by Bob Biderman
Z listened with patience to Mordecai’s tirade and then when smoke had started to abate and the chimney had cooled down, he asked whether Mordecai would like him to follow this story of the Whitechapel murder. An article, he said, from the Jewish perspective might be appropriate.
And what would an article from the Jewish perspective entail? Why should they publicise a story of a Jew who killed an Angel – even if the Angel was another Jew? What could they gain besides trouble?
But the story was already out, Z reminded him, and it was bound to get bigger as gruesome murders always do even without the added interest of the Angel killing Jew. Mordecai, he argued, owed it to his readership to present a calm and factual analysis to counter the scandal sheets that would dig up any gory detail and print it if they felt it would sell more papers. They didn’t have the same obligation to set the record straight as he did. After all, this was his community and his people.
Mordecai bit down on the stem of his highly coveted Meerschaum pipe and contemplated Z as he often would when he felt it difficult to respond – either because he didn’t know what to say or did, but hadn’t found the words to say it. Silence in Mordecai’s case did not always mean consent. This Z knew from experience. But in the past, when Mordecai listened mutely to Z’s proposals, it usually meant that the decision to publish would be made after Z had written it. So writing it or not, was up to Z. Whether the words he eventually wrote would find a home on the pages of the Jewish Record, however, was up to Mordecai and if he was feeling overly bilious that day.
CHAPTER 2
LIKE DICKENS, WHOM he both feared and admired, Z had a great suspicion of facts. Even though Hard Times had been published some thirty years before, the ideas in the book still rang true for him as did the metaphor of Coketown where fact, fact, fact, was everywhere in the material aspect of the place and fact, fact, fact, was everywhere in the immaterial. This, after all, was the heyday of the statistician – those grey, robotic men who sat at neat and tidy desks in bleakly lit offices transforming all life into numbers at a stroke of their pen. He hated them, not for who they were but for what they had done – squeezing out all emotion and history from ideas and events so they could more easily be quantified – which had the effect for him of turning people into unthinking machines (probably what the statisticians were after, he suspected).
Of course he did understand there was a functional purpose to gaining certain information – if only for a preliminary understanding of what had happened and when it had occurred (leaving aside for a moment the very important ‘why and wherefore’). Except there were no simple questions, not for someone like Z, at least. For as life itself was complex, existing on many different levels and myriads of planes, so were questions. And answers – well, they were even more complicated. Answers depended on who was giving them and where the respondents were in their head at the time they were asked. In fact, if pressed, Z would have probably admitted what for any journalist (or their editors, at least) is absolute anathema – that there were no real answers which could bring forth such a state of blessed assuredness craved by the many who needed certainty as their bromide so they could sleep easily at night.
And yet like all men whose career lay before them, Z had a practical side which fortunately allowed him to dispense with those notions set out above – at least long enough to accomplish certain journalistic tasks necessary to construct a coherent story. So journeying to several sites and speaking to some key people, he was quickly able to gather important information regarding the events that happened after the body of Miriam Angel was discovered and the young man, Lipski, was taken away to hospital. Z made extensive notes based on questions he asked of those he chose to interview, some of whom were more forthcoming than others – which is often the case when people are confronted by a member of the press but even more so with Z who didn’t look or act like a typical reporter.
Toward evening, Z finds himself walking through the passages of some of his old haunts, places he knew long ago before he left the East End. Even as night falls, the pavement of Wentworth Street is teeming with children. The road is dark and gloomy, but life abounds. Like a greedy voyeur, nothing escapes his eye. The contrast between the West End and the East, thought Z, was denoted by the brightness of one and the obscurity of the other. There was a push among reformers to illuminate the ghetto streets and just the other day he had read in one of the papers a commentary that stated in its usual authoritarian tones, ‘Homes would become more cheerful and attractive; life would become healthier and the plague of crime would die out like toadstools under the sun, if the dire streets of the East End were finally electrified.’
Was it any wonder that the people of the area, which the press had termed ‘The Wicked Quarter Mile’, were attracted to the brightly lit world of the public houses? Back on the great highway, with its cheapjacks and shooting galleries, its roar and rattle, its hawkers and quacks expounding the miracle of some new patent medicine, it was all lit up in blazing naphtha. At the newsstand posters shouted out the gruesome headlines in huge black text. But the images described therein were flat, like paper cutouts. When Z walked those same mean streets he viewed them with more dimension. The houses all had people and the people all had lives. He knew something about the lives they led because he had once lived there himself; so he could see them sympathetically, not just as representatives of the grotesque.
