In Search Of The Yiddish East End
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Writer & biographer M. Syd Rosen is on a quest to discover his family’s past and explore the significance of Yiddish culture today
My grandfather’s cousins’ butcher’s shop in Wentworth St photographed by Shloimy Alman
I live in a former hat factory opposite the school that Emanuel Litvinoff writes about in his memoir Journey Through a Small Planet. I moved back to Bethnal Green and into this building about eight years ago and Aleph, my partner, joined me here about two years ago. I say ‘moved back’ but I should not. I am not from Bethnal Green, no matter how long I live in the shadow of Litvinoff.
I use the word ‘shadow’ almost literally because a new yoga studio nearby has recently painted the author’s face on the side of their building in Cheshire St. Now, every day, as I head back from a walk or a visit to the shops, Litvinoff’s great bespectacled face looks down at me.
You have to go back two or three generations to find my family’s roots in Stepney, Whitechapel, and Spitalfields. This, I was always told, was a nowhere land, a place abandoned to the whims of the Luftwaffe. By the time I got here the Bethnal Green my family knew had long gone, the residents deceased or otherwise departed, taking with them as much of their language and culture as they could. To many, Yiddish meant little more than either tired humour or the unfamiliar world of Hasidism. In isolation, it was hard to argue otherwise. 2011 saw the end of Friends of Yiddish, a literary club for native Yiddish speakers that had been meeting at Toynbee Hall for the best part of a century. Nothing ever took its place because nothing ever could.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was the only member of my family—myself included—with an inkling of why it was that the East End remained important to us. Nudged into recollection by my imminent move east, my grandfather recalled teenage summers spent helping out at his cousin’s butchers shop on Petticoat Lane Market. My mind flashed to white coats speckled with blood and the rhythmic plucking of dead chickens before Litvinoff’s oversized face leapt into view and reminded me to keep the nostalgia in check. Nevertheless, here was something for me to grab ahold of, a marker so visceral that even a vegetarian such as myself wanted to just reach out and grab it.
Once, Wentworth St had fourteen butchers. Tired with time, my grandfather could not recall the location of his family’s shop nor quite what it looked like, only that it stood on a corner. Resigned to the fact that the area had long since changed, I hoped at least to be able to identify the right address.
My grandfather is decidedly English, a fact that obscures how close he was to the mass migration of Jews into East London from Eastern Europe—how close we are still, despite it all. Some of my family came from Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), a city in what is now Ukraine. Czernowitz is best remembered by Yiddishists for having played host to a hugely influential conference on the state of the language in 1908. Today the city is a common stopping-off point for those seeking refuge in nearby Romania.
There would be no mass Yiddish tomorrow as dreamed of by the linguists of Czernowitz. But still Yiddish thrived in London, as it did all over the world, leaving in its wake a voluminous and varied cultural output to which my generation have next to no recourse, whatever our backgrounds.
Aleph and I wanted to try to do something about this. We set up a project dedicated to exploring the past, present, and future of Yiddish culture, particularly how it relates to contemporary struggles over memory and power. We wanted to learn more about where Yiddish culture came from and where it still might be able to take us.
In preparation, I decided to rewatch a number of films with an eye to what we could screen, including Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings (1955). Written by Wolf Mankowitz, the film takes its name and structure from ‘Chad Gadya’, a Jewish song dating back to the sixteenth century. Traditionally sung at Passover, ‘Chad Gadya’ concerns the fate of a poor little goat who is eaten by a cat who is in turn bitten by a dog who is then beaten by a stick. On it goes, in familiar shaggy-dog fashion.
In A Kid for Two Farthings our hero Joe is an imaginative little boy living in a bustling but deprived East End street market. Joe dreams not of a goat but of a unicorn magical enough to grant his friends and family their wishes. Filmed in the summer of 1954, A Kid for Two Farthings showed Petticoat Lane at both its heyday and its swansong. Amidst establishing shots of hawkers and housewives and spinsters and spivs, Joe spies a pigeon and decides he must have it. As I watched Joe hunt his prey in vain I suddenly spotted a blurry blue butcher’s shop in the background. If you squint hard enough, ‘Frankel’ comes into view, the surname of my grandfather’s London relatives. Like Joe, my unicorn was flickering into technicolour life.
