing Yiddish periodical, but it was really a testimonial to the last angry Yiddisher, Stencl’ (Jewish Chronicle, 27 March 1964).
The most revealing article was one that described a room Stencl once rented. It reads like a mirror image of the abandoned room of the orthodox scholar David Rodinsky. ‘On the mantelpiece of a shabby little room in Philpot Street, in the heart of Whitechapel, is a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait taken from an illustrated London magazine, a newspaper cutting showing a photograph of two old Jews with long white beards who surrendered in the old city of Jerusalem in the recent fighting, and a postcard-size reproduction of Chagall’s painting of Jerusalem. Stacked on the floor in a corner are old issues of a Yiddish magazine called Loshn un Lebn. Other Yiddish magazines and books fill a shelf in another corner. A small table by one window in the room is completely cluttered with Yiddish newspapers. There is in addition, one chair, a narrow bed and a small chest of drawers. Nothing else’ (Jewish Chronicle, 23 January 1949. Unnamed special correspondent).
One of the boxes was filled with correspondence, in English, about the Friends of Yiddish meetings. Many of the letters mentioned a man named Majer Bogdanski – who would be singing at the event. I had heard of Majer before and knew that he had set a number of Stencl’s poems to music.
In September 2000, thanks to an invite from my friend Bill Fishman, I met Majer at the annual dinner held at King’s College, Oxford, to celebrate the end of the Yiddish summer school. The first time I saw Majer he was sitting on a bench in the walled garden of the college, wearing a tired jacket, trousers slightly too short and a flat cap. His eyes were closed and he rocked back and forth as if in prayer, while singing a haunting Yiddish melody.
During the meal in the banqueting hall, a number of academics got up to speak. Unaware that he may have been causing offence, Majer continued to sing in Yiddish at the top of his voice, banging the table vigorously with his fists.
Bill Fishman told me that Majer had taken over as the chairman of the Friends of Yiddish after Stencl died. ‘He’s the real thing,’ said Bill, ‘truly one of the last of the Mohicans, a dying breed, you should speak with him.’
I talked with Majer for most of the evening and asked if he wanted a lift back to Whitechapel in my car. He was eighty-eight years old and more than capable of travelling by train, but he graciously accepted my offer. I discovered that Majer was from the same area of Poland as my grandfather. He was a fascinating person with a story that includes a stint in the gulags after being captured by the Russians while fighting in the Polish army. ‘We were the first to have been there and survived,’ he told me. After many personal tragedies, including the loss of his wife and child, Majer made his way to Whitechapel. He worked as a tailor and took evening classes in music. He is now considered to be one of London’s greatest Yiddish singers and songwriters. Like Stencl and my grandfather, Majer represents so much of what was great and good about the Jewish East End.
We became friends and met on many occasions. So I became concerned when letters I sent were unanswered and his phone line appeared to be dead. I was relieved to find out, through another member of the Friends of Yiddish, that Majer had moved, by his own choice, into a Jewish old people’s home, near Gants Hill in Essex.
I visited him at the first opportunity. I found the home, a vast uninspiring brick building, incongruously tucked between a row of suburban 1930s semis, in a side street near the Gants Hill round-about. The fortress-like exterior reminded me of synagogues I had seen in Eastern Europe. Security was tight. After rigorous questioning by a stern-looking nurse, I was led through carpeted corridors smelling of disinfectant to Majer’s room.
As soon as I reached the third floor, I heard his voice, still powerful after several heart attacks and a recent operation to have a pacemaker fitted. I stood for a few moments outside his door, listening until he reached the end of his song. I knocked. Majer was sitting in a large electric-blue wing-back chair. In his hand was a notebook with his latest composition, a Polish poem set to music. As he got up to greet me, I was shocked to see him almost doubled over. He had been so fit and upright. He kissed me passionately on both cheeks and led me towards the only other chair in the room.
‘Well, what do youthink?’ he said.
‘It’s OK,’ I replied. ‘More manageable for you. But where are the books?’
‘All gone. I donated them to the Spiro Institute.’
His sparsely furnished flat near Tower Bridge had been filled with books.
‘They were in the bedroom, the cupboards, everywhere,’ he said. ‘Every surface was covered. I’m pleased they are somewhere safe, not in the dust-heap.’
Majer had moved, reluctantly, into the home, when he realized he could no longer cope alone.
‘I’m ninety-two years old now. I have great trouble with the heart. My confidence has gone. I no longer go out without an escort. The greatest part of the day I spend sleeping. The only place I go is the Friends of Yiddish meetings – with Haim Neslen, who has taken over as chairman. He takes me there and back.’
We began to talk of happier times and the first Friends of Yiddish gathering Majer had attended.
‘It was in 1947, the year I came to London, in the basement at Henriques Street, the Baron Beaumont Settlement. There was barely room to stand at the back. Stencl led the meeting and I talked with him afterwards. He told me he put out 250 chairs and still people had to stand. Back then he was quite a superstar. Many came to hear him read his poetry. He was a prolific writer, one of our best. The first time we met, he invited me to sing. I’ve been singing at these Saturday meetings ever since. I knew an awful lot of steibel ligun, songs sung in small synagogues in the back rooms of houses. The Hassidim passed these songs from mouth to mouth but never wrote them down. So I wrote down fifty-four from memory and I began to sing them at the Saturday afternoon meetings. Then I began to compose new songs. I have composed hundreds of songs, all in Yiddish, and published four books.
‘In the old days, when the meetings were full to capacity, we went en masse, at about five o’clock when the meeting ended, to one of ten places, and chewed over the whole thing, really heated discussions for many hours. We took the programme to pieces, more tea, then another two hours arguing. There were plenty of these tea places, particularly on the Commercial Road, but most often we went to Lyons, a huge place near Aldgate station. It was where Stencl wrote his poetry. Youhave to think hard when youread those poems. He writes about many things, an awful lot about love – and when he writes about love, it’s with real passion. I have composed music to a number of his poems. He lived for his literary works.
‘In the years I knew Stencl his appearance didn’t change too much. He wasn’t too nicely dressed but he didn’t want it. He nearly always wore a shabby old suit, tie and trilby hat and the pockets of his jacket bulged with poems and papers. He was quite handsome, ruggedly so, with piercing blue eyes. He was charismatic. He attracted people to him. He had a temper and would curse vehemently in Yiddish if someone wronged him, but he didn’t hold a grudge against anyone. We came from the same part of Poland, but from entirely different backgrounds. His family were learned Talmudists, mine were working people. I came from a long line of cabinetmakers, he came from a long line of rabbis. So we had completely different upbringings, although we both came from orthodox households. Stencl studied for a much longer time with his father. He was a very learned man, a great Talmudist, no rabbi could catch him out. He was not exactly a religious man, he didn’t observe all the 613 commandments, but he was definitely at home in the synagogue. Wherever there was a Jewish gathering, even if they didn’t speak a word of Yiddish, he was there. He was among the Zionist gatherings, he for a time sympathized with the communists, although he wasn’t a communist. He was at home with the Bundists. He edited Loshn un Lebn and he himself had to sell it. This is partly why he was there at the door of every Jewish gathering. People just bought it, they couldn’t say no to him, he was so lovely. It cost only a few pence and many couldn’t read it even, but they bought it because of the charming way he approached people.
‘He lived a modest life in various cheap rented rooms around Whitechapel and was bombed out a number of times. He finally got a council flat in Greatorex Street, which was very near to my workshop in Wilkes Street and he’d often drop by for kibbutzing, just chatting – but the Saturday afternoon meetings were always our main point of contact. Slowly the meetings got smaller as people began to leave Whitechapel. A few would still make the effort and come from further away – but as the audience died off, the hall became too big. Halls got smaller and smaller until we ended up in the Toynbee Hall, which must have been the tenth venue. We still meet there every Saturday at three o’clock. The principle of the meetings is the same: everything must be conducted in Yiddish. We read and discuss Yiddish prose, poetry, essays, as well as singing songs. Until the 1950s, even in the 1960s, there were plenty of performers. Nowadays we have very few, and those that do come learned their Yiddish at university, they didn’t grow up speaking it. I try to encourage everyone to participate by asking them to read or say something. There is no restriction on what we discuss or perform, as long as it is in Yiddish. Yiddish songs of all types, Yiddish literature, even articles in newspapers. This Saturday there were only ten, which is now considered to be a good audience. A few weeks ago there were eighteen. There has only been one time since Friends of Yiddish began that we didn’t have an audience. It was a cold winter Saturday in the early 1970s and only Stencl and myself showed up. I asked him, “Well, is this it?” And he answered, “While I live, never!” And it’s never happened since.
‘The meetings are still run in the same way they were in the 1940s, apart from one new addition. After Stencl’s death, I took over as chairman and I followed the exact same pattern he had – except he used to inaugurate meetings by talking about current affairs. I established the custom of reading something by Stencl, a poem, an essay. We like to keep his memory alive and this is the way we do it.’
As we talked Majer kept checking his watch, it was nearly time for his evening meal. We walked downstairs together and parted outside the canteen. I asked him if he had held any concerts at the home. ‘Because of the pacemaker I can no longer play the violin,’ he told me, ‘and that I regret very much.’ With a wide sweep of his hand around the beige-coloured, empty dining hall, he said, ‘This is it for me now. I shall be here until I die.’ I watched his tiny hunched figure shuffle painfully over towards an awaiting dinner lady. I left the building with a new determination to start Yiddish lessons at the soonest possible date.
[Rachel Lichtenstein]
The ruin where the church once stood
Lit strangely by the electric lamp,
Tucked under bushes in a dark corner
Head on fist, sleeps the tramp.
Tired from roaming about all day
He lies in the middle of his journey,
The moon hangs in his ragged face
A lamp torn down from its post.
I fear that like the neglected tramp
I too will yet lie somewhere here
And with him wander sad away
Before the day dawns grey
[Avram Stencl]
On one spring day in 1940, hundreds of women and children disappeared from the streets of London. Early in the morning of 27 May, as the world’s eyes focused on the evacuation of Allied forces from the beaches at Dunkirk, police, accompanied by members of the Women’s Voluntary Services, knocked on doors throughout Great Britain. Thousands of women between the ages of sixteen and sixty were informed that they could pack a suitcase, one per adult, before they were arrested and imprisoned. Days later, thousands of them were shipped out of the country.
With the outbreak of war, the British Home Office had ordered all alien residents with German and Austrian passports to appear before police tribunals, where they were placed into one of three categories: A, B or C. Class A enemy aliens were considered dangerous and immediately arrested. Those classified as B were considered of questionable loyalty and kept under supervision. They were allowed to remain free, but were subject to certain restrictions: they were not to go beyond a five-mile radius of their homes without police permission and had to surrender any potential espionage items such as cameras, maps and binoculars. Class C aliens were classified as refugees from Nazi oppression and went completely free.
Churchill’s attitude towards the refugees hardened as reports of German fifth-column infiltration poured across the North Sea. Public opinion turned against the 70,000 German and Austrian refugees in Great Britain as newspaper headlines fuelled a rampant anti-refugee paranoia. Even Oxford University got in on the act, issuing an official statement that ‘all aliens are a potential menace and should be interned’. It was true that some real Nazi sympathizers were among those arrested and interned, but the vast majority of Britain’s ‘enemy aliens’ were Jews and other refugees fleeing Hitler.
One day before the Dutch resistance collapsed, Churchill called for the round-up of enemy aliens. ‘It would be much better that all these persons should be put behind barbed wire,’ he said. On 15 May 1940, all male Class B aliens between the ages of sixteen and sixty were arrested. When the Home Office Secretary announced the arrests in the House of Commons, many felt he had not gone far enough. As one MP asked: ‘Is the female of any species not generally more dangerous than the male?’ Members of the House of Lords concurred that ‘women spies are much more dangerous than men’. And so, on 24 May, a secret memorandum went out from the Home Office to all chief constables in Britain, ordering the internment of all B women to begin the following Monday at seven in the morning.
Dora Diamant (Dymant-Lask) was one of them. She and her six-year-old daughter, Marianne Lask, were arrested in their Islington flat on Carysfort Road and taken to the grim gates of Holloway Prison. They were locked in a cell block with hundreds of other German-speaking women, who, in at least one respect, were just like her: Jewish refugees with German or Austrian passports who had been classified as B enemy aliens. In her battered suitcase Dora carried some warm clothes, medicines for Marianne and her only treasure, a holy relic in the form of a man’s military-style hairbrush, the only possession she had been able to keep of her love affair with Franz Kafka.
Dora had come to England only the year before, after crossing from the Hook of Holland eight or nine times before she was finally admitted. Fleeing Berlin in 1936 for what she still believed to be the workers’ paradise, she had arrived in Moscow at the height of Stalin’s purges. Following a miraculous escape from the Soviet Union and a harrowing journey through Nazi-occupied Europe that had lasted months, Dora reached safety in England, with her desperately ill daughter, in 1939, exactly one week before Germany invaded Poland. Her imagined safe haven had turned into a trap. Not once, as an active Jewish communist in Nazi Germany or as the outspoken wife of a imprisoned German Trotskyite saboteur in the Soviet Union, had Dora been arrested or incarcerated. She had escaped Hitler and Stalin, only to wind up a prisoner in England.
Two days after their arrest, Dora and Marianne were among the more than 3,200 women and children shipped off to hastily set up detention camps on the Isle of Man, where they spent the next year at the Women’s Internment Camp at Port Erin. Because she was ‘Kafka’s Dora’, Dora was rescued from the Isle of Man by Professor Dorothy Emmet, a philosopher at the University of Manchester, in the late summer of 1941.
When Dora returned to London, what she found in the bombed streets of the once vibrant Jewish East End was a new purpose: the preservation of the Yiddish language. She joined forces with the poet A. N. Stencl in the co-founding of the Friends of Yiddish. ‘Immediately after her arrival she associated herself with our work,’ Stencl wrote in a tribute to Dora in his Yiddish journal, Loshn un Lebn. ‘She held lectures at the Shabbat afternoons, read from Yiddish literature, especially the classics. Dora’s readings of portions of Yiddish stories, for instance the poem “Monish”, were always a Yontif, a holy day, at the Yiddish literary Sabbath afternoons.’
