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Uncle Solly’s World

A few years ago, I was living in an attic above a Bangladeshi sweatshop on Brick Lane in London’s East End. To escape its mice-ridden confines (not to mention my landlord, Mr Ali, who was forever coming upstairs to help himself to my booze and watch cricket on my TV), I would escape to the Whitechapel Library around the corner.

I found myself in good company. Nearly everyone in the reference section was trying to escape something. The tramps sought refuge from the English weather; the OAPs from the tedium of retirement; young Bangladeshis studying GCSEs from the cramped confines of their council flats. In the middle of unruly Whitechapel, the library was a sanctuary. And just as the poet Isaac Rosenberg had once feasted on literature, philosophy and economic and political theory in the place the East End Jews called ‘The University of the Poor’, so young immigrants now studied for their Open University degrees, trying to earn a one-way ticket out of the ghetto.

I joined them, making use of the library to educate myself about the East End. I had never set foot in the area before; my childhood was spent in leafy SW13 and most of my adult life in places like Pakistan. But, returning to England unemployed and broke in the winter of 1999, I found myself washed up on Brick Lane. My first few weeks in the attic above the sweatshop had brought on feverish culture shock. But since then, I’d managed to recover and had begun to explore the neighbourhood – on foot and through the library’s stacks.

My favourite desk stood between tall shelves crammed with Bengali, Somali and Urdu classics, which had replaced the Yiddish collection. Here, I read my way through all the history books and memoirs on east London. These included an extensive collection of ‘Cor-Blimey-There’s-Nothing-Like-a-Knees-Up!’ autobiographies, and the ‘Dodgy Geezers that I ’ave Known’ genre, but thankfully, there were more thoughtful accounts on offer. Among them, I disco

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A few years ago, I was living in an attic above a Bangladeshi sweatshop on Brick Lane in London’s East End. To escape its mice-ridden confines (not to mention my landlord, Mr Ali, who was forever coming upstairs to help himself to my booze and watch cricket on my TV), I would escape to the Whitechapel Library around the corner.

