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Kahn & Botsman’s salt beef shop, 1914. Photo courtesy of the Jewish Museum, London |
The faces change, but it's the same old buzz
Comparing today’s East End with that of yesteryear, Bernard Kops, Monica Ali and Oona King discuss how that special migrant spirit survives
STAND in the middle of the road and close your eyes, says playwright Bernard Kops.
He takes a deep breath and the sounds and smells of the East End in 2008 take him back to a Bethnal Green childhood of the 1920s and 1930s.
Kops, who lives in West Hampstead, finds remarkable similarities between the Jewish East End of the early 20th century and the area today: although the ethnicity of the people who live there has changed he believes there are strong common threads of experience that bind his Jewish community with the burgeoning Bangladeshi community that now inhabit the streets of his childhood.
Kops is appearing at Jewish Book Week with author Monica Ali and politician Oona King to discuss the East End: Then and Now.
Ali, whose novel Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003, has English and Bangladeshi parents. Oona King, who grew up in Camden and went to Haverstock School, is the product of a Geordie Jewish mother and an African-American father. She represented Bow and Bethnal Green as an MP from 1997-2005.
All three say they are drawn to an area that is a microcosm of multicultural Britain today – and holds valuable lessons about the similar experiences immigrants have, no matter where they are from.
Kops was born in Whitechapel in 1926 into a poor Jewish family. After the war he eked out a living selling secondhand books from a market barrow in Cambridge Circus before writing The Hamlet of Stepney Green, his first play that made him a household name over night. His memoir, The World Is A Wedding, which tells of his East End childhood, has recently been republished (Five Leaves Publications).
“I have marvellous memories of the East End,” he says. “The rhythm of the streets, the hustle, the bustle. The streets feel alive, like they did when I was a boy. Wander through there today and close your eyes. People are busy, earning a living. In all directions you can hear the sewing machines whirring – it’s just like it was.”
It is this sense of community that drew Oona King to the area.
She recalls as a Camden teenager being invited to a party in the Isle of Dogs and thinking it “sounded like it may as well be on the other side of the world”.
She returned to the Brick Lane area in her mid 20s. “I was about 25 and I went to Brick Lane to buy some material to use for my wedding dress,” she said. “I got out of the station and all the street signs were in Sylheti. I thought: where am I? I approached a group of Bengali woman in headscarves and asked for directions. They did not make eye-contact with me. It was not the done thing – but now I know the area better than anywhere else in London.”
It was the start of a love affair with the area that continues today.
“The East End changes regularly on the surface but the underlying feel remains the same,” she says.
“I love the East End for the same reason I love New York: it is a world apart from anywhere else and is as close as the British Isles gets to a cultural melting-pot.”
Kops wrote the Hamlet of Stepney Green in the late 1950s. He then travelled back to his old haunts and found an East End in what seemed like terminal decline: Whitechapel’s 300,000 Jews had become 6,000 in 1958. The old Jewish school had been pulled down. Synagogues had disappeared. The all-night vapour baths in Brick Lane were closed and the kosher restaurants were disappearing.
But now, when Kops returns to the area, his eyes light up.
“What I have found is the Bangladeshi family experience is the same as the Jewish family,” He said. “You work hard, often in small businesses, self-employed, or for long hours with low pay. You want your children to get an education, to become accountants, doctors, chemists – professionals. Then the third generation begin to express themselves artistically – they write, they play music and they paint.”
He sees this happening now within the Bangladeshi community, as it did with the Jewish community he was a part of, and was one of the shining writers to emerge from it.
Kops holds writing classes and workshops in Whitechapel and Stepney libraries and is well-placed to recognise the creativity emerging from the East End once more, and links the experience the youngest generation of Bangladeshis are having to his own career.
“The people I am teaching in the East End are brilliant,” he states.
“Following the end of the war in 1945, there was a real change in the social structure. Before the war it was basically the same as Victorian England. But all of a sudden these poor Jewish boys wanted a piece of the action and would not accept the social structure.”
He was part of the group that included Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker that defined British drama in the 1960s – and he believes a similar ?cultural movement is happening all over again with young Bangladeshis – British-born but aware of their culture, taking centre stage.
“The young generation speak English,” he added. “They want to participate, but they also bring their own voice, which is wonderful. It is the voice of a community expressed through intellectuals. This happened with the Jewish community.”
Bernard recalled how his father, who had originally come form Holland, stepped off the docks and thought he had landed in America.
“He realised he had been done, and had no choice but to stay here. He got a tram and said good morning over and over again to people – it was the only English he knew. But he had to settle and had to get comfortable. Then the children began to come and they wanted to broaden their horizons.
“And it is happening once more.”
• The discussion on The East End Then and Now, chaired by Claire Armistead,
is on Saturday March 1 at 8.30pm. |
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