In Celebration Of Cockney Yiddish

In The Cockney Yiddish Podcast, launching today, Professor Nadia Valman, professor of urban literature and Dr Vivi Lachs, performer, researcher & translator of Yiddish culture, explore the unknown popular culture of the Yiddish East End.

Mr Mendel, the Gramophone Man, by Alfred Daniels

The East End was transformed by the arrival in the late nineteenth century of tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Russia and eastern Europe, among them our great grandparents. They spoke Yiddish, a hybrid language based on old German, incorporating words from biblical Hebrew and local languages. When we were growing up, hearing stories of the old East End from our relatives, we were also learning bits and pieces of this language. Years later, when we had both become researchers of the Jewish East End, we asked ourselves: How did the English language turn Yiddish into Cockney Yiddish and how did Yiddish infiltrate Cockney? How did English and Yiddish cultures converge in the music halls, markets and newspapers of the East End?

Even before the major immigration of the late nineteenth century, Yiddish words could be heard on the London streets. Henry Mayhew, who published his encyclopaedic account of the poor in 1851, recorded the word ‘gonaff’ being used among thieves to mean a young pickpocket, and around the same time other writers of lowlife used the word ‘gelt’, meaning money.

But from the 1880s Yiddish culture flourished and the Yiddish language began to absorb many English words, spoken with a strong Yiddish accent. We can see an example in the terminology of the East End sweatshop industries: bizi taym (busy time) and slek taym (slack time), which denoted the seasonal fluctuation of employment. Shifts in everyday language reflected the ways that Jewish immigrants and native Londoners were increasingly mixing in work and social life.

These changes are also visible in the popular writing and entertainment culture of the Yiddish East End. In The Cockney Yiddish Podcast we listen to Yiddish music hall songs and urban sketches, which Vivi discovered in archives and translated as part of her research with Nadia over the past few years. The songs were performed in the Yiddish music halls which thrived in the East End and they reflect the experience of immigrants in London with humour and pathos. The sketches and stories were published in the London Yiddish press, such as Der idisher ekspres (The Jewish Express) and Di tsayt (The Jewish Times) as commentary on the diversity of East End Jewish life, generational conflict, and the relationships between Jews and Cockneys.

Yiddish music halls were enormously popular with their local audiences, whether they were part of the roaring crowd in the vast Wonderland theatre in Whitechapel Rd or crowded into the back room of a pub in Philpot St (better known as the York Minster Yiddish Music Hall). What a thrill it must have been to listen to the Edwardian comic music hall song “Vos geyst nisht aheym sore gitl” (Won’t You Come Home Sarah-Gitl), which parodies the popular ragtime song “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey”! The original song is sung by the hapless wife of a philandering husband. The Yiddish version, however, is sung by a hapless husband, lamenting the shenanigans of his feisty wife, Sarah-Gitl, who has run off to explore the charms of gentile men in the gin palaces of the West End. The gender switch in the Yiddish version came at a time when women’s roles were being challenged in both public and private life, and we think audiences would have relished the irony of the performance.

A more poignant expression of social change is the story that we discuss in Episode 1, ‘A London Girl’s Secret’, which you can hear read by Miriam Margolyes. The story tells of a young Jewish woman going out walking in the glittering metropolis with her non-Jewish boyfriend, whom she has met in the East End tailoring workshop where they are both employed. She lives at the intersection of two cultures: her home life with her dour Yiddish-speaking grandmother and her work life in the thrumming city.

The emotional core of the story is the young woman’s impossible struggle to make these two worlds meet. She can only speak English and the Yiddish language has become a barrier to communication with her grandmother’s immigrant generation. ‘A London Girl’s Secret’ was published in 1931 by the Yiddish short story writer and socialist I A Lisky and it looks back to the great Victorian Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill, who in his novel Children of the Ghetto (1892) also wrote of a female protagonist, the child of immigrants, who is alienated from her past and confronting the question of her future. Like Zangwill’s novel, Lisky’s bittersweet story of the Jewish East End is also a universal tale of the challenges facing second-generation immigrants.

In The Cockney Yiddish Podcast we bring you many other forgotten gems from the Jewish East End including Shakespeare in Yiddish performed by the actor David Schneider, whose grandfather Abish Meisels haunted the wings of the New Yiddish Theatre in Adler St, Whitechapel as a playwright and prompter. We discuss how the Great Dock Strike of 1889 inspired Jewish trade union activism and the poetry of Morris Winchevsky (dubbed the ‘Grandfather of Jewish Socialism’). We mull over the long history of nostalgia for the Jewish East End, from Victorian Anglo-Jewish writing to sentimental Yiddish songs of the fifties. If you are a Yiddish speaker you will enjoy Episode 5, which is entirely in Yiddish and explores the popular Yiddish writer Katie Brown’s comic take on how immigrants negotiated celebrating Chanukah and/or Christmas.

But perhaps our most unexpected journey into the world of Cockney Yiddish was our investigation of the story of Mr Mendel, the mysterious Gramophone Man whom Nadia’s father remembered playing old-fashioned Yiddish records on his battered gramophone in Petticoat Lane market in the thirties. When we looked, we found him everywhere – in fiction, film and photographs. And in the memories of many elderly East Enders, most intriguingly, we found him in a little Yiddish ditty that had been echoing around the streets and playgrounds of the Jewish East End for decades…