When he came to England as a young refugee from Poland, Majer Bogdanski met Dora when he participated in Friends of Yiddish meetings as an audience member. Fifty years later, Bogdanski still recalled magical Saturday afternoon meetings after the war, when ‘each meeting was an event’. He would press himself against the wall at the back of the crowded room, to see Dora at the front of the hall, as he said, ‘the star of the show’. After Stencl’s death, Bogdanski took over the leadership of the group, which has survived to the twenty-first century. Frail in his mid nineties, he regularly attended and performed poetry and prose readings at the meetings of Friends of Yiddish, which are still held every Saturday afternoon at three o’clock at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel.
Throughout the 1940s, Dora wrote reviews and articles for Loshn un Lebn on the ‘impoverished’ Jewish theatre of London, which she saw as another aspect of the Holocaust. With the murder of one third of the Yiddish-speaking population, Dora did what she could to keep the promise and future of the language alive. Turning her focus to the younger actors, whom she saw slipping away, lured to more professional and lucrative opportunities on other stages, Dora wrote: ‘A strange and very disturbing phenomenon has shown itself for some time: A kind of extinction – heaven help us – of young talents. As soon as a young acting talent is discovered – and one barely has a chance to taste it – and already we’ve lost the child. Be very careful, London Jewish Theatre directors,’ Dora warned, ‘that a ship – not with sour milk, but actually with cream – will sail away from you. Pinje Goldstein, our most talented, original comedic character actor, may go to America. This has happened with the very gifted Tamara Solomov, now with the Habima in Palestine. So it has been with Fela Feld – and what about our Shiomoh Kohen? How many Shiomoh Kohens does the Jewish stage have?’
Despite her best efforts, the Yiddish world of ‘Jewish art’ was vanishing before her eyes, unable to survive the postmodern world, born in the apocalyptic end to the war. A discontinuity brought about by the cataclysmic events of 1945 had changed the very composition of the universe. With the birth of the atomic age, the old world of Yiddish had dimmed and was dying. Dora saw herself as ‘engaged in a bitter struggle to preserve that bit of honesty and purity that we possess’. A cherished dream had come true with the birth of a Jewish nation, but it had not helped the Yiddishists’ cause. Israelis spoke Hebrew, the revived and updated ancient language of the chosen people, as the language of the future. Yiddish was scorned by the Israeli literati, shunned as the old-fashioned jargon of a victimized people.
In the dark performance halls of Whitechapel, Dora continued to wage her battle ‘against forgetting’. She urged the Jewish community on to greater creativity and artistic expression, producing and directing conferences, meetings, readings and shows in which she acted several parts, as one observer wrote, ‘deploying in front of a public to whom ancient, almost forgotten emotions had to be recalled’. It was dispiriting and disheartening to see the audiences grow older and dwindle as no new artists appeared. But, as Dora reflected, ‘What can youdo? Out of great need and misery youtake what is given – and you shrug your shoulders. One must, after all, keep the soul alive. So you give in. However, this “giving in” is the saddest part of our hopes and struggles.’
When she learned she was dying, Dora began to write her memories of Franz Kafka. She realized she must do what she could to clear up the distortions and misunderstandings surrounding him and his literary intent. Her journals are a testament to her undying love for the man, not the writer, who by then had risen to world fame. After Dora’s death in August 1952, her eighteen-year-old daughter typed up the two journals and gave the originals to Marthe Robert, Kafka’s French translator. It wasn’t until 2000 that Dora’s journals were discovered, first the original in Paris, and then in 2002 the typed copy turned up in Berlin. The original of the second journal, written in the darkest moments of Dora’s life, is still missing.
Dora died on 15 August 1952, and was buried in a vast treeless cemetery on the eastern outskirts of London. Her funeral was described by Marthe Robert in the Paris journal Evidences: ‘No writers or journalists attended her funeral. The news had not reached them; only those with whom Dora had worked, played and sung were now crying openly under the rain in the big East End Jewish cemetery. All those who knew her were aware of the importance of her presence, not only because of the great writer whose life she shared – for one brief year, or, if one wishes, for almost thirty years. The figure of Dora does not come under literary history, not even for those who saw in her a reflection of Kafka’s light. She spread her own light…she was still spreading it in the Jewish milieu of Whitechapel.’
Dora’s grave remained unmarked, without a tombstone, until 1999. It was not only a matter of not having the money. According to Kafka’s niece, the late Marianne Steiner, who was at Dora’s bedside when she died, Marianne (Dora’s daughter) didn’t want a headstone. ‘Mother isn’t there,’ she said. According to Dora’s friends, neither they nor Marianne ever returned to the cemetery again. For almost five decades, the location of Dora’s grave, a solitary rectangle of bare rocky earth between tall granite tombs and white marble slabs, was forgotten.
Zvi Diamant, Dora’s only living nephew, had no idea that ‘Kafka’s last love’ was his aunt until 1996. Born in 1947 in the release camp at Dachauto Dora’s older brother, David, Zvi moved to Israel when he was two years old. David died in 1960, before Zvi’s thirteenth birthday. Zvi first became intrigued with Dora when he received a yellowed newspaper article, with ‘this beautiful love story of Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant’.
Because of the coincidence of their shared last name, Zvi began to research. He soon discovered that they were indeed related and began to wonder: What happened to Dora after Kafka died? Did she survive the Holocaust? Did she marry? Did she have children? Are they still alive? Determined to find answers, he turned to the internet. There he learned that Dora had married ‘a certain Lask’ some time ‘between 1926 and 1936’ and had given birth to a daughter, Marianne. He also learned that Dora had died in 1952 and was buried in London, but he could find no information on his cousin Marianne.
Zvi wanted to find Dora’s grave in London, but was told that many Kafka scholars had looked for it but no one had found it. The next year, in late September 1998, Zvi contacted me on Yom Kippur Eve, in answer to a letter that I had written to him, telling him about the results of my more than a dozen years of in-depth research into Dora’s life. When Zvi learned the sad news of Marianne’s death in 1982 and the location of Dora’s unmarked grave, which I’d found in 1990, he felt he must do something. Believing himself to be the only living relative of Dora, he decided that he must ‘repair this wrong’ and provide them both with a tombstone. A date was set for the stone setting: 15 August 1999.
Three months later, on the forty-seventh anniversary of Dora’s death, a memorial-stone setting was held at Dora’s unmarked grave at the United Synagogue Cemetery on Marlow Road in East Ham. From Berlin came members of the Lask family, Dora’s mispoche from Israel included Zvi, his wife, Shoshi, and their four children, a cousin and her family, and Dora’s half-sister, Sara Baumer, with her daughter, Tova Permutter. In all, more than seventy-five people from the UK, Germany, Israel, Holland and the United States came to honour Dora’s memory. The reception afterwards offered a moving testament to the power of the Yiddish language, with a performance of a story by Dora’s favourite author, I. L. Peretz, given by ninety-four-year-old Majer Bogdanski. Few in the audience knew Yiddish, yet everyone understood, as Kafka said, instinctively, the depth of the emotion.
Dora’s daughter was not forgotten. Although her ashes are interred at Hoop Lane in Golders Green, Marianne’s name was included on Dora’s white marble tombstone. The large stone is engraved with both their names, along with a quotation from one of Kafka’s closest friends: ‘Who knows Dora, knows what love means.’
[Kathi Diamant]
The present texts are based on the transcriptions of tape recordings I made in 1975, when Josef was at least ninety-two years old. My role model as a poet is Charles Reznikoff, who deployed a maximally or perhaps minimally free verse when transcribing documentary texts in two astonishing books: Holocaust (taken from the Nuremberg Trials Records) and Testimony (taken from American law-court records). Also, I acknowledge the way Claude Lanzmann laid out the original French transcript of his film masterpiece, Shoah. My own words – titles, comments, notes, questions – are in italics. Eventually the sequence (with full notes) will be integrated into a book about my grandfather.
Long ago I corresponded with Charles Reznikoff, the exact contemporary of the lost grandfather of Anglo-Jewish poets, Isaac Rosenberg, except that Reznikoff lived on till 1974. I told the American poet about my grandfather and that I intended writing about Josef one day. Reznikoff was encouraging, and for sure intuited that I saw him as a poetic grandfather. To this day, this great and self-effacing poet does not appear in any mainstream anthologies. My own Menard Press published Milton Hindus’s book on him, and also one of his poems as a Jewish New Year card, which sold out quickly, partly because the Reznikoff family and in-laws bought so many copies.
Josef Rudolf was born not later than 1883 and perhaps as early as 1880 in Kalusz, a shtetl near Stanislawow, a small town in the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, East Galicia, now West Ukraine. The family moved to a village called Dolpatow, where his father kept an inn, and then to Stanislawow itself, his mother’s town.
East Galicia became Poland in the wake of the First World War. It was occupied by the Nazis in 1939, then by the Soviet Union in 1941. After the war, it became part of the Ukrainian republic within the Soviet federation. Ukraine is now independent. Josef arrived at Hamburg Docks in 1903 or 1904 or 1905 (more research needed), en route for London. The journey from his home region involved changing trains at Oswiecim, Auschwitz (see also section 26 below).
When his mother, Rosa Vogel Rudolf, arrived here for his wedding to Fanny Flashtig in 1912, her boat was moored offshore at London Docks. He couldn’t wait to see her, so he rented a rowing boat and rowed or was rowed over for a reunion. His way of speaking English was typical of his generation of Jewish immigrants, although his sexual frankness was surely rare.
Zeida is the Yiddish word for grandfather and is derived from dyadya, the Russian word for uncle, and is etymologically related to dedushka, grandfather. Grandmother in Yiddish is bubba or bobba, with its obvious etymology. Fanny Flashtig was known by us as ‘Bobba Dolf’.
A chance reference to immigration officers in an email from a friend today reminded me of my grandfather’s naturalization in 1924. The bobby walked the short distance from the police station in Leman Street to 52 Little Alie Street, where the family lived upstairs. Presumably he had an appointment. ‘Say after me, Mr Rudolf, “How now brown cow.”’ Zeida replied: ‘How now brown cow,’ doubtless in his best English, which was probably not as good as the heavily accented Polish Jewish Yiddish English he spoke to me fifty years later. ‘Very good, Mr Rudolf. I shall recommend to the Home Secretary that you should receive your papers.’ Bureaucracy only kicked in when it was discovered that his nationality, Austrian, no longer existed, at least not for him, since his home town was now in independent Poland. But there was a solution: he must become a Pole – for three weeks – before he could become English.
1
Apropos an old photograph in a book I showed him of pre-war Polish Jews:
A good thing no Jews live in Vietnam.
There are in Hong Kong.
My mother’s half-sister,
Yenta Vogel, married Captain Adolf Spatz,
and went to Hong Kong.
Why did he photograph these poor Jews?
They all look like monkeys.
I didn’t see one good-looking person in this book.
Photo of a shul (synagogue):
AR: It’s very old.
Everything is old. It’s only a picture.
2
Apropos a mention of Moses:
Moses was a nice-looking man.
If they will put a picture of him in a shul,
people might think he’s a God, like Jesus.
3
It happened in a family related to us:
one man married a woman and the brother fucked her.
AR: Is it allowed?
If you’re doing something wrong, you’re not worried if it’s allowed or not.
She liked it better with the younger brother, that’s all.
AR: And the older one didn’t know?
No, but the family knew about it.
It happens everywhere.
It happens all the time.
(sotto voce)
It happened once
in an old story:
someone didn’t know he was fucking his mother.
4
I was on the board of management of Hambros Synagogue
(in Commercial Road)
for twenty-five years.
There was a man on the board called Hart who didn’t like one called Fox,
and said to him:
You are fox in the name, and fox in the game.
5
When you say your name is Rudolf (Mayerling),
the world thinks Prince Rudolf.
He would have been king but they killed him.
Her father found him in the bedroom with her and killed him with a bottle.
The king (Franz-Josef) had many women, but he wasn’t a bad man.
He was religious and he believed the Jews killed Jesus.
Jesus was a communist, and he preached against the religion, you understand.
Yehuda (Judas) was a bastard, Yehuda was a blackguard,
he came running from the scaffold where they hung Jesus,
crying mazal tov, they’ve hanged him.
6
A Jew in them years, you could kill him like a cat.
A Jew in them years, they killed them all out.
A book tells people
to take a couple of Jews and kill them like rats.
Prejudice against the Jews is all over the world.
I didn’t look for problems.
Look, one Jew another Jew doesn’t like, so why should a Yok like a Yid?
(offensive terms for non-Jew and Jew)
The Jews too are bastards. They kill one another.
7
You shouldn’t talk about a father to his son.
You shouldn’t talk about a son to his father.
To keep the peace, forget about the trouble.
8
Zeida did his military service in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry:
I dreamed I was in the army on my horse,
in a charge.
Suddenly two more riders
entered the dream
and pulled my horse to one side
while the others charged on
to be destroyed.
I woke up.
9
In my shul
one Shabbes
(Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation of the word for Sabbath)
there was a wise old man.
He put his finger in his mouth.
What are youdoing? I asked.
I’m fooling my arse.
I smoke tobacco
against constipation.
AR: What was his name?
Zeida cackled.
You potz.
(Yiddish word for prick, literally and metaphorically, as in English)
Yankel Kakka, that was his name.
Yankel Kakka.
(Jack Crapp, the name of a Gloucestershire cricketer when I was a child, is an accurate and perfect translation)
10
Life gets in the way.
AR: Gets in the way?
Yourself. Life gets in the way of yourself.
11
Old man Klinghoffer was a groisse potz,
bought a thousand pounds worth
of blue silk at ten shillings a yard.
Had to sell at half a crown.
I showed him the ropes.
He became paralysed
and could do nothing.
He died soon after.
His wife was a yachne (gossip) but she was more clever.
12
I met a Jew from Mesopotamia.
He liked a pretty girl in my workshop, Lucas Street,
in the first Great War.
(East End street rebuilt after being bombed in the Second World War)
Her father [was] dead, she asked me
should she marry him?
I had to make sure
he was a Jew:
he said the Kaddish for her father,
so he was.
Why not? I said.
But she decided not to.
He became engaged to a plain girl
and fucked her mother.
