My mother’s cousin’s father was a Cailingold, and we’ve been able to trace back to Luboml, not far from Warshaw. What I udnerstand about Moshe’s family in Warshaw is that they were not only booksellers but publishers too.

We are sure there is a connection but have not yet been able to trace it exactly. I believe there were many brothers in the original family.

I read Asher Cailingold’s book about Esther and sent a copy to my mother’s cousin for her to have.

I might add that the Yizkor book for Luboml speaks of the Cailingolds, including a photo of the hotel the family owned and a description of my mother’s cousin’s uncle’s death.

Asher later wrote a book about Ester – An Unlikely Heroine

Thank you for sharing your memories and comments

Long before Ceilingold and Abramsky there was the radical publisher Barnet Ruderman, a pioneer of the Jewish labour movement in the 1890s, and a bookseller in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Ruderman’s big break was as the London agent for Avner Tanenboym, whose bestselling Yiddish potboiler ‘Secrets of the Russian Imperial Court’ would have been wildly popular in Whitechapel.

Mazin’s, ‘Hebrew bookseller and drapery dealer’ in Whitechapel Road was another well-known East End landmark for decades. As was Weinberg the printer/publisher in Brick Lane. Active in the Jewish workers’ party, the Bund, in his native Poland, Weinberg published a Yiddish weekly called the Family Friend in the 1920s, featuring a popular column called ‘Der Vaytshepeler Filosof’ (the Whitechapel Philosopher).

Moyshe or Morris Zusman was another immigrant bookseller/printer/publisher/bookbinder who opened his shop at 90, New Road in 1907. Yiddish translations of Oscar Wilde were among his early imprints. He was also the local Yiddish theatre impresario, booking acts from Poland, the US and beyond.

And then there was Israel Naroditsky, a yeshiva-trained radical, and another scholar/publisher in the mould of Ceilingold and Abramsky. Naroditsky ran a print shop on Mile End Road and published hundreds of books from the 1890s until the 1940s. His three sons, Carmel, Bar-Kochba and Zerubavel, carried on the business, promising their father that they would continue to subsidise the printing of local poet Shtensl’s monthly Yiddish literary pamphlet ‘Loshn un lebn’ (Language and Life).

There were dozens of others, just as interesting. Chimen Abramsky had known many of these pioneers and had even acquired their stock in some cases. He talked about books as if they were old friends; he would pull one off the shelf, then proceed to tell you about its previous owners, where and when they had first met, and what was special about it. He was the last link with a century of Jewish immigrant bookselling and publishing in Whitechapel.