A Kid for Two Farthings was mostly shot on location, so I knew there was a high chance this was a real building. For the sake of convenience, though, Reed stitched together his make-believe market out of several different streets, making use of sets and dressing real buildings when necessary. Checking a commercial directory, I learned that L. Frankel was indeed located at 30 Wentworth St, sharing a corner with Goulston St, just as it appeared to do in Reed’s film.
Though the entire film revolves around Wentworth St, the only glimpses of L. Frankel are to be had in these two brief shots. Happily, the building still stands today. The attractive green tiles and hand-painted sign are gone, but the capitals on either side of the shopfront remain.
Families like mine stopped speaking Yiddish around the time Reed’s cameras arrived in Spitalfields. By that stage it had long been derided as zhargon, ‘jargon’, one of those ‘miserable [and] stunted’ half-languages better suited to the ‘stealthy tongues of prisoners.’ These words belonged to no less influential a figure than Theodore Herzl, whose determination to crush Yiddish meant abandoning not just a way of speaking but a deep link to our collective past. Herzl was, of course, wrong. It gave Aleph and I no small pleasure to call our new project Jargon, in celebration of a language and a culture all too readily dismissed.
London is still home to tens of thousands for whom Yiddish is their mother tongue. Many others continue to learn it, for either sentimental reasons, out of alignment with the values of diasporic life, or to work their way through a vast and largely untapped cultural heritage. Our project is not just for Yiddish speakers though. We are setting up a book club for Yiddish literature in translation, organising film screenings that consider the meaning of ‘Jewish cinema’, hosting artists’ talks and authors in conversation, and running book sales. We want to find a way to talk about this world without romanticising it, to critique it without isolating it.
Jargon is launched next Sunday 25th May at House of Annetta, 25 Princelet St, E1 6QH. For a full programme and to purchase tickets, visit jargon.org.uk.
The corner of Wentworth St and Goulston St today
L. Frankel’s butcher shop at the corner of Wentworth St and Goulston St in the background of this still from A Kid for Two Farthings in 1954
L. Frankel’s butcher shop in the background of another still from A Kid for Two Farthings in 1954
Emmanuel Litvinoff gazes down onto Cheshire St
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So I ask myself and others wherever we go Mama Loshen ( our mother’s tongue) is near our nose and minds .
I love the end wall Portraits. They say so much. An area rich in history, and which must never be lost.
I belong to that generation whose Jewish parents had been brought up in the East End, my father as the youngest child of Russians who arrived about 1840 and my mother, who arrived as a young girl from Galicia (near Lvov). Nothing is known of how and why the paternal ancestors made the journey; my mother followed in the footsteps of her sibs, all of whom made better lives for themselves by their migrations. Until the nineteen thirties they lived in Whitechapel or Stepney but then began to move northward into Hackney or further afield though it took the Blitz to finally drive them out. Whether redevelopment will be allowed to amount to a new Blitz remains to be seen. But the indications are that it is not a foregone conclusion. I hope the old-style properties will be found to be worthy of preservation. Sadly, I shall not live long enough to see the outcome, being now well into my nineties.
Fabulous initiative which I look forward to visiting. Yiddish film, theatre and lit is so immensely rich, and deserves to be better known. I hadn’t heard of Annetta’s House. It renews my faith in life to know about this kind of thing and person.
By the time A Kid for Two Farthhings came out my father had lost his ability to speak the Yiddish of his Stepney childhood but could still understand it. That led to strange situations during our visits to my grandparents [who had long ago moved out to Stoke Newington] in which they chatted to him in a weird, unrecognizeable language while he answered in English.