(presumably knowingly)
13
In the old days, when you died, they broke a plate and buried it with you. You wanted the world, and all you took away was a broken plate. It’s supposed to be at twelve o’clock in the night, dead souls come together and daven (pray).
A man passes by the shul at midnight. He hears or maybe thinks he hears the souls calling him over to the Torah (metonym for the Holy Ark). He goes to the rabbi. In them days, the rabbi always lived near the shul or over the beis hamidrash (small prayer-house).
‘What shall I do?’ he asks the rabbi. The rabbi says: ‘You can go in, they will give you an honour, you can take an aliyah (‘ascent’ to assist in the Reading of the Law, an honour), but make sure you go in backwards.’
14
Zygfryd (his nephew Zygfryd Rudolf, later of Los Angeles) is a bastard. When he came to England, he didn’t show respect to the family. I can quarrel with you today, but if I got respect for you I won’t lose my temper with you in front of your family.
My brother, Zygfryd’s father, Shmuel, was in Carlsbad for a holiday. I visited their house in Stanislawow when I was on leave from the army. I found Zygfryd fucking the servant. When he finished, I told him, do whatever youwant to do, go to the fields, but don’t do nothing wrong in your own house.
She was good-looking. Oh, she was good-looking. I said to her that when his parents come home I won’t tell nobody, but you ought to be ashamed. And I asked her: he persuaded you or he didn’t persuade you? He did persuade her. That’s all right then, I said.
When I was a sergeant in the cavalry, I went to a brothel in Przemsyl near the Russian line, to round up the men after a day’s leave. ‘Soldiers out.’ I noticed a pair of army boots under a bed, and summoned the man: your name, soldier? Isaac Rudolf. He was a distant relative, but not under my command, so he could stay. There were a million soldiers in Przemsyl.
15
I remember a soldier who had syphilis.
Pieces were falling off of it.
They kept him for experiments, how long he can live.
They fed him on water rolls, no fats in them.
They kept him alive till the whole dirty blood went.
Then they start feeding him with good things,
to make the body go back good, you understand.
Take an apple, inside is a worm.
Youopen it, youtake out the worm, to preserve the apple.
16
If she’s not clean and you’ve got some matter there on top of the skin of your shmekel (willy, affectionate, unlike potz), you should wash it off with your piss. Your piss only works on your own blood. It’s so strong it eats up the dirt. You got to do it straightaway.
The doctor advised soldiers
that when you go to a whore and it comes up
he shall wash in the piss,
the piss is so strong.
My piss wouldn’t be good for you,
your piss wouldn’t be good for me.
17
Why couldn’t you be a doctor, you potz? Youwork in the house all day. If I would be a young man I would rather do anything than what youdo, working at home translating. That’s what I think.
18
Am I born from a stone? [or: If I am born from a stone]
I never had a mummy.
Why did my mother left me,
Left me alone
And I aint got where to go.
The best would be
You shall take me there.
I mustn’t do that no more.
19
I can’t sleep.
If I’m laying in bed
thinking too much
I suffer insomnia.
The doctor told me I mustn’t do that no more.
So I’m trying to forget about it.
(This describes what happened when he wrote his only poem [section 18 above]. Sure enough, he stopped writing poems)
20
The pike is a clever fish,
the king of the fish.
He lives off little fish.
Other fish lives on worms.
He tastes good.
He’s an expensive fish.
But the head is no good.
They don’t throw the head away, they boil it.
We had no sea. We had big rivers.
For gefilte fish, youcan fill any fish.
Take for instance an English fish, a bream.
I would say it comes from the carp family.
It’s a fat fish.
We dined at each other’s houses in turn,
two brothers, two sisters. (he and his London siblings)
I bought fish, carp,
from Tom’s in the Lane. (Petticoat Lane)
Live fish. At the end of the week
live fish
thrown back into their
(word missing; unclear on tape)
When we were boys
we used to go to the water.
The fish, they don’t swim about;
at the edges
during some grass you put your hand in
and you’ll find a fish. That’s where they sleep.
If youwent in the water
and looked for a fish
sometimes there was a snake there.
You put your hand in
and youcan feel if it is a fish, a frog or a snake.
The snake didn’t bit youin the water.
I used to catch fish like that.
21
At one point I put myself down, describing myself as a shmok:
Why do you say that? You’re a clever boy and youmake yourself small.
You’re not enough proud of yourself. You’re a learned man.
You’ve got everything what God gives, and you don’t appreciate.
If you call yourself shmok people will hear and call you shmok.
You are higher than somebody else because you are an educated man.
A person ought to call himself more than he is.
It’s a fools’ world. If you’re too good they shit on you.
Keep yourself higher than others, not exactly without manners,
You’ve got to have manners as well.
Think yourself a mensch.
If you’re not a rich man, you’ll be a rich man.
Your father says a clever word:
if a person understands his position
the battle is half won.
You understand your position, you know how to act.
22
The gypsies didn’t come from Egypt.
They came from somewhere.
The government didn’t allow gypsies to the army.
They got no rights.
The gypsies weren’t whores, they were thieves.
The government didn’t give them civil rights, and they didn’t try to get rights.
They go every time to another place.
Garlic is good for you, protects you against gypsies and diphtheria.
23
AR: Were your friends in London all Galicianers?
A nice man was by me a friend, I didn’t care from where he came.
AR: What do you consider yourself, an Austro-Hungarian, an Englishman or a Jew?
I consider myself nothing.
I says a person is nothing.
I was an Austrian patriot when I was young.
I thought I was Moishe Groiss (Big Moses, a big shot) but I wasn’t.
A job you couldn’t get there.
They took one out of a thousand
for a civil service job.
24
Hershel Ostropoler was a clever bugger.
(He was court jester to an eighteenth-century Hassidic rabbi who was a rich depressive)
25
Renee has tomatoes the whole length of her garden.
(His daughter, in whose Hendon house he lived for many years as a widower)
26
Auschwitz is a junction.
All the trains from the whole of Europe
go to Auschwitz.
From every part of the world
you’ve got to change at Auschwitz.
That’s why those bastards
made a concentration camp there.
I’ve been through Auschwitz many times.
Youcan’t go to my home
unless you pass through Auschwitz,
except if yougo to Vienna.
But that way it costs longer.
The straight cut is through Auschwitz.
27
My father worked in agriculture.
He had horses.
He had a mill.
Made beer from hops. Young trees.
They aint got no coalmen there. You cut your own wood.
My father had a licensed inn.
Sold brandy.
You pay over your nose.
Tobacco belonged to the government.
They gave you 5 per cent.
My father had a head for business.
He rented property for seven years from a lord.
They were very rich there,
Potockis and Rozvadovskys,
some of them had twenty villages.
My father had shop licences to rent,
he passed them to old soldiers.
They had to be at least half a mile apart, to make a living.
Here youcan have one shop next to the other
because it’s in private hands.
My father had five sons.
If all of them had been in the army,
he could claim a pension.
My father had small businesses.
He had a head for business.
28
In Austria, it wasn’t good prospects for young people. A Jew wants more than food, a Jew wants prospects. Youcan’t have prospects in a country what is too poor for prospects. They can’t have fifty Yiddisher clerks taking twenty jobs. If I would be an official, and I got the chance of taking clerks, I might take a Yid, give him a chance. Between a good Yok and a bad Yid I choose the Yok, between a good Yid and a good Yok I choose the Jew. It’s not right, but I would take him. Why should I give a Jew a job if two Yoks are waiting? Here in London once was a job: a sailor, a soldier and a Yiddisher handyman, they want to be a postman. The post wants one postman, and three men wanted the job. Why should they give it to the Jew? The sailor was on the sea and the soldier was in the army. You got to consider things. That’s the way to do it.
29
In London, I been in the Jewish shelter in Mansell Street till one o’clock at night. My brother Jonas run about till he found me sitting outside the shelter. I was sick of sleeping on the floor. I was two weeks on the floor sleeping in Hamburg, and on the ship third class was no joke. Jonas brought me from the shelter to his lodgings. He took all my clothes and threw them in the dustbin because he was afraid I was not clean from the boat. He gave me a shirt, and he told his wife, Bertha, and she gave me three shirts and three vests and three pants.
I had lodgings in Lucas Street. In Jubilee Street. In East Mount Street, back of the London Hospital. In Jewish families. I’m orthodox. A brother-in-law and sister came to London to take me to America. I said I won’t go. I can exist in London as well. I had got to know my future wife. My mother visited twice, for my wedding and my brother’s wedding, but my father wouldn’t come because it wasn’t froom enough here. She came for two weeks. I kept her for four weeks. She was anxious to go back and look after the younger children. My father had thirteen children to keep, five from the first wife, eight from my mother. She went home out of pity for him, rachmonos: he was twenty years older. She was going to come again, but war broked out and nobody came no more from there. My parents died in their own beds, before Hitler came.
I had no trade. I met a man. For five pounds he said he would teach me to be a cutter and designer. Who will keep me for a month, I said? For that five pounds I could be in America not here. Still, I learned how to operate a trousers machine. I was paid in secondhand clothes what I could sell. I sent home money to my parents. In them years you could start a big business with fifty pounds. As a machiner I earned three or four pounds a week.
I was learning to be a machiner in my brother’s workshop in Lucas Street. I started with ten shillings to pay my lodgings. Then I went out to work, in all sorts of places, and earned a pound, two pounds. Uncle Jonas paid my lodgings. Afterwards I paid him back. My brother-in-law Uncle Abba was my partner for thirty-three years in Lucas Street, and I lived in 16 Sutton Street.
I went past there once when I was working in your Uncle Leon’s printing shop in Sun Street, three or four years ago. I was with Leon’s driver Alan and I smoked a cigarette and thinking what happened in them days. Before we was married, Grandmother lived in 67 Chambers Street and Prescott Street. In the old days we went everywhere by bus. London Hospital to Marble Arch cost fourpence. Cheaper than the Underground. When I was working by Leon, and we would need to go to the City, I used to say to Alan go through Chambers Street. He says to me something happened here that you won’t tell me. I said my girl lived here and I got married from this place.
[Anthony Rudolf]
Time was, when the ships used to dock by Tower Bridge, and the immigrants into England could disappear without further ado among the streets and courts of the East End, there to begin life afresh. But all that had changed. Now, a permit was required from the Home Office…
ROLAND CAMBERTON, Rain on the Pavements
We were standing just a few hundred yards east of Brick Lane, in London’s East End, and the narrow road stretched out between two rubble-strewn voids. The council had provided a new sign to confirm that this was indeed Fuller Street, but there was nothing left to see.
Not so, however, for the figure who gazed up from the pavement, his hands slicing the air as he hammered a world back into the emptied scene. He put a terrace of two-storied houses along both sides of the bulldozed street, and squeezed whole families into cellars beneath the road. Up at the far end he sketched in a taller tenement, named it Fuller Street Buildings, and then stared at it until it was fairly ‘boiling’ with humanity. Children started yelling, sewing machines rattled, and there was a constant chatter of Yiddish. Exasperated neighbours took to banging on thin walls and ceilings with broomsticks, and the air was thick, even in the cold damp of winter, with the interfused smell of drains, sour pickles, garlic and overflowing dustbins in the back yard.
Who was this man – spry but of considerable age – who walked through a temporarily slumped corporation’s building site, repossessing it as a village that was, in his own words, ‘remote in spirit from the adjacent cosmopolitanism of the great city of London’, and altogether more like the small Jewish towns that were once ‘scattered across the lands of Eastern Europe’, each one fatally ‘hemmed in by ancient curses’?1 And why – now just as then – do we know so little about him?
As a child Emanuel Litvinoff lived in Fuller Street Buildings, but nowadays he perches a few miles to the west, in the sunken grandeur of Bloomsbury’s easternmost bastion, Mecklenburgh Square, where he leases a small flat in a building used to house overseas students and their dependants. When I visited him towards the end of 1992, Litvinoff lived in an obscurity that owed little to geography or the length of the corridor leading to his door. To reach him, it was necessary to skirt the jostling vanity fair that is literary life in England, sidestepping the prize-giving ceremonies, the celebrity tennis matches (Barnes was still playing Amis in those distant days) and the chatter about Philip Larkin’s dismal social attitudes, then being adroitly publicized by his literary executors. Eventually, I pushed a numbered bell and the man who had once written a Thames Television play named The World in a Room peered out and said, with a guarded smile, ‘Come in.’
Litvinoff’s books may have fallen out of print in the 1980s but some of them drew exuberant praise before that, and a few have even sold rather well. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was one of Britain’s leading television dramatists: an accomplished exponent of the single-studio play, a now all but extinct genre which Litvinoff used to dramatize social prejudice. But television is, in his own regretful description, ‘so much steam on glass’, and no one should be expected to remember any of that. Yet Litvinoff has also been a contrary figure: insisting on asking awkward questions and never signing up for the compliances of the successful literary career. He was even a misfit stylistically, addressing fundamentally modern themes, but declaring that he did so as a storyteller (‘you can’t just jettison tradition or discount the problem of communication’) and dismissing most avant-garde experimentation as the fashionable trickery with which self-indulgent writers attempt to make up for their lack of social imagination. Litvinoff was born in London in 1915, but he has never regarded himself as an English writer.
‘There has always been a parochialism about English writing,’ he remarks, explaining that the Whitechapel in which he grew up demanded a broader outlook. His celebrated autobiographical account of his childhood in the Jewish East End, Journey through a Small Planet (1972), was shortly to be republished.2 Warning that little trace now remained of the community he had known, except for a few ‘occasional relics, such as you’d find after a volcanic eruption or an earthquake’, he was prepared to take me round nonetheless; and to follow the thread of his life through streets that, if they survived at all, now belonged in more recent immigrant worlds.
In the Tube going east under the City of London, Litvinoff talked of his parents, who had journeyed to London from Odessa in 1913. Like many of the Jewish immigrants who came up the Thames travelling ‘steerage’ in what might as well have been cattle boats, they had hoped to reach America, but ended up being dumped in a Whitechapel ghetto that was already densely populated by Jews who had fled persecution in the Russian Empire – an emigration that had become a terrified mass exodus in the early 1880s, thanks to the brutalities licensed by Tsar Alexander III and his notoriously anti-Semitic minister of the interior, Count Nicholas Ignatieff.
