Comments on: Alexander Baron’s East End

By: Ronnie Newman

Ronnie Newman — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 10:55:15 +0000

Further to my comment on 13th February 2021 I would like to make the following amendment. Regrettably, I made a mistake with the name of Alexander & Dolores Baron’s son’s name. His name is Nicholas and not Andrew as stated. I’m really sorry about this and sincerely apologise to Nicholas for my forgetfullness.

By: Ronnie Newman

Ronnie Newman — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:58:14 +0000

Thank you Nadia for this lovely article about my 1st cousin Alexander Baron (Joe Bernstein to his close family). After his his 1st book From the City From the Plough was published we all tried to get used to calling him Alex but invariably still called him Joe on the rare occasions that we met up.

His mother Fanny Levinson and my mother Doris Levinson were sisters but my mother as the youngest of 10 children was born in 1915 so she was 20 years younger than Fanny. Although Joe (Alex) and my mother were Aunt and Nephew, they were more or less the same age so were more like good friends or cousins and used to spend time together when they were young adults. As mentioned earlier Alex was my 1st cousin and I was born in 1937 so I’m 20 years younger than him.

I didn’t really get to know him until after the 2nd WW as he was a serving soldier and I was evacuated to the country with my mother. With the age difference between us, we didn’t really have too much in common and only used to meet occasioally at family functions. He was a very gentle man, generally quite shy and was a wonderful author and script writer. He married quite late and was well matched to his lovely Dolores. They had one son Andrew. Sadly, since Joe (Alex) passed, we have had very little contact with them. If by any chance this comment is read by Dolores or Andrew then Ronnie and Joyce and fammily send them their love and best wishes.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 09:26:52 +0000

Great book. As are all his novels.

By: Aubrey Gordon

Aubrey Gordon — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 09:06:04 +0000

It may interest you to know that from 1935 for 25 years I lived at 28 Cheshire st .formerly Hare st. 2 doors up from Alexander Barons Grand parents in Bethnal Green .We knew them well.

The story goes that when I was a baby, crying, Baron’s grandmother heard and climbed out of the front window onto the ledge that ran along all the houses, crawled along till she reached no. 28, opened our front window, climbed inside and took care of me.

yours, Aubrey Gordon, Modiin ,Israel.

By: Ellen Moody

Ellen Moody — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 13:28:07 +0000

I forgot to mention that he got along with with Winston Graham and (again from memory) wrote the first 8 episodes of the second year of the 1970s Poldark (for Black Moon and Four Swans)

By: Ellen Moody

Ellen Moody — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 13:26:02 +0000

Thank you. This is the first extensive description of Baron I’ve come across — apart from a “life and works” by Gale in the George Mason database. I know he wrote a number of superb scripts for BBC adaptations of classics: especially Dickens, one of Jane Eyre, one of Sense and Sensibility. I remember reading an anti-war novel, There’s no Home, and his Seeing Life, comparable with the best war memoirs. A humane decent man.

By: Joan

Joan — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 19:21:27 +0000

My partner went to interview Alexander Baron about 25 years ago when he was researching the role of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs during the Second World War, and in particular how soldiers settled into postwar life. He went to see him at his suburban house in Golders Green and Baron and his wife gave him lunch. What struck my partner was how modest and unsentimental he was. And he told a story about how, when his book From The City, From the Plough was published he was invited to a publishers party but on arriving at it was too shy to go in.

By: Jill Wilson

Jill Wilson — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 17:30:02 +0000

I have just been on a very good walk/talk by Julian Woodford about the journeyman weavers and guess where we went… Cheshire Street! How zeitgeist is that…

By: Helen Breen

Helen Breen — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 12:36:21 +0000

Greetings from Boston,

GA, Nadia Valman does a masterful job of describing Alexander Baron’s return to his grandparents’ home in East London.

How cleverly the novelist incorporates the Sabbath scene that the protagonist Dido glimpses as he moves on to meet his own fate. She writes:

Their kitchen table is transformed by candlelight, a white cloth and the gleaming loaves of challah. ‘It disturbed him’, Baron wrote. ‘It awakened in him drifts of longing which he could not follow. It made him feel lost and sad, something that drew him but was infinitely out of reach behind the panes of glass’.

Oh, the universal desire to return to a scene of our childhood that only increases with time…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 09:19:58 +0000

Great piece about a wonderful London novelist