I found myself in good company. Nearly everyone in the reference section was trying to escape something. The tramps sought refuge from the English weather; the OAPs from the tedium of retirement; young Bangladeshis studying GCSEs from the cramped confines of their council flats. In the middle of unruly Whitechapel, the library was a sanctuary. And just as the poet Isaac Rosenberg had once feasted on literature, philosophy and economic and political theory in the place the East End Jews called ‘The University of the Poor’, so young immigrants now studied for their Open University degrees, trying to earn a one-way ticket out of the ghetto. I joined them, making use of the library to educate myself about the East End. I had never set foot in the area before; my childhood was spent in leafy SW13 and most of my adult life in places like Pakistan. But, returning to England unemployed and broke in the winter of 1999, I found myself washed up on Brick Lane. My first few weeks in the attic above the sweatshop had brought on feverish culture shock. But since then, I’d managed to recover and had begun to explore the neighbourhood – on foot and through the library’s stacks. My favourite desk stood between tall shelves crammed with Bengali, Somali and Urdu classics, which had replaced the Yiddish collection. Here, I read my way through all the history books and memoirs on east London. These included an extensive collection of ‘Cor-Blimey-There’s-Nothing-Like-a-Knees-Up!’ autobiographies, and the ‘Dodgy Geezers that I ’ave Known’ genre, but thankfully, there were more thoughtful accounts on offer. Among them, I discovered Emanuel Litvinoff ’s Journey Through a Small Planet – a masterpiece that rivals George Orwell’s best non fiction. In fact it was to inspire me to write my own account of life on Brick Lane. Litvinoff ’s refreshingly realistic view of the East End of his childhood in the 1920s and ’30s rang especially true. It was no Cockney paradise full of chirpy Pearlies; nor does he portray it as an immigrant Shangri-La. His world was filthy and overpopulated, packed with sweatshops that gave off a ‘stench of overcrowding and decay’. Nowhere does he express a hint of sentimentality for the ghetto, even though, in his lifetime, he would watch it disappear. What Litvinoff does celebrate, however, are the characters – all of them ordinary men and women – who inhabited his world and whose idiosyncrasies made it so colourful. Indeed, for an autobiography, the book contains very little of the author. We learn only that he was a typical teenager, full of dreams and hormones, prone to falling in with the wrong crowd; and that, upon reaching manhood and wanting to become a writer, he penned his first novel on scraps of paper. Instead, each chapter is dedicated to the daily struggles of relatives, friends, neighbours and the occasional enemy – all of them deliciously flawed. First we come to know Mark Golombek, a Ukrainian clothes presser and revolutionary, who would insert leaflets inside soldiers’ uniforms that read, ‘DOWN WITH BLOODTHIRSTY CAPITALISM!’ Next we meet Litvinoff ’s mother, Rosa, who fled Russia for London where her husband left her ‘pregnant and twenty-two, with nothing but three children, a sewing machine and her skill in dressmaking’. Then we’re introduced to Mickey Lerner, who was regularly caned at school for refusing to sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Finally, there’s the belle of the neighbourhood, Fanya Ziegelbaum. Seduced by Herschel Rosenheim, a touring American actor, she’s forced to have an abortion at Fat Yetta’s backstreet clinic. Litvinoff developed a justifiable contempt for some. ‘Fathers – what I’d seen of them – were not much of a bargain,’ he writes. ‘They stank of sweat and strong tobacco; [and] when they grabbed you in an unwanted embrace their rough beards rasped your skin.’ From an early age, Litvinoff lived in constant fear that his mother would marry again. He managed to see off one suitor, a Mister Paisky, who had a smile that revealed ‘a gold tooth in the ruined cavern of his mouth’. But eventually, the young man’s worst fears came true in the form of Uncle Solly. A smooth talker who carried a Malacca cane, he claimed to have ‘killed Germans in Gallipoli and France, prospected for diamonds, [and] strode once with the same nonchalance amongst the Kaffirs of the African veldt’. Like all the others, Uncle Solly turned out to be trouble. An impulsive gambler who kept Rosa in a permanent state of pregnancy, he spent most of his evenings lying onthe sofa ‘half undressed, scratching reflectively at his hairy armpit and dribbling smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette’. Litvinoff ’s home was a dilapidated tenement building filled with the pervasive stench of cats, where neighbours banged broomsticks on each other’s walls and ceilings. He was never in any doubt that he wanted to escape – and he was not alone. ‘We were all dreamers,’ he writes, ‘each convinced it was his destiny to grow rich, or famous, or change the world to a marvellous place of freedom and justice. No wonder so many of us were haunted by bitterness, failure and despair.’ That collage of dreams and failure, destiny and despair remains etched on the East End’s human landscape. The Welfare State ensures people no longer starve to death; and young girls aren’t sold under the railway arches as they were in Dr Barnado’s day. But still, the borough of Tower Hamlets, encompassing the East End proper, remains the poorest in Britain. Thousands of families still live six to a room in crumbling estates, poverty and unemployment are rife, violent crime is rampant and heroin is the new gin. The parallels between the old Jewish East End and the new Muslim-dominated one don’t end there. The Bangladeshis, who number around 60,000, have learned to live with racism just as the Jews did. Like their predecessors, most first-generation Bangladeshis have clung together, mirroring Litvinoff ’s old tenement building – ‘a village in miniature, a place of ingathered exiles who supplemented their Jewish speech with phrases in Russian, Polish or Lithuanian’. This insular existence trapped many of Litvinoff ’s generation, and today, some young British Bangladeshis find themselves caught in the same culture gap. You can see them on street corners dealing in drugs and fighting turf wars. Others have turned to Wahabi-inspired Islamic fundamentalism, previously unknown in the Bengali tradition. They condone violence against the British state and aspire to fill the shoes of Litvinoff ’s childhood friend ‘Gurevich’, a Marxist revolutionary who planted a bomb on Tower Bridge. In short, the immigrant gestation period is no less painful today than it was in the 1920s – or perhaps at any time in the East End’s past. But Journey Through a Small Planet offers hope. Although Litvinoff himself felt disenfranchised from his family, community and religion – just as he did from the wider Anglo-Saxon society – he, like tens of thousands of other Jews who populated east London between the 1880s and 1960s, did manage to escape. And, just as the Glaxos and Gestetners achieved success, Litvinoff also realized his dream, transforming himself into a novelist and poet.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Tarquin Hall 2006


About the contributor

Tarquin Hall is the author of Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End, published in 2005. He lived on Brick Lane for two and a half years but has since gone up-market and moved to Hackney.

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