Emanuel remembers his father only as a tinted photograph on a vanished wall in Fuller Street Buildings. He was apparently a low-grade sweatshop worker who nevertheless thought of himself as an intellectual. Politically, he was an anarchist, who had probably been involved in student activity in Odessa. He went back to Russia during the First World War. Obliged, like other male ‘aliens’ in Whitechapel, to choose between serving in the Tsar’s army in the East or with the British on the Western Front, he got caught up in the Russian Revolution and never returned: ‘The things we know about him are extraordinarily romantic. He seems to have organized a band of freebooters, which minted money, and stole horses.’ The group eventually made their way to Archangel and arranged passage on a boat leaving for London early one morning. Litvinoff’s father arrived too late and was last seen on the shore: a receding figure waving frantically from the quayside. Obliged to fend for herself and her four sons alone, Emanuel’s mother took to her sewing machine and worked as a home dressmaker. She haunts Litvinoff’s pages as the ‘resident ghost’ of his childhood. Exhausted by endless drudgery and the five additional children that followed remarriage, she speaks out from a succession of grim flats (after Fuller Street, the family lived in Hackney’s Mare Street and Sandringham Road in Dalston), issuing the despairing admonitions so vividly captured by the son she only saw going off the rails.
Emerging from Bethnal Green Underground station, Litvinoff took his bearings from a terrace named Paradise Row and then launched off down Bethnal Green Road. He remembered how as a child he used to run up and down this mean street to Bethnal Green Library, fetching the books that, as an untutored but ‘omnivorous’ reader, he would choose by title alone.
After pausing to tug a weirdly shaped shop back into its pre-war incarnation as Smart’s picture palace, where he saw the first talkies, Litvinoff turned to seek out the brick Victorian heights of the institution he knew as Wood Close School. The Jewish parents of that time stressed the importance of having ‘a good trade in your hands’, but the intelligent kids only had to look at their own parents to realize that this meant being condemned to a life of ‘humiliating drudgery’. The only escape lay in the local grammar school: it was ‘through scholarship that you escaped the dread fate of the factory and sweatshop’. Litvinoff was on course for this elevation: indeed, as he walked around the school, glancing at Bangladeshi children in their bright red uniforms, he remembered winning the Bethnal Green essay competition on the theme of ‘What I did on my holidays’. His tactic, as he explained, was ‘to play on the sympathy of the judges at the beginning’ by making it quite clear that his family had been in no position to offer him any holiday at all. But though he was at the top of the class, and generally something of a star pupil, he was defeated by the exam. Children were really ‘fighting for their lives’, and Litvinoff was ambushed by nerves – to such an extent that he couldn’t even hold the pen. He failed repeatedly, and the future disappeared.
By the time we walked past the Carpenters Arms, still seedily associated with the Kray twins, young Emanuel was sliding steadily into dereliction. He had renounced his passion for reading, finding nothing in books but a painful reminder of lost opportunities. A trade scholarship checked his descent for a while, but, in what he would later describe as ‘my first serious experience of anti-Semitism’,3 he was refused admittance to the school of lithography he hoped to attend (‘The one question I did not apparently answer to the interviewer’s satisfaction was that relating to my religion’). So he ended up learning shoemaking as the only Jewish student at Cord-wainers’ Technical College near Smithfield: a place that is known to readers of Journey through a Small Planet for the abiding stench of the offal yard next door, and for the headmaster who spent morning assemblies twisting mocking variations out of Litvinoff’s alien name: Litintoot, Litmuspaperoff, Lavatoryoffsky…Litvinoff left as soon as he was legally able and was soon sleeping rough, or in doss-houses. As he recalls, ‘if you were down and out in the 1930s, nothing existed for you. You could die on the pavements.’
It was in this condition that Litvinoff drifted westwards towards Soho. Having slept in the ‘beggars crypt’ of St Martin-in-the-Fields, he would make his way over to the Café Royal in Regent Street, where he stole past the commissionaires for a free wash in the gentleman’s cloakroom, winning a smile on the way through from a knickerbockered George Bernard Shaw. He remembered catching an apprehensive glance from Wyndham Lewis, striding along Piccadilly in black cloak and wide-brimmed hat; and visiting a basement café named the ‘Dive’ in Frith Street to scrounge a fourpenny plate of minestrone off Aleister Crowley, who sat there in tweeds, playing chess and looking altogether more like an English country gentleman than the notorious occultist, pervert and diabolical ‘Great Beast’ of widespread reputation.
Jewish Whitechapel was a hard place, and ardent in its pursuit of redemption. Standing outside the chained and deserted building that once served as the Working Man’s Synagogue in Cheshire Street, Litvinoff observed that, while he had not been held by the rabbi with his Talmud and Hebrew lessons, he had certainly dallied with both Zionism and also ‘the red day of reckoning’ promised by the ghetto’s apocalyptic brand of communism. It was from a left-wing vantage point that he saw the black-shirted Oswald Mosley working the East End in 1936 – a ‘toff’ aping Mussolini and using ‘a prissy upper-class English voice’4 to rally his hate-filled fascist followers from his stronghold in Bethnal Green’s Roman Road. But he wasn’t among the Whitechapel Jews who went off to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, he remembers laughing at the idea that this untrained and malnourished band of volunteers would be an asset for the International Brigade.
His next messianic affiliation began when he was befriended in a Soho café by a woman, recently deceased, whose name he was still reluctant to divulge. Though only a little older than Litvinoff, maybe twenty-one or so, she seemed to live in a different age. She dressed in old-fashioned clothes, and was, as he recognized only with hindsight, an uncompromising Jewish chauvinist. A skilled astrologer, she drew her acolyte into a world of esoteric divination reached through the exotically mixed media of Kabbalah, psycho-metry, automatic writing, meditation, and seance-like attempts to re-enter past lives. It was, Litvinoff remembered, all a bit too much: ‘I used to get the feeling that I could enter into madness. If you’re an untrained young mind, struggling with the complexities of the Kabbalah, and if your sexual initiation is all mixed up with this…’
So there he was, trudging through the 1930s, undernourished, often without food for days, and ‘hallucinating’ or having ‘some kind of nervous breakdown’ as he went: ‘I would be standing in front of a shop window, and suddenly it would feel dark. People would look spectral, and the world was spectral.’ He remembers ‘out-of-the-body experiences’, when a moment of time would suddenly seem ‘stretched out to infinity’, and other fugue-like occasions when he suddenly slipped through the historical fix of the city, ‘stumbling into a little pocket of time’. He might be walking down the street, or perhaps approaching the Jewish soup kitchen off Bishopsgate, when suddenly he would look up and find the cars gone, and horse-drawn traffic in their place. In this condition, he saw Jewish immigrants arriving from Russia, and tenements melting away mysteriously, to be replaced by older cottages with little gardens. He remembers asking a man the date and, on being told it was 1890, going into a haberdashery shop and looking at children’s exercise books for verification. Litvinoff’s first poem was among the ghostly manifestations of that time. It appeared quite unexpectedly, when he was working in a furniture factory in Wembley. Perhaps it was down to the glue-pot, with its ‘rather extraordinary, intellectually aphrodisiac’ fumes, but the romantic words suddenly appeared, as if from nowhere: ‘Farewell O Queen of the Night/Dark Mistress of my Cosmic Dreams.’ Litvinoff laughed at the memory of these overripe lines, remarking that, while he had long wanted to be a writer, he had never been interested in poetry, only knowing the stuff he had learned by rote at elementary school: ‘“The boy stood on the burning deck,” that kind of thing.’
By the mid 1930s he had a room over the Finchley Road and a piece-work job as a fur-nailer, which enabled him to put in four or five hours a day, and devote the rest of his time to pursuing his renewed literary ambitions. He completed a long novel about the East End, written in ‘a kind of fever’ when he was just over twenty, and named Of Time Wearied after Thomas Wolfe’s epic Of Time and the River. In one of many unpublished manuscripts, Litvinoff has described how Elias Canetti visited him in the darkened room where he would be sitting at his long-carriaged Remington, ‘typing out the interminable novel I was convinced was a work of genius that would win for me instant fame. Trance-like, I spoke of the need to shape one’s life into an instrument through which the voice of God would utter, a trumpet of prophecy, of my dream that an angel stood at my shoulder while I wrote the story of my generation on to the page in illuminated letters like the Book of Kells.’ Canetti listened and then declared the young author ‘a schizophrenic artist’, leaving him to hunt through dictionaries to find out just what this meant. Litvinoff burned that ambitious novel in a characteristic fit of embarrassment shortly after the war.
As we wandered through the crowded street market of Petticoat Lane, Litvinoff pointed to the Jewish physiognomy of some stallholders, and then proposed that one of the most insidious effects of racism is to make victims see themselves through their persecutors’ eyes. It may not really show in Journey through a Small Planet, but Litvinoff left Whitechapel on a wave of revulsion that he described, most memorably, in the 1960s: ‘Every time a woman with a foreign accent made a scene on a bus, or two men argued loudly in Yiddish over a business deal, or a music-hall comedian got a few laughs by jamming a bowler-hat over his ears and retracting his neck into his shoulders, I was miserably ashamed.’ He found the Jewish names on shopfronts ‘grotesque and provocative: the Kosher signs and Yiddish lettering were embarrassing advertisements of alienation; there was too much huckstering in street markets; the flies crawling over exposed meat and groceries were proof of ingrained backwardness and squalor. I was equally affronted by the sight of a Hassid walking through the street in outlandish garb, impervious to the effect of his own strangeness, and of the herring-women down the Lane, plunging their chapped and swollen fingers into the open barrels of pickled fish.’5
The Second World War changed everything. To begin with, Litvinoff registered as a conscientious objector, but he changed his mind as soon as Hitler’s purpose became clear to him and urged the War Office to hasten him into active service. The authorities had different ideas, parking Litvinoff alongside other mistrusted ‘aliens’ in the Pioneer Corps, first in Ulster and later as an officer in West Africa and Egypt. Barred from directly fighting the fascists, Litvinoff went to work on the poetic front. ‘Conscripts; a Symphonic Declaration’, published in 1941, retains some of the apocalyptic character of his early ‘schizophrenic’ period: the young khaki poet imagines the young rising up into ‘the great open spaces of unthought where newness is’, challenging ‘the champions of unchange’ and insisting on a ‘prayer of human suffering’ that rings out above ‘the loud dogmatism of revolution/And of hucksters selling patriotism to the mob.’ In ‘Re-Dedication’ he declaims, ‘We saw truth shining through the shabby compromise/and closed our eyes.’
A few pieces printed in the anthology Poems from the Forces brought a letter from Herbert Read, who then published Litvinoff’s slim volume The Untried Soldier in the Routledge New Poets series. Some of his poems were broadcast by the BBC and there was further interest from John Lehmann, publisher and homosexual patron of young literary strivers from the East End. Litvinoff went to meet him at his residence in Park Lane, and was embarrassed to find himself being offered sherry and cigarettes by ‘a blond Nordic giant with exquisite manners’ in a silk dressing gown (‘I didn’t know where to put my hobnailed boots and soon departed’). He also heard from Dr Alex Comfort, at that time a young anarchist poet and novelist, with whom Litvinoff was soon on good terms.
Yet Litvinoff’s budding reputation as a neo-romantic poet did little to alleviate the difficulties of the late 1940s. He had married during the war, and had no idea that his wife would soon step out on to the catwalk as Cherry Marshall, a leading fashion model who eventually went off into a life of her own. The couple lived with their young children in a damp basement flat and Emanuel eked out a living by reviewing for the Guardian, the Tribune, the Spectator and other papers. He tried radio too, proposing a series of short programmes inspired by a café philosopher named Schulberg, a ‘Yiddish Socrates’ known for his aphorisms (‘If God made you a Jew youdon’t need a hobby’; ‘Every fool is convinced he is going to give birth to a genius,’ etc.), who worked as a dues collector for the Jewish Burial Society and frequented Goides, a Whitechapel café patronized by East End Jewish intellectuals. Litvinoff’s plans for a longer series named Harry’s Delicatessen were scrapped after July 1947, when a ‘near pogrom mood’ developed after British authorities in Palestine hanged three Jewish terrorists for an attack on Acre Prison, and two British sergeants were captured and hanged in retaliation. Litvinoff was quickly reduced to ghost-writing – first the memoirs of an eminent surgeon, who recommended that his scribe should adopt a properly English name if he wanted to get on; and then more literary works for Louis Golding, the best-selling Anglo-Jewish novelist for whom Litvinoff wrote three books, including To the Quayside (1954), a novel in which he took Golding’s Mancunian cast of characters but used them to dramatize his own concern for the European Jews who, having survived Hitler, had faced new barriers as they tried to reach Palestine. Litvinoff would also try a comic novel (‘everyone was writing one in those days’). Entitled The Swello Girl, this never-published satire was inspired by the ubiquity of tits and bums in advertising: it featured a buxom television presenter who became an instant celebrity after accidentally falling out of a low-cut dress.
Meanwhile, the once-denied memory of Whitechapel kept reaching forward from the back of Litvinoff’s mind. Reanimated by the fact of Nazi mass murder, it would pass stern judgements on his literary endeavours. As he once wrote, ‘I had climbed out of that ghetto on a ladder of books, inadequately self-taught, only to settle into the myopic confines of a Hampstead rented room scribbling bad poems.’
