by Vivi Lachs
London Yiddishtown: East End Jewish Life in Yiddish Sketch and Story, 1930-1950
Katie Brown, A. M. Kaizer, and I. A. Lisky
Translated with introductions and commentary by Vivi Lachs
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8143-4848-2
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London Yiddishtown is a collection of urban sketches that first appeared in the London Yiddish press. It showcases the work of three Eastern European immigrant writers who settled in London’s East End and wrote during the 1930s and 1940s. The sketches are short pieces of fiction, fictionalised reportage, and humorous urban feuilletons. Though unknown to English readers prior to the publication of this volume, the writers were popular Yiddish celebrities in their time.
Katie Brown, known as London’s “Yiddish bestseller,” wrote comic sketches that describe the shenanigans of East End immigrant community and family life. She shows the tensions between parents and children, such as the son waving a red flag made from pyjamas on a soapbox in the street and the daughter going hiking and camping with a boyfriend, to the shock of her mother. With wry and belly-laugh humor, her sketches address generational changes in ideology, ethical values, and Jewish identity.
I. A. Lisky arrived in London in 1930 to an anxious political world where people were protesting unemployment and fighting fascism. With a focus on the sharp fight for survival, his engaging and intense stories follow Jewish and gentile characters whose experiences range from joining a hunger march to running a clothing factory, recruiting for the British Union of Fascists, arguing communist politics, and being cast as stereotypical Jewish extras in the film Jew Suss.
A. M. Kaizer was a prominent community activist and a popular writer. His hilarious satirical romps make fun of community peculiarities and shortcomings, hypocrisy, and foolishness. They move from bragging benefactors of a community kitchen to bickering cantors in a synagogue, from class-conscious women on the trolleybus heading down to Petticoat Lane to disaffected bar mitzvah boys and their aggravating fathers.
In addition to the twenty-six stories, London Yiddishtown includes a contextual introduction and notes, biographies of the writers, and a lauded final chapter, offering a new history of the East End literary milieu of the time.
Vivi Lachs is a historian of the Jewish East End, a 2019 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, and a Yiddish performer. She uses Yiddish songs, poems, and stories to expand what we know of London’s immigrant history. She is the author of Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse 1884-1914. She sings, records, and composes with Klezmer Klub and the Cockney-Yiddish music hall band Katsha’nes, runs the Great Yiddish Parade, is vice chair of the Yiddish Cafe Trust, and leads tours of the Yiddish East End.
REVIEWS
Times Literary Supplement:
Folklore: https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2022.2074701
Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/british-yiddish-rokhl
Penniless Press: http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/NRB/YIDDISH.htm
Patrick Comeford: Anglican blog: http://www.patrickcomerford.com/2022/11/tales-of-missing-vowels-and-vanishing.html
AUDIO LINKS
Interview for The Shmooze Podcast of the Yiddish Book Center
READINGS
Translators Aloud
#YiddishLitMonth is curated by Madeleine Cohen. Mindl is academic director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, where she directs the Yiddish translation fellowship and is translation editor of the Center’s online translation series. Mindl has a PhD in comparative literature from UC Berkeley. She is a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College and president of the board of directors of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 