London Yiddishtown

Vivi Lachs’s excellent book is accessible to all.

~Helen Beer

Well illustrated and full of fascinating biographical and bibliographic information, London Yiddishtown is an excellent introduction to three sadly neglected Yiddish writers and their world. It ends with the best chapter in the book, a forty-page essay on the Yiddish literary scene of the 1930s and 1940s that gives more attention to refugee Yiddish writers such as Itzik Manger, A. N. Stencl and Esther Kreitman.

~David Herman

What a treat. A book that brings to life exactly where and how my parents lived. For anyone, though, following the people who came out of Eastern Europe and created Yiddishtowns in London, Manchester, New York, and elsewhere, this is a wonderfully detailed, scholarly, and human read.

~Michael Rosen, Author of Many Different Kinds of Love

Vivi Lachs's London Yiddishtown is a triumph. It unearths for an English-speaking audience the authentic voice of the Jewish East End during the years of its dissolution and eventual dispersal. It gives us, in all its sympathetic richness and ironic humor, the internal contradictions of a community that fractured as much from within as from without. Here, in the work of these hitherto-unknown Yiddish writers, is the gold that Arnold Wesker would mine for the theater just a few years later.

~Jerry White, Emeritus Professor of Modern London History, Birkbeck, University of London

Yiddish London comes alive in this wonderful selection of stories from the East End of the 1930s. A joy to read, these vibrant episodes of Jewish immigrant life, sometimes humorous, sometimes moving, are expertly translated and historically contextualized by Vivi Lachs, providing the reader with a unique look at the Yiddish subculture that bubbles just below the surface of contemporary English Jewry. Offering a window into a Jewish life that has disappeared, the stories in London Yiddishtown reveal immigrant hopes, fears, dreams, and aspirations, and do so while painting a vivid picture of a community walking between two worlds.

~Eddy Portnoy, Author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press

Vivi Lachs's new book is a novel and successful experiment in re-creating the experience of everyday London Jews in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Lachs draws on the work of three neglected Yiddish writers to explore the needs and hopes of Jews who too frequently escape the attention of historians. We learn much about gender roles, courting and marriage, tensions between parents and children, religious observance, and social mobility among Jewish Londoners.

~Todd M. Endelman, Professor Emeritus of History and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

A fascinating window into a previously closed world for those no longer able to access the rich past of their Yiddish-speaking forebearers.

~Rachel Lichtenstein, Author of Rodinsky's Room and on Brick Lane

Vivi Lachs is a leading authority on the understudied subject of Yiddish in England. In London Yiddishtown she has added to the history of its development and use in the 1930s and 1940s, including biographies and translations of three important prose writers.

~Anita Norich, Tikva Frymer-Kensky Professor Emerita of English and Jewish Studies, University of Michigan