As his post-war writing developed, Litvinoff would range far and wide across Europe, yet every road seems to lead him back to the rejected square mile of the Jewish East End. In his novel of post-war Berlin, The Lost Europeans (1960), we wander through the communist Eastern sector of Berlin (a city that Litvinoff had visited in 1955 and 1957), only to arrive at another ‘claustrophobic tenement’ which evokes the ‘vulgarity, the noise and overspilling vitality’ of slum life in Whitechapel, even though its poverty has a contrasting and far more pitiful ‘picked-to-the-bone’ quality.6 In To the Quayside, Louis Golding’s character Elsie Silver walks up the rue d’Hauteville in Paris and is suddenly surrounded by ‘the smell of warm boiled brisket of beef, and chopped fried fish, and yellow cucumbers in great glass jars, and cheese-cake, and red horseradish…It was home sweet home again’.7 We turn to the first page of The Bare Knuckle Breed, a book of historical boxing stories that the straitened Litvinoff ghosted for Louis Golding, and find ourselves in the squalor of Whitechapel’s Horse Shoe Alley, falling through successive time warps until the smell of fields and hedges is in the air and Bethnal is ‘still somewhat Green’.8
As we walked down Brick Lane, scouring the Bangladeshi detail for the odd remaining Jewish residue, I asked Litvinoff how he answered the charge of nostalgia. As a writer who came to identify so deeply with the lost world of Jewish Whitechapel, how did he avoid becoming a million times more parochial than the English tradition from which he had felt so dislocated? Litvinoff conceded that you do indeed have to be very careful about the ‘sentimentality’ of a Jewish memory that lingers over bagels and herrings from the barrel, while choosing to forget that the East End was in many ways a ‘frustrating and verminous’ place, which people wanted nothing more than to leave. Yet he also insisted on a ‘real grief at the passing of the ghetto’. ‘You’ve lost a world,’ he explains: ‘a living, vital, throbbing community, with enormous dignity, neighbourliness, fellowship and integrity.’ Its demise, moreover, was like the ‘death of a living creature’: although it had the economic and institutional basis to have survived much longer, the Jewish East End was effectively killed off by the wartime bombing.
Litvinoff has never thought of himself as ‘an East End writer’ – resisting a category embraced by some of the left-wing Jewish novelists who wrote about Whitechapel in the 1930s and 1940s. He stands back from Willy Goldman, author of East End My Cradle (1940) and The Light in the Dust (1944); and he shudders as he remembers the representation of Jewish Whitechapel offered in Simon Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy (1935), screeching ‘Twenty to Eight’ in horrified mockery of the bawling mother who wakes the work-shy hero in the opening paragraph of that crudely realist novel. As the title of his own memoir suggests, Litvinoff recalls Jewish Whitechapel as ‘a small planet’ – a place which was at once miniature and epic in scale: a square mile into which a vast twentieth-century world had been squeezed, and where ‘people spoke of Warsaw, Kishinev, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa as if they were neighbouring suburbs’. As he says of growing up in that two-roomed flat in Fuller Street Buildings: ‘You were sitting in the kitchen or on your mother’s knee, and what were they talking about?’ He counts off a few possibilities: the failings of Russia’s pre-Bolshevik Kerensky government; the sayings of a much-loved rabbi in the Ukraine; the vividly remembered brutalities of a pogrom somewhere on the Black Sea; or the relative merits of Lenin and Trotsky, both of whom were said to be good for the Jews. ‘You really imbibed with your mother’s milk a sense of the wider world out there – a world that was still reaching in to touch you.’9
Litvinoff has an eye for the glowing Whitechapel fragment that lights up a wider world. In Faces of Terror, a much-praised trilogy of novels about the Russian Revolution and its consequences (initially commissioned by Thames Television as plays, which were never made), he started with the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, in which the British authorities shot it out with Latvian communists who were hoping to finance their revolutionary activities with the ‘redistributed’ wealth of British capitalists. The first book in the sequence, A Death out of Season (1973), takes the siege and the violently miscarried robbery that precipitated it, and enhances the story with the help of old East End speculation – factually incorrect, but true in an imaginative sense – which turned the fugitives into anarchists and linked their activity to an abortive Tsarist plot to assassinate the British monarch, thereby closing the country to the exiled revolutionaries who gathered there. In the next two books, Blood on the Snow (1975) and The Face of Terror (1978), Litvinoff projected his company of locally gathered characters through the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist Terror. A small, if much fabled, White-chapel experience is used to trigger a narrative that travels through the defining events of the early twentieth century.
If Whitechapel gave Litvinoff a day-to-day awareness of distant historical convulsions, it also bequeathed him abiding themes that would outlive the ghetto in which they were found: his sympathy for victims of all kinds, and his concern with ‘not politics per se, but a kind of morality that is often expressed in politics…You couldn’t grow up in the Jewish East End without having also lived inside the necessity of that morality.’ Unlike many more conventional figures of English fiction, Litvinoff’s characters are displaced and often unable to integrate lives that have been broken and scattered by the continental shifts of twentieth-century history. Some have nothing left but hatred and bitterness: Litvinoff designates them ‘the thin sour fruit of the ghetto’.10 Others are threadbare idealists, overtaken and defeated by history’s corruption of their cause. They crackle with the ‘neurotic tension’ of those who feel alien wherever they are. Litvinoff’s Europe is seen from the quayside and prison cell: it has more frontiers than reassuring landscapes, and its cities are known less by their stately monuments than by tenement blocks and the shabby cafés in which ‘all the world’s foreigners’ gather.
Halfway up Princelet Street, where, in 1992, one house was still a battered Bengali leather factory while the next glowed as an architectural icon restored and re-Englished by New Georgian conservationists, we stepped through double doors into another pocket of forgotten time: a Huguenot weaver’s house that had been converted into the tiny synagogue of a since dispersed East European chevra. Litvinoff, who had not been here before, peered around in an amazed shock of recognition. Searching through the names painted on the balcony for families he might have known, he mutters that this dark place is indeed ‘full of ghosts’. We climbed upstairs to visit the garret that was once home to David Rodinsky, an eccentric and, by posthumous reputation, somewhat prophetic figure who stayed on as caretaker after the closure of the synagogue. A student of remote and archaic languages who used to wander the streets pressing coins into the hands of the poor, Rodinsky was rumoured to have walked out one day and vanished, leaving behind the jumbled and evocatively time-warped room that had recently been cleared out in the interests of architectural restoration.
This gentrifying myth of the dematerializing immigrant is of little interest to Litvinoff, who understands Jewish disappearance in the incomparably greater terms demanded by the Holocaust. Such is the brute historical fact that really distinguishes Litvinoff’s post-war rendering of Whitechapel, giving his response to the death of the ghetto a character quite distinct from merely sentimental nostalgia or the frisson sought out by ‘ripperologists’ and Ackroydian ‘psycho-geographers’ in more recent years. As Litvinoff explained at a writers’ symposium in Israel in the 1960s, the Holocaust had the effect of ‘generalizing’ his memories of Whitechapel, turning them into recollections of an extinguished ‘tribal community’.
If the war reformed Litvinoff’s memories of Whitechapel, remembered now as part of the murdered Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe, it also reinforced his distance from the British mainstream. In explanation, he refers back to events that took place at a distant quayside during the Second World War. Litvinoff was stationed with the Pioneer Corps in Ulster when he heard about the Struma, an old cargo boat that had left Romania in December 1941, packed with nearly 800 Jewish men, women and children who had made their way to the Dalmatian coast in desperate flight from the Nazis.
Having broken down at sea, this overloaded vessel was eventually towed into Istanbul harbour, where its passengers hoped to disembark so that they could travel overland to Palestine, but the Turkish authorities wouldn’t let them off the boat unless the British agreed to admit them to Palestine. Cabled in London, the British Colonial Office would have none of it, declaring the fugitives to be ‘illegal immigrants’ who ‘exceeded the quota’. There were to be no concessions even for the children. After weeks of hellish wrangling, a Turkish warship towed the Struma out of Istanbul harbour and abandoned it in the Black Sea, where in February 1942 it exploded and sank with only a single survivor. It would emerge, many years later, that the Struma had been torpedoed by a Soviet submarine acting on Stalin’s orders. For Litvinoff, this shameful episode had the shocking effect of ‘blurring the frontiers of evil’. The merciless officials in London had become ‘Hitler’s accomplices’, and there was only one conclusion to be drawn: ‘Never again would I be able to think of myself as an Englishman, or face uncertainty about my identity.’
So Whitechapel lived on in Litvinoff’s mind: not just an evocative lost world but an abrasive insistence on inconvenient truths and awkward questions. His most notorious clash with the English mainstream occurred in January 1951, when Sir Herbert Read invited him to read at an inaugural poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts. A long-standing and even devout admirer of T. S. Eliot (he would later claim to have ‘needed Eliot as a man needs food’11), he had been horrified when, in 1950 or so, he bought a copy of Eliot’s recently published Selected Poems and opened it to find that it included a number of anti-Semitic verses written before the war. In the 1920s and 1930s, Litvinoff remarked, anti-Semitism was more or less endemic, but he was appalled, only a few years after the Holocaust, to find Eliot republishing his lines about ‘money in furs’ and the ‘protozoic slime’ of Bleistein’s ‘lustreless, protrusive eye’. After reading the book on the Tube, Litvinoff had gone home and written a poem entitled ‘To T. S. Eliot’ – indeed, he remembered how it seemed to write itself in less than an hour. When he got up to announce the poem at the ICA reading, he was mortified to hear Read say, ‘Oh good, Tom’s just come in.’ He nearly faltered when he looked up in time to catch Eliot’s welcoming smile, but decided that ‘the poem had a right to exist’, and read it to the packed but silent room:
So shall I say it is not eminence that chills
but the snigger from behind the covers of history,
the sly words and the cold heart
And footprints made with blood upon a continent.12
‘All hell broke out’ as soon as Litvinoff had finished. Sir Herbert Read, whom Litvinoff describes, with a sharp East End eye for compromise, as ‘the anarchist knight’, remarked that, had he known in advance, he would never have allowed the poem to be read: ‘I have known Tom Eliot as a friend for many years and there is nothing at all to justify this crude and unprovoked attack.’ Litvinoff’s unpublished account of this event tells how Stephen Spender stepped in to say that ‘As a poet as Jewish as Litvinoff, I deeply resent this slander.’ David Gascoyne also rose to ‘express dismay and amazement at the obscenity that had just been committed’. Shouted down as he tried to explain himself, Litvinoff decided that he couldn’t just slink away, so he went and sat next to his wife as the storm raged. He admits to feeling ‘a kind of regret about it…about the circumstances’. He also remembers Eliot getting up to leave, and one member of his adoring, dumbstruck entourage glancing at Litvinoff on the way out and spluttering in helpless outrage: ‘Good God! He’s with a beautiful girl!’
Litvinoff went home shaken. And that night his telephone kept ringing. Reuters had put the story on the wire, and papers all over the world wanted to know more. Dannie Abse, who was at the reading, heard T. S. Eliot mutter, ‘It’s a good poem, it’s a very good poem,’13 but that judgement was not widely shared at the time. Indeed, Litvinoff found himself ‘stigmatized as a talentless younger poet trying to achieve notoriety by attacking an eminent poet’.
His criticism of T. S. Eliot was sharply condemned on the letters page of the Jewish Chronicle, and there were further objections in 1959/60 when he published The Lost Europeans. The first to appear under his own name, this novel was concerned with Jews going back into post-war Berlin. People objected to its portrayal of Jewish hate, its supposedly tactless revival of animosities that were best let lie, and its use of homosexuality to suggest the artificiality of relationships in that guilty but already forgetful and divided city. Asked about these condemnations, Litvinoff told a joke. Two Jews are lined up in front of a firing squad, and one of them starts protesting about his rights. He demands a last cigarette, and the blindfold to which he is also entitled. But his companion takes him by the sleeve and begs him, in a pacifying tone, not to make trouble. Perhaps that was always how established Anglo-Jewry’s advice sounded to the rude and noisy East European newcomers of the Whitechapel ghetto.
Yet, for a while, Litvinoff prospered. The film rights to The Lost Europeans were sold, even though the film, which was to have starred Dirk Bogarde, never got made. There was a time when home was a six-bedroom house in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, with a Swiss maid, and a Ford convertible in the drive. In the late 1960s, Litvinoff told the Zionists at a symposium in Tel Aviv that he was content to live among generally ‘mild, tolerant English people’ in ‘an urbanized English village’ where he was ‘not conscious of segregation from my neighbours’. But while his second novel, The Man Next Door (1968), was all about English country life, it was an anti-idyllic affair hardly calculated to flatter those neighbours. It concerns a Jewish family who, having made good in the Whitechapel lingerie trade (‘Alluriste Ltd’), move into Maidenford, a village that would have been quite charming were it not for the vast sausage factory that, in a reprise of the stinking offal heap next to the Cordwainers’ Technical College, fills the air with the heavily symbolic stench of pork production.
The arriving newcomers are studied by their neighbour, a middleaged and all but redundant vaccum-cleaner salesman named Harold Bollam. Like Litvinoff, Bollam has spent time in West Africa and he comes equipped with the degenerate attitudes Litvinoff had found among some of his fellow officers during the war: men who humped their way through hot and sodden nights on long-suffering black girls, and then woke up to enact a grotesque parody of colonial domination on the other unfortunate natives they were saving from barbarism. Bollam is a pastoralist of the racist variety, for whom the sight of ‘pure countryside’ communicates ‘a deeply religious feeling as if you’d been cleansed through and through’, and he greets his infuriatingly successful new neighbours with an escalating campaign of rape, arson and murder.
Human vanity being what it is, there are writers who seem to choose their themes for strategic reasons – skipping from one massive historical event to another in order to demonstrate their command of a world that is never larger than their ability to endow it with new significance. A year or so before our walk through Whitechapel, Martin Amis had chosen to revisit the Holocaust and, in Time’s Arrow (1991), to throw time into reverse so that the gas ovens in Nazi concentration camps actually gave life to their murdered ‘victims’.
Litvinoff, who lacks such literary facility, declared himself horrified by the thought of this conceit. His themes have the heavy and perhaps old-fashioned quality of obsessions, curses, responsibilities that he is sometimes unable to shoulder. Sitting in the Market Café on Fournier Street, he recalled the unfinished work, the destroyed and discontinued manuscripts, the hundred ways he had found of cutting himself down from behind. Then he shrugged and recalled Orwell’s observation that every life feels like a failure when seen from inside: ‘I didn’t have the ambition and drive youneed if you want to be a noted author…’
Yet it was not entirely his fault that his experience could not easily be tailored into a steadily advancing literary career. As he once explained, the ‘proletarian’ life of Jewish Whitechapel had scarcely prepared him to get on even with the more ‘deracinated’ and flexible European Jews who later turned up in London as refugees from Hitler – stylish, urbane and often strikingly ‘erudite’ newcomers who ‘swam in the mainstream of European culture’,14 and needed only a period of acclimatization to adjust themselves. Certainly, this kind of ‘failure’ has been the lot of more than one writer from the interwar Jewish East End. I mentioned Roland Camberton, whom Litvinoff thought he had probably last seen wearing a smart suit and disappearing, perhaps with some relief, into a job in the Reader’s Digest organization. Camberton’s novel Rain on the Pavements (published by John Lehmann in 1951) features a character named ‘Uncle Jake’. Known as the ‘bad lad’ of the family, he had resisted both work and marriage, and spent his time talking socialism and anarchy, using his ‘mortgaged bicycle’ to pedal back and forth between the public library and innumerable meetings of left-wing political parties. Irreligious, unhoused and a ‘perpetual student’, Uncle Jake ends up as an education officer in the RAF: married with two children, living on the base and keeping his distance from London and the disavowed projects of his youth, including the single novel he had managed to get written and published (‘a heartbreaking business undertaken in hopelessly unfavourable conditions’) before giving up. Entitled Failure, this ‘thin, ill-printed, yellow-wrappered volume’ had proved entirely true to its name. It had sold only 300 copies, one of which could still be found at the British Library, providing unread testimony to the lost world of pre-war Jewish Hackney: ‘the labour exchanges, the public libraries, the parks, the bed-sitting rooms, rain on the pavements, fog over the railway yards, and Uncle Jake in an old mackintosh cycling immortally, eternally, towards dreams more real than the reality in which they had been forgotten’.
Litvinoff shrugged again, saying that one of the reasons he had devoted so much energy to the campaign for Soviet Jewry, in which he played a leading role after his visit to Moscow in 1955, was because he didn’t feel that his literary writing was an adequate justification for his existence. ‘I suppose I’ve never stopped failing the scholarship,’ he said, remembering those distant years, just up the road, at Wood Close School.
We walked on past the gaunt bulk of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, too late to investigate the old gentleman’s lavatory in front of the church steps: an underground amenity, which had been bought as a potential wine bar by an Asian entrepreneur at the end of the 1980s and was then in sporadic service as an experimental art space run under the name of ‘Strike’. Down near the bottom of Brick Lane, we turned east into Old Montague Street. This, as Litvinoff remarked, had once been the very heart of Jewish White-chapel, and its vivid life has been transferred into his novels, where children still throw balls at old tin cans, bald mongrels wander about, and the ‘melancholy strain of evening prayers drifts across from the synagogue’. In the Faces of Terror trilogy, a down-at-heel anarchist bookseller called Hoffman has his shop here, selling revolutionary literature to a shabby clientele that includes Special Branch detectives trying to pass as working-class intellectuals, and Russian Embassy officials who come to keep an eye on the émigrés who are considered to be ‘the most dangerous agitators in Europe’. Hoffman’s shop is the site of heated argument between the anarchist tradition that was once so strong in the Jewish East End, and the Bolshevik Terror that would soon enough stamp it into the ground.
The redolent names of Green Dragon Yard and Black Lion Yard were preserved on brand-new street signs, but nothing else was left. ‘There’s no point going any further,’ said Litvinoff, as the past evaporated in front of him. Yet we persisted, heading in the direction of one remaining place where Hoffman’s struggle continues. We passed Whitechapel Library, where Litvinoff had unveiled the blue plaque to the poet Isaac Rosenberg, and turned into Angel Alley – an infamous slum in Victorian times, but now only squeezed by the expanding Whitechapel Art Gallery. At the end of this narrow way, we stepped through a cave-like entrance into a building that resounded with the sound of thrashing printing machines. The walls of the tightly curved staircase were covered with posters advertising diverse liberationist causes, and above that we stepped into the Freedom Bookshop – another tight little room, where the spirit of Kropotkin lives on.
Litvinoff had demonstrated that it is possible to straddle different eras and continents as you walk down a city street. But he now assumed the surprised look of a man who has suddenly been kidnapped by his own imagination. The books and pamphlets were piled high all around him. They expounded the anarchist theory of organization, and traced the beleaguered practice of mutual aid through the Spanish Civil War and then on into such unlikely refuges as allotments, holiday camps and alternative business networks. One offered a critique of the green theory of deep ecology, recommending that the plane trees of London – those purely decorative ‘symbols of moral superiority’ that Litvinoff sees outside his own window in Mecklenburgh Square – should be uprooted and replaced by apple trees, which, in Henry Thoreau’s phrase, are surely ‘the most civilized of all trees’.
After pondering this unexpected place, Litvinoff approached the man behind the desk, and asked for news of his old friend Alex Comfort, known here for what he was before 1972, when he turned his anarchism into a best-selling primer, The Joy of Sex. Seeing a stack of imported books by the late George Woodcock, then still thriving as the grand old man of Canadian Literature, he remembered another quayside proposition: when Woodcock was leaving for Canada, he had invited Litvinoff and his wife to join him on the anarchist literary commune he hoped to establish there.
After glancing at his watch and announcing that he had to meet his young son from school, Litvinoff remarked that he felt as if he had been in ‘an extraordinarily intense dream. You could get home and find that the place youhad just been had never existed.’ He then vanished into the Underground at Aldgate East.
[Patrick Wright]
TONY LAMBRIANOU (an East End face): You remember the King’s Road? What was it? Nothing. Now it’s famous – for what? For the people who made it.
ROBIN COOK (aka Derek Raymond): That’s right. You’ve got to go back thirty years.
TL: It’s funny to hear you talking about that, Robin. It’s the culture. It’ll never ever come back. That’s the tragedy of today. We’re never going to get it back as it was.
RC: It was a brilliant sort of thing. Like a meteor. Phew!
TL: It went.
RC: It burned out, didn’t it? Went pop like a light bulb.
TL: That is the tragedy of it today, looking back. I mean, you represent Chelsea to me. The way you’re dressed. You understand that life.
RC: We saw it from the underside of things.
TL: You’ve had a good life. You’ve had an interesting life.
RC: Oh certainly.
TL: The first time I saw you, I thought: ‘Here’s a man who’s been both sides of the fence.’
RC: Ah yes. A pub I used to drink in a lot, the Star. Belgravia. Remember that? Paddy Kennedy’s place. You’ve got Charlie Mitchell, all that mob. Billy Hill.
TL: You remember them times do you?
RC: Yes, I used to drink there. First floor. Ground floor was only for the punters. First floor for the real mob and the law. Cos you’ve got the law one end of the bar and the rest of us at the other end. You’ve got Kennedy in-between. He was the guvnor.
TL: The villains at that time were more or less exactly what the papers wanted them to be. I’ve always said that. We had this war going on with Jack Spot and Billy Hill in the West End. Do you remember all that?
RC: Very much so.
TL: In all the papers. What was going to happen next?
RC: I’m sixty or so. I can go well back to the 1950s.
TL: These were people. I mean they came from the Italian part. You can see the way they used to dress even today. I watched. Every Friday night on BBC2 they’re doing the Cagney film and the Bogart film. You see the way they dress, the sharpness of it stands out. I watched one last week. What was his name?
RC: George Raft, remember him?
TL: He came down with us. He came over to meet the Twins, didn’t he? Met him at the Colony Club. He was one of the smartest men. One thing, going back to Billy Hill, they were all immaculately dressed people. Never anything out of place. You prided yourself on that. That was what it was all about. And there’s still, luckily, a few of us around who dress to that style today. I don’t think that’ll ever die out. Never. Never in a million years. It’s marvellous, to me.
I always remember a film that made a big impression in my life. Angels with Dirty Faces. Don’t know if you’ve ever seen that? It was about the Dead End Kids. Remember them? They took Cagney to the chair because he wouldn’t grass. And all the kids sitting there watching it. Do youremember that classic film? You’ve got James Cagney like he controlled all the rackets in America. He came from what’s called the ‘wrong side’ of New York. Brooklyn? The Bronx? It was the Bronx. And youhad all these kids and when he came out of prison they glamorized him and he winds up murdering somebody. I think it was a copper. He was in it, O’Brien. What was his name, the actor? Tom O’Brien, I think it was. Pat. Youhad Pat O’Brien, he played the part of the priest who pleads with him to say, ‘Look, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.’ He wanted Cagney to say ‘I don’t want to die. Please don’t do it to me.’ He disappointed all the kids. That’s how the film ended and you see Pat O’Brien smiling, like he done it for him. He knew the truth. The film was made in 1933. If youever get a chance to see it, it’s absolutely blinding.
RC: Remember the original Scarface? 1932 that was.
TL: Who played the original? They’ve had Al Pacino in it since then.
RC: Ah, that’s the remake.
TL: To me, the original was the best.
RC: I liked the Al Pacino one. Have you seen it?
TL: No, I ain’t. I like the original.
RC: Go and see it. Go and see it. Youwon’t regret that. I’ve seen it thirteen times on video.
TL: Another film that’s dear to me was A Kid for Two Farthings. Do youremember that?
RC: ‘Montana, I believe you speak from the heart. Every day above ground is a good day.’ Oh it’s terrific. You ought to see it. You’ve got me going now.
TL: A Kid for Two Farthings. Do youremember that? Done in Brick Lane. Diana Dors. Can youremember that?
RC: What was it called?
TL: A Kid for Two Farthings. She was in it, Diana Dors. In the 1950s. Done in Brick Lane. It winds up, the little girl dying at the end of it. I’ve never seen the film on television or nothing, but it always stood out in my mind. About Brick Lane. It was done mostly round here. The stallholders and that. Incredible, incredible.
RC: Did you see the Bentley/Craig film the other day?
TL: Do you know what? That left a big impression on me as a kid. You know something? I remember that very well, the Bentley and Craig case.
RC: So do I. Same sort of age.
TL: From that day onwards, I remember that case. How old was I? 1950?
RC: When were you born?
TL: 1942.
RC: 1942? Oh well, I was thirty-one.
TL: I was about ten when that came on and nobody ever thought he would hang, Derek Bentley. Do you remember that? That case, it always stood out in my mind as a youngster. Nobody could believe what was happening, the hanging was out. Do you remember that? Hangings was the thing, Pentonville, Wandsworth. I remember Ruth Ellis, the scenes outside the prisons. It was news, headlines. Them things certainly stood out in my mind, especially the Bentley/Craig case.
RC: That stuck in my mind.
TL: The Ruth Ellis case.
RC: It was the week I was called up, the trial. Just gone into the army. I remember that vividly, 1949.
TL: Talking about the army, I know a lot of men I was behind in prison who done the army.
RC: No choice, National Service.
TL: They had, some of them, never committed acts of violence in their life. I know some from the Korean War onwards. And when they released them from the army they turned out to be bank robbers. Some committed murder because they’d trained them how to use violence. They knew how to do it. I know a man today who stands in prison. I won’t name him, he was in the Korean War, and to my mind he’s done twenty-five years. A man who never did nothing wrong. I won’t name him because he’s still away. He went out and committed murder. Before he went in the army he would never have dreamed of committing acts of violence. I sat there in Durham Prison with this bloke, he was telling me about it and it was unbelievable. Until he went in the army, he was a straight, mild man and from that minute onwards he started to murder. Incredible.
It’s like what’s happening now with America. They bring them back from the wars, I bet a lot of them turn out to be going to crime because they’ve been trained how to kill, to be cunning.
You still buying them French cigarettes? Are they French, them ones?
RC: Yeah. Do youwant one?
TL: I was in Paris the Christmas before. Spent New Year there.
RC: I won’t say I know Paris as well as London, but very nearly.
TL: It has a magic about it. I’d always wanted to go. Must go back, have a look around, because the history, it’s out of this world.
RC: Mind you, the bars aren’t worth a London pub. Tell you that for nothing.
Enter Driffield (a bookdealer, employing RC as driver)
D: Young Robin, out.
TL: Robin, see you again.
RC: I’ll be back, Tony.
An extraordinary moment. Even though I’d planned it with some care. The man in the big cap coming straight towards me, hurrying, the approach to Fenchurch Street Station, out of an old fiction and into a new: Gerry Goldstein. With Pat of course, his wife. A few steps behind. A little warm, well wrapped – coat, scarf, woolly jersey, prepared on this mild day for savage weather, prepared to leave London. Sort of. To entrain for the Estuary, Tilbury Town. The opening of my novel, all those years ago, in the nightmare of Thatcher. Gerry as primary witness, participant and telephone connection: the shift from bookdealing to factoring memory into a publishable form. At every event, every notorious gathering, Gerry was in the next room, on the stairs, at the kitchen table. A nice boy, they said. The Peakes, Donald Cammell, Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious, Michael Moorcock, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull. Looped anecdotes on tap. ‘Remember?’
We did our walks, once every seven years, through the City, Ludgate Hill, Smithfield; hospital, church, café, always that, tea and cigarettes, a late breakfast eaten fast, condensation on greasy windows. Gerry had a particular way of smoking, two fingers in a stubby V, cigarette up close to the bitten nails. Head down. Eyes staring off into the middle distance. He knows he’s being photographed. But the look of the man, dark hat, small scar on left cheek, overcoat, has a residual sadness. Here and gone. John Bunyan’s sculpted feet sticking out from a hospital blanket of snow as Gerry strikes a pose in Bunhill Fields.
Sometimes we tried Les the Junkman on Roman Road, if we could catch him open: dead shoes, scratched records, horizontally stacked books keeping the walls up. W. G. Sebald in his essay ‘Moments musicaux’ speaks of ‘searching through a box full of old photographs in a junk shop near Bethnal Green underground station’. Photographs that might provoke memory, challenge a meandering narrative; evidence gathered before the crime has been committed. Recklessly, we give our trust to images. And treat stories as stories. All books in the end become fiction. I have every sympathy for Sebald’s impulse, to collaborate with London, its murkier districts, by finding postcards or handwritten scraps that might, eventually, be teased into a meditation, a lecture. Cards from a shoebox in Cheshire Street suggested the form and numerology of my novel Downriver: twelve tales of imploded colonialism, exotic imports, unappeased crimes, political mendacity.
Gerry, always a character in search of a scribe, and Sebald, a fastidious ghost, coincide in the junk shop of the tall, moustached, preoccupied Les. Les is more custodian than vendor, collector rather than distributor of artefacts. His first instinct is to snatch back a potential purchase: ‘Piss off.’ Sebald has the confidence and the skill to shape a doctored autobiography, recalling what he needs to recall, making flux definitive in leisurely fatalistic prose. And then taking the blush off the thing, even this modest form of confession, by having his words translated. Gerry doesn’t enjoy such luxury: he’s on the move, the phone, talking talking talking. And reading too. In the crack of the day, hungrily seeking out pointers, clues, names.
Cabbalistic signatures: Canetti, Kersh, Emanuel Litvinoff. The Litvinoff trilogy was a particular favourite, rings of ghetto history diminishing into Europe’s forests, cities, settlements. Into Russia. I have a photograph of Gerry and Pat getting Litvinoff, on a return visit to the haunts of childhood, to sign copies of the first editions of those books. Litvinoff is wearing just the kind of baggy Soviet cap Gerry favours as he hustles towards Fenchurch Street. The veteran author is bright-eyed, birdlike, sharp to the edge of sarcasm, hurt perhaps by the world’s persistent refusal to grant his work a proper evaluation. He’s sallow, tanned by electric light. You wouldn’t believe that he went out much. The streets surprise him. A production assistant, annotating this material for a television documentary, describes him as: ‘Asian man on railway bridge.’
One person from the past Emanuel won’t talk about is his half-brother, David. Gerry mentions the funeral. It was the last time he saw Emanuel. But Emanuel has nothing to say about the incident. Gerry was a good friend of David Litvinoff, a person whose name turns up in the memoirs (gangland and showbiz), gambling, yakking, scamming: a conduit, a prankster with his phone wired to a reel-to-reel tape-recorder. Gerry owned several hours of Litvinoff tapes. He remembered what he wanted to remember. It shifted, the story, with the years, the audience. David vanishing, coming back with wads of unexplained cash. Runs at the country. Trips abroad. The Welsh tramp on whom Harold Pinter based his caretaker, Davies. Litvinoff and Performance. Litvinoff and the Krays. Litvinoff’s suicide. The myth was treated by Jonathan Meades, by Colin MacCabe. Spun, trawled, analysed. Stories about stories: a man, his head shaved, hung from a window. A cheesewire grin. Gerry, rightly, felt a sense of ownership. The man, living or dead, was a friend. Gerry sat in a Cheshire Street pub, the Carpenters Arms, with the former Robin Cook. The Chelsea novelist took himself to France, worked in a vineyard and came back as Derek Raymond. Cook, moments earlier, was saying to an interviewer, sorry, he knew the name but had never run across this Litvinoff. Now he responds to Gerry’s question. Telling him what he wants to hear.
‘Where did you know David from then?’
‘Oh well that was through Kim, gambling parties. Very much so. With the Krays in Esmeralda’s Barn.’
‘I remember that,’ Gerry replies, ‘in Knightsbridge, Walton Place. Yeah, I went there. I remember going there when I was about seventeen. Upstairs.’
Gerry, late in the day, told me where David Litvinoff was buried, out in Rainham, a long walk from the station. My visit became part of a book, as it was always going to, as Gerry knew and understood: resented. No copyright on future memory. Snatches of dialogue, already written, are overheard on station platforms. Photographs are taken before the events they depict have been properly staged. Legendary characters pull away from the diminishing gravity of the books in which they are trapped. The only London constant is the weather, its shifts, the theatre of the clouds. The only way to free up a story is to start walking. To take a train somewhere you have never been and to recognize it, immediately, as the missing paragraph of a novel that should never be written.
The faraway looks of Gerry and Pat in their snatched portraits, black-and-white photographs, place them outside this mundane
circuit. They enact what I can only hint at. By the lives they led, the people they met, the endless rehearsals and repetitions of storytelling, they avoid the fix of time. They float. Two voices. Two versions of a shared past. This astonishing, long-lived and nurtured relationship: witnesses to a particular history. To London.
I had written, in part as a tribute to Gerry’s dad, Pip, an even more animated fabulist, this train ride into the Estuary. Which is why, when Gerry rang, after months of sickness, heart, abdominal pains, asking about a walk, I suggested Fenchurch Street. An early start, in Gerry’s terms, mid-morning. I had the sequence from my published novel, Pip Goldstein’s arrival at the station, in place of his son, the journey to Rainham, stones on David Litvinoff’s grave. And now as I set it up, I wanted to justify my theft by seeing Gerry come towards me, taking the place of his father, who had moved away from Whitechapel. Moved away from the ghetto. His telling of it: Jack Spot, Mosley’s blackshirts, street markets, women, card games, clothes. ‘Youremember, Gerry, when we went to see David in hospital?’
Before Gerry and Pat appeared, as I stood at the entrance to the station, another person, a young neat contained man, approached, introduced himself. He was, by profession, an actor: one of the juvenile leads in an upcoming Bleak House. Now he has a role in the day’s story. I won’t gloss over his appearance, which was not part of my original template, the material I had already edited and needed only to live through and photograph. This man, like Gerry – a kind of tribute – wore a long scarf and a cap. (As did Pat, goose-white to Gerry’s Donegal tweed.) The project, for the actor, was an uncommissioned work-in-progress, a documentary film on the life and legend of David Litvinoff. Gerry had been telling tales.
Things were shaping up nicely, a repeat journey in the direction of Rainham, Gerry and Pat playing themselves – and the actor, by his voluntary attendance, playing Litvinoff. To describe something, he would appreciate, is to become it. And so they approached, the Goldsteins, talking, gesticulating, greeting us with embraces. Introductions were made, after we had been through those moves. Gerry explained the proposed outing, which had long ago been published, but which was not quite redundant.
Gerry has a camera, digital. Pat has a camera. The actor has a camera. The train is a camera, sweeping us away from cloying traces of brick and sentiment into Docklands, ice caves of political hyperbole and wastes that will become the latest nowhere, mustard-brick estates between pylons and landfill. The Goldsteins, jump-cutting, stereophonically, competitively, see little of this. They don’t know where they are and have nothing to go on. They came to the Rainham funeral by car. ‘What are those things?’ Pat asks, confronted by a squadron of gas holders.
Old fictions, lost fictions. Revised fictions. Call them up as proof that we still remember, Joseph Conrad at Stanford-le-Hope. His displaced craft waiting on the tide, off Gravesend. The three caps, Pat and Gerry and the actor/documentarist, face the camera, under iron struts, a pattern of light and shadow, on the bridge that leads away from the dock at Tilbury Riverside. They look, very much, like dissidents coming out of East Berlin. Would you trust them, approve citizenship? The past is a burden revealed through stance and wearily complaisant half-smiles: Pat’s bag, Gerry’s shoulder pouch. Their papers, proof of identity. Before we walk out along the river path to East Tilbury, past the sign (white graffiti on concrete wall), beside which I photograph them – THICK AS THIEVES/US, WE’D STICK TOGETHER/FOR ALL TIME, AND/MEAN IT – we stop for a drink, not wanting to exhaust the convalescent Gerry so early in the day. The World’s End. A squat public house in the shadow of the fort and the power station.
This survival, which I associate with Magwitch’s attempted escape in Great Expectations, his second flight, has now revised itself, self-consciously, as a prime example of London heritage. Memorabilia with no memory: Pepys murals, a limp view from Defoe’s factory. Flags, swords, battle honours. We drink under a glass case in which is exhibited a battered quarto volume: SAMUEL PEPYS/CHRONICAL OF/THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON/ 1666.
I want to examine this book; it belongs in the library of disappearances. Here is a version of Pepys that I’ve never come across. This is not the account in the Diaries. ‘Some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City.’ The diary entries are succinct, they cover eleven pages in my edition. The Tilbury trophy is something unknown and unrecorded – a late forgery or an illustrated private edition? But worth testing, sniffing over. An entry for the Gazetteer of East London. ‘Chronical’: is that a genuine archaism?
Gerry is game; the sun climbs, he flags. We take the train home from East Tilbury, leaving the mystery of the Pepys ledger to be resolved on another day.
In high summer, persuaded by a Dutch writer and his friend, an artist, a recorder of security personnel, I’m back at Fenchurch Street. This time we’ll start at East Tilbury, the Bata factory, the church, the Coalhouse Fort and walk back, west, to Grays, Thurrock, Purfleet – stopping, if we time it right, at the World’s End.
The mood is very different. The woman, spirited, present in a way that Pat and Gerry never could be, is alert to atmosphere. She is searching, openly, for material to exploit. She wants pieces of the world that conform to her way of seeing it. And, such is the intensity of her focus, these pieces duly appear. Our empty reverse-commute train, for example, is loud with ghosts. She mentions the fact, without emphasis. She understands what she’s getting into. Without having read it, or having any requirement to read it, she’s become that figure in a story of mine, ‘Grays’. A woman who sets out with a copy of a book on Conrad’s Polish Background. A vampire tale. This woman, dressed in black, ready to walk, performs the role – making us invisible, unnecessary. I stare out of the train window at a pale-wood fence, Rainham’s Great Wall of China: it stretches for mile after mile. It’s new and really rather…Dutch. Planks bright as Ikea floor tiles. The purpose of this new landscape feature is obvious: it masks blight. Smouldering landfill, discontinued industry, carcinogenic paddocks are hidden from the eyes of the Olympic commissioners. That’s why the c-2-c train is so smart, roomy, air-conditioned and unreal. It’s part of the pitch, the ruinously expensive and doomed 2012 bid. Doomed to be successful, condemning us to years of puff and spin as we creep towards the Great Project. Bleak times for those who are cheerfully off-message.
So we come back, through the Czech village of East Tilbury (next stop, Stanford-le-Hope), through the handpainted placards: SAY NO 2 THAMESGATE SCUM, THAMES GATE GET STUFFED. Through a Dutch landscape of poplars and ponds. To the river.
They are professional walkers, this couple: water bottles, sun cream, changes of shirt, cameras. The artist has been here before, obviously, the Bata factory is open to conceptualists. It’s a compulsory visit: pre-development cash forced into the hands of those who are prepared to set-dress the latest piracy. Art first, shit later. Then art again: unfunded, disregarded. If they let you do it, get out – fast. You’ve been had. You’re in the brochure.
The beach, below the Coalhouse Fort, is one of the best, half a mile of prime detritus, scoured and arranged by the tide. On a sort of altar, constructed from driftwood, somebody has laid out an exhibition of medicine bottles, reminiscent of Mark Dion’s installation at the Tate (materials found on the foreshore). Chunks of coal are turning to tar in the day’s sulphurous heat. The river is so low it belongs in a Ballardian fantasy, a post-apocalyptic London: war architecture, lookout towers with broken steps, lizards on hot stones. I explain to the artist that I’m looking for pieces of tile that have words, or bits of words, on them: I’m looking for a story, a sentence. Some way out of a narrative cul-de-sac. I find a shard of stained porcelain, the rim of a plate or dish, on which I discover an obelisk, perhaps a version of Nelson’s column, with the word MORLEY’S. Interesting but no use. The only plunder worth carrying away relates to the Dutch artist, not to me. Two naked cherubs, twins, mounted on a white horse (legless). The rocker on which the horse once stood – it would have disqualified this object as kitsch – has gone, leaving just enough of the original to suggest a kind of celestial skateboard.
Twins, couples, duplicates, are the woman’s subject. Later in the day, at the Port of Tilbury, we will be pulled up by a police car for the crime of photographing two women in lime-green tops, carrying green plastic bags, hair dyed red, passing two men, security personnel, walking in the opposite direction (yellow-green slipover jackets and yellow hardhats). ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ the cop said, as he stepped from the car. ‘This is a very sensitive place.’ The artist refused to show any form of identity. She kept her faked card with the real photograph for Berlin, her next destination. I fobbed him off, as usual, with tales of the river and the production of a document proclaiming my membership of the Welsh Academy (Literature), Yr Academi Cymreig. It was that or the Video Box membership from Hastings. The mobile policeman confessed to living on Canvey Island. We parted on the best of terms.
The barmaid at the World’s End, splendidly sullen, refused to pull a pint before the stroke of eleven. Much to the bemusement of another Dutch couple, tourists who had come ashore from a cruise liner, anchored at Tilbury and shortly to set sail for Spitzbergen. In the stern, nearly naked figures lounged on deckchairs, watching the oily river, the mirage of the deserted riverside parade. Container ships hugged the deep channel. Lorries filled the space alongside the B149 tea stall. Trucks rolled over the QEII Bridge. All of them Dutch, all of them operated by Geest. Which means, so I am told, ghost. Spirit.
The nice thing about my fellow walkers is that they take nothing for granted. ‘The Romans crossed the river here,’ I said (on the authority of a forgotten local historian). ‘Are you sure?’ said the man. ‘There’s a double moat around Tilbury Fort,’ I offered. ‘The best example of seventeenth-century military engineering in England.’ (I quoted the postcard.) ‘Probably Dutch,’ I added. ‘Now I believe you,’ said the woman, when she saw with her own eyes the broad strip of water, the World’s End on the far side.
The other thing about this couple was that despite the unforgiving heat, the roads I marched them down, the police interventions, miles of concrete wall along the riverbank, Barratt Estates, tower blocks of Grays, oil refineries, overgrown paths, thorns, broken glass, foodless pubs, grudging service: they never complained. They kept going to the finish, trailing a little by the end, it’s true; but if I told them we were pushing on into the night, to reach Beckton Alp and the Northern Sewage Outfall, they would suck another water bottle, slap on the star cream, change a T-shirt and continue. ‘Are you sure?’
The Dutch writer is not prepared to nurse his pint, his conceded peanuts and crisp powder, he demands the guvnor. The man responsible for the Pepys book in the sealed glass box. The woman has looked very closely at this thing: ‘It’s printed upside down.’
I take a tour of all the random mementoes that spell out: bogus history. A Pepys quote, in fake seventeenth-century script, is blocked by a notice: NO CHILDREN BEYOND THIS POINT PLEASE. A few sentences about a Pepys visit to ‘Barkeing Church’ dress the snug. Youeat, if you get lucky, in an alcove of restored militaria. There is much talk of the Dutch Wars, raids on the Thames, the breaking of chains. But the clincher is the memory album. The curator of this riverside museum (in a genuine, low-ceilinged, black-beamed drinking den) has contrived a Joseph Cornell artwork from borrowed photographs, messages on postcards, snapshots found in car-boot sales. The downriver publican is an amateur Sebald documenting a fiction of war and loss and family: the karma of human melancholy and its impossible resolution. A young woman writes home from a teachers’ training college in Swansea. A soldier has himself photographed before he returns to the trenches. An elderly man in regalia, perhaps Masonic, poses in a suburban garden: with the fatal confidence that undid Oscar Wilde when he chose to reveal himself in a velvet suit that made public the degree of his occult initiation. The compulsion, with these disparate elements, is to construct a narrative. And to relate that narrative to place. To authenticate lives that have no obvious connection with an undistinguished public house.
The publican appears and, without pressure, confesses: the Pepys book is a total fraud. He invented the title and had it blocked out on a ledger from a Tilbury junk shop. The book I wanted to investigate wasn’t a book, it was a prompt card: CHRONICAL OF THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. (That ‘al’ ending must be a local variant, Francophobe. A car offered for sale, in East Tilbury, had DIESAL £495 painted on the window.) And, since the Pepys text had never been written, London fire was not yet brought to ground. It was still ahead of us, the disaster. The scorched air and blackened skin. Something was printed on those upside-down pages, some composition that must remain a private matter. The case was nailed and varnished. It would not be opened until the pub changed hands or was re-themed. This manifestation was another, very public, disappearance. A cheap trick. An attempt to make me describe an object that doesn’t belong in the story. A plea to which, quite obviously, I will turn a deaf ear. Write nothing, say nothing. Tear up the photographs.
[I. S.]
On General Election morning I’m wandering around Halkevi, a Kurdish and Turkish Community Centre that can be found along a busy street full of budget super-markets, spartan cafés, nail-design stores and boarded-up Edwardian chemists in Stoke Newington. It’s an imposing building, an old Jewish garment factory whose industrial grandeur hasn’t been entirely smothered by the tarpaulin and scaffolding that covers much of it as it undergoes renovation. By the late 1970s the ground floor was being used as a wedding venue by Turkish Cypriots, many of whom still recall the tunes and colour supplied by bands such as the Butterflies and the Cyprus Quartet whose musicians were local tailors and carpenters.
In those days it was a place of joy. That changed in 1986 when it became a hub for tens of thousands of Kurdish men and women escaping torture and government clampdowns back in Turkey. It was a home for those without a home, for those who dreamed of a homeland. A community of sorts was forged here, but one that was as much coercive as voluntary: centre officials would strong-arm locals into paying weekly levies. It became a PKK stronghold, a training camp for radical activists and future guerrillas who were taught to question their family loyalties and to regard them as less important than nation-building. Women in the area were so anxious that in desperation they tried to hide their sons from the Centre’s panoptic eye.
In the mid 1990s Special Branch took to raiding the Centre. Today there are no security guards or amateur militia manning the front door, though a huddle of middle-aged men sipping tea around a table gaze at outsiders with not so much suspicion as surprise: this is a self-regulating environment, one whose dimly lit hall recreates the atmosphere of a provincial museum, where everyone knows each other. The snooker table, a near ubiquitous feature in Turkish and Kurdish social spaces, is deserted. On a pinboard are fastened notices offering cheap leases for kebab stores in Hull.
The sense of hushed desertion doesn’t feel in any way intimidating; rather, it sets the stage for the contemplation of a striking section of the wall on the right-hand side of the hall. Here, protected by cheap plastic, are photographs of around fifty Kurdish men and women who have been fighting against the Turkish state. Young, moustachioed men in camouflage squatting on the ground; a carefully composed portrait of a slim-hipped young woman standing in an orchard; a group of soldiers hiding in a bunker; an enlarged photocopy of a broadsheet picture of a fighter with the newsprint on its reverse still visible. Some of them look barely out of their teens, while one resembles a septuagenarian philosopher-poet. Some look defiant, others smile or raise V-signs. Most carry rifles.
What they all have in common is that they are dead. And that they are all related to families who live in this area of London. Above the photos is a sign, in Kurdish: WE WILL NOT FORGET THEM. This is a martyr’s memorial. A wailing wall that creates a foundation narrative for what it means to be Kurdish: the importance and the inevitability of death. The dead are not departed, it insists; they are among us, watching over and for us. The wall, seen along with the other photos of the jailed guerrilla leader Ocalan that hang throughout the hall, establishes the dominant mood of grief and collective struggle that underwrites this Community Centre.
The Kurds who attend this Centre are Muslims, but religion plays little part in their lives unless they’re travelling abroad, in which case they use faith as a luck charm and drop in to the prayer room at Heathrow. The Centre’s events coordinator is Yaşar İsmailoğlu, a Turkish Cypriot ex-soldier and former classmate of Ocalan who came to London during the power shortages of 1972. A poet who has published several volumes, he also set up the longest-surviving Turkish newspaper in the area, as well as a local football team. Activism is his life – and did for his adopted daughter whose photograph is included on the wall.
He is endlessly busy, full of good cheer, known to everyone in the neighbourhood. He finds it impossible to walk more than a couple of yards without bumping into a friend, colleague or co-conspirator. Yet talk to him for more than a few minutes, and a great melancholy enters the conversation: he dreams, he says, of mountains and of freedom. Here, in England, ‘What we have lost is our enjoyment of living. It is exactly like a robot here. We come to work, then go home.’
We go to one of the many Turkish and Kurdish cafés that are found in the area. A clump of old and silent men cradle their coffees. ‘In the social clubs here, it’s just playing cards,’ says Yaşar. ‘They don’t even talk. They’re just killing time. There is no fun.’ These places, many of them private and many acknowledged locally as drug dens, are far from the classic caffs that get celebrated by the aesthetic moribundists of the capital’s psychogeographic fraternity. They’re refuges from women, mosques for the faithless, retirement homes for the old and fatalistic.
There are few visible traces of the past as we wander around Stoke Newington, but Yaşar’s memories function as a kind of architecture. As he recalls the protests he led, or huge marches that Halkevi orchestrated, the streets become momentarily filled up and populated by ghost communities. We observe pro-Ocalan, anti-imperialism graffiti and reflect on how these hasty, nocturnal scrawls represent an archive, never collected and often flypostered over, of local resistance. ‘They are words,’ Yaşar hazards, ‘paragraphs – in the book of the Turkish Left.’
The siege mentality that enabled, however patchily or involuntarily, a sense of Kurdish community is on the wane. London-born teenagers, no longer animated by the dream of returning East, struggle with the law and with their parents. Halkevi, once a self-designated ‘engine for a Kurdish new republic’ and, according to Yaşar, local people’s ‘eyes, tongue and brains’, has moved towards becoming a welfare organization that deals with spousal abuse, mental health, drug addiction and all the other ailments common among poor migrant populations.
Young Kurds embrace the amnesia of British pop culture, its repudiation of anything as worthy or old-fashioned as politics. Unlike their elders, they’re not assailed at night by dreams of beatings, electric shocks, prison-cell torture. Yaşar, who knows that a community is nothing without shared memories, is currently involved in an oral history project that involves the recording of first-generation settlers. The first batch of tapes arrived the day we met, but they proved to be faulty: the lighting was poor, the voices inaudible.
[Sukhdev Sandhu]
DR BARNARDO’S BOYS’ HOME, STEPNEY CAUSEWAY, E1
Opened in 1870, demolished in 1970. From 1872 it featured a large sign, NO DESTITUTE CHILD EVER REFUSED ADMISSION – all because of ‘Carrots’. John Somers (aka Carrots) was eleven when he knocked on the door of the Home one night in 1871. The refuge was full and he was turned away. Carrots had been on the streets since he was seven years old; whenever he earned money (by selling newspapers and cigarettes, or blacking shoes) his mother would find and rob him. Barnardo promised Carrots that he could have the first bed to become vacant, but a few days later a market porter found the boy’s body in a sugar barrel in a passage leading to the river at London Bridge; the coroner found that he had died of exhaustion, exposure and lack of nourishment.
[Sarah Wise]
SILKWORMS
At its peak in the early 1820s, 20,000 home looms for silk-weaving provided a living for 50,000 Londoners. Silk-worms can survive for sixty days on the leaves of the mulberry tree (at a push, they’ll eat lettuce), and imported mulberries were often to be found in the back yards and gardens of Spitalfields and Whitechapel. (A beautiful, gnarled mulberry, some 300 to 400 years old, can be seen in the garden of the Hogarth House Museum in Chiswick, still flowering and fruiting.) Mr Antony Tag-liabue was a prolific supplier of the worm larvae, from his premises at 31 Brook Street, Holborn.
[Sarah Wise]
BISHOPSGATE ARCHES, EC2
Despite being called ‘a masterpiece of Victorian engineering’, and being lauded by English Heritage, the Bishopsgate Goods Yard and its magnificent viaduct was bulldozed in 2004 for the East London Line extension – even though civil-engineering experts deemed the structure strong enough to take twenty-first-century rail traffic. In the 1890s the arches, at Wheeler Street and Brick Lane, became a temporary home to families who were unable to afford their rent or who were flitting between cheap lodgings in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. They slept on the west side, while the police patrolled the eastern pavement, ignoring them. From five o’clock in the morning dockers and porters began to pass, and were known to throw down coins and even to offer their lunches to the neediest-looking children.
[Sarah Wise]
CALLAHAN’S, WHITECHAPEL HIGH STREET, E1
In 1909 Prince Kropotkin travelled to London to give a series of lectures on ‘The Tyranny of Government’. He was refused admission into Britain until some Fabians, including Hubert Black, Edith Nesbit and James ‘Big Jim’ Callahan, interceded on his behalf, offering personal sureties for his good conduct, and the use of Callahan’s Meeting Rooms, previously known for their association with Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party.
Callahan became increasingly involved in questions of Irish Home Rule, returning to Dublin in 1914. He died, largely forgotten, in a botched robbery (or guerrilla attack) on Amiens Street Station, in 1921.
The Meeting Rooms, flourishing under their original name, continued to welcome anarchists (some of whom were to die in Spain). By the 1940s, Callahan’s lost its political aspect and became a dance hall. When it was demolished in 1968, it was best known as a venue for ‘Old Time’ dancing and bingo. It enjoyed one final episode of public controversy when Frank Cornelius, standing as a Liberal candidate in the 1959 election, attacked the long-serving local member, Ian Rinkoff, for ballot-rigging, involvement with dubious property deals (under the guise of slum clearance), and part-ownership of a Maltese-run café/brothel in Cable Street. The café features in Alexander Baron’s novel The Lowlife.
[Michael Moorcock]
MARRIAGES WHARF, E6
Marriages Wharf lay across the river from Marriage’s Old Wharf at Gallions Reach. The old wharf was destroyed in the Arsenal fire of 1843 and William Marriage, grandson of the company’s founder, rebuilt the wharf and warehouse so that it would be more convenient for the Custom House on the other side of the Woolwich Basin. Marriage was the chief importer and exporter of opium and the rarer spices. He financed a fleet of his own ‘Poppy Clippers’ and founded a hospice for destitute Chinese women in Albert Road. In the mid twentieth century Marriage’s eccentric mansion, attached to the old warehouse, was still standing – but, by 1970, it had been demolished to make way for the GLC’s Gallions Street development.
[Michael Moorcock]
JACK WILLIAMS
1
I picked up with a man
Jack Williams had no legs he
was an old sailor got frost
bitten in the Arctic regions I
used to lead him all about
Ratcliffe Highway & sometimes up as
far as Notting Hill with a
big painted board afore him a
picture of the place where he
was froze in I was with
him for fifteen months till one
night I said something when he
was a-bed didn’t please him
he got his knife out &
stabbed my leg in two places
here are the marks
2
I can only see hisself sir
He’s sure to give me any
coppers he has
in his coat-pocket
& that’s a very great thing
to a poor man like me
3
It’s no use
such as us
calling at fine houses
to know if they’ve
any old keys to
sell no we
trades with the poor
4
O yes I’ll buy bones
if I have any ha’pence
rather than go without but
I pick them up
or have them
given to me
mostly
[ John Seed/Henry Mayhew]
A most important discovery has been made within these two days which removes every shadow of doubt respecting the guilt of the late suicide Williams. It was proved before the magistrates of Shadwell Office that, three weeks before the murder of Mr Williamson and his family, Williams had been seen to have a long French knife with an ivory handle. That knife could never be found in Williams’s trunk or among any of the clothes he left behind him at the Pear Tree public house. The subsequent search to find it has been unsuccessful. On Tuesday Harrison, one of the lodgers at the Pear Tree, in searching among some old clothes, found a blue jacket which he immediately recognized as part of Williams’s apparel. He proceeded to examine it closely, and upon looking at the inside pocket he found it quite stiff with coagulated blood, as if a blood-stained hand had been thrust into it. He brought it down to Mrs Vermilloe, who instantly sent for Holbrook and another Shadwell officer to make further search of the house. Every apartment then underwent the most rigid examination for almost an hour and a half, when the officers came at last to a small closet where there was a heap of dirty stockings and other clothes, which being removed, they observed a bit of wood protruding from a mouse-hole in the wall, which they immediately drew out, and at the same instant they discovered the handle of a clasp knife, apparently dyed with blood; which upon being brought forth, proved to be the identical French knife seen in Williams’s possession before the murders; the handle and blade of which were smeared all over with blood.
[The Times, 16 January 1811]
The mass hostility towards the corpse of John Williams, the supposed Ratcliffe Highway murderer, was of a bestial ferocity. The entire population of the district, as it appeared, rose with the aim of destroying him, dismembering his body and working every savagery upon the cold flesh. But the violence was formalized, a ritual was invented. A solemn procession moved out from St George’s-in-the-East, where the suicided man had been kept overnight; a loop was made through the district, so that all eyes might witness the cart, its titled board and shameful cargo. With attendant horsemen and a straggle of pedestrians, the death-cart acknowledged the Marrs’ Ratcliffe Highway shop, the scene of the crime, and then turned, along the western entrance to Hawksmoor’s church, towards the chosen place of burial.
The board on which the body was arranged had been dressed with the murder weapons, the maul and the chisel – as well as the stake that would be driven through the dead man’s heart. Thomas De Quincey, in his essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, does not dwell on such details. Williams, he reports, ‘was buried in the centre of a quadrivium, or conflux of four roads (in this case four streets)…And over him drives for ever the uproar of unresting London.’
[I. S.]