For Z, as a writer, the streets of Whitechapel were peopled with actors in the horrifically grand, magnificently ironic carnival of life. And his job, like a Jewish Balzac, was to record a chapter in the universal human comedy – but one that related to his people. As he walked, he observed and tried to capture the visual rhythms and melodies:
Two young men, one with a bundle of papers and the other a bootblack, share half a cigar that has been dropped, smouldering on the pavement by a gentleman who has hurriedly jumped into a Hansom cab. Nearby a boy without legs sits upon his ragged jacket before an empty metal cup. Next to him a blind man ekes out a tune on a homemade dulcimer. But they are merely backdrops to the ongoing drama of the street – a crowd surrounds a buggy which has been loaded with the body of a woman, drunk and very nearly dead, while, simultaneously, another throng is drawn, compellingly, to a street hawker whose mesmerizing patter casts a spell over his bedazzled audience.
All these characters – the newsy and the bootblack, the legless boy, the blind man, the drunken woman, the charismatic hawker – will later be fleshed out and bestowed with humanity to become more than objects of pity or scorn; they will come to possess hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, tragedy and humour. For now, however, they will remain quick sketches.
Z pockets his notebook and then looks around for someplace to quench his thirst. He enters a pub called the White Hart set on the northern side of the High Street before which the kaleidoscopic music of an organ grinder is bringing some much needed cheer to the road. There he sees a man sitting at the bar and recognises him as someone he knows, someone who worked as a stringer for the East London Observer. Z joins him for a drink. Almost at once the name of Lipski comes up. Everyone on the paper, the stringer tells him, is vying to get some kind of handle on the story. And winking – the man clearly had a few before Z came in – he says, in confidence, of course, that he has just been to London Hospital and, in fact, has seen Lipski, himself. Later Z tries to record what the man in the pub had narrated to him:
He entered the long corridor leading to the open ward where the ordinary patients were treated. Normally, Lipski would have been placed in the separate Jewish ward, but it was full at the moment. At the nurse’s bay he found a sister who was preparing some fresh bandages for her patients. He asked her how Lipski was doing. She said he was doing as well as could be expected and that he’d been visited by two doctors who had both agreed that the injuries were not very serious. The membrane of the throat was all that had been injured by the nitric acid – which, it appear
ed he had administered to himself.
How could she be sure?
That was the doctor’s opinion.
How was he feeling now?
He has not passed a comfortable night, poor fellow, she responded – he’s been tossing and turning with only an occasional fitful doze. She said that with sympathy, without displaying any sign of repugnance for the man.
Where was he now?
She pointed to a bed half way down the long ward, on the right hand side. Walking toward it, he saw the patient lying there with his eyes fully open. He appeared to be staring vacantly at the ceiling while his hand clutched convulsively at the coverlet. His throat was bound up with bandages. His dark hair was tangled and unkempt. His face was pale and sallow – beardless with just the hint of side-whiskers.
Sitting opposite him was an interpreter who was also serving as a police guard. He was there, he said, to take down any statement Lipski needed to make. Only one visitor had called on the patient so far, he claimed – a young Jewess who came and sat by his bed for over an hour on Tuesday night. The greeting between her and the patient was most affectionate and the girl expressed her firm belief in his innocence and in the truth of the rambling story he told her about two men coming into the house at Batty Street asking him for work and subsequently pouring some liquid down his throat and that of the woman Angel – a story which the facts of the woman’s door being locked on the inside and his being found beneath the bed almost entirely disprove.
But we shall see, for tomorrow is the inquest.
CHAPTER 3
THE CROWD BEGAN forming around Vestry Hall in Cable Street hours before the coroner arrived to start the proceedings, hoping to catch sight of the featured players – the stars of the grotesque which outdid even the oddities on display at the hideous waxwork museums and storefront freak shows scattered along Whitechapel. Because no matter how good a rendition a waxwork might be, no matter how contorted the likes of the Elephant Man, they couldn’t hold a candle to the drama taking place on Cable Street that day – here the horror and the blood were all too real and the performance didn’t cost them a farthing.
For this was an event even more extraordinary than the Jubilee parade just weeks before when the Queen rolled past in her golden coach on her way down Mile End to the token of her munificence – the rapidly constructed, bare to the bone, Palace of the People. Three cheers: a tiny nod of the regal head, a peremptory wave of the imperial hand and she was gone, never to be seen by them again. But this – this was an event of their own. It happened of them, by them, to them and, what’s more, it was still fresh in their consciousness. For it was only the day before yesterday that the body of that hapless young woman was carted out of Batty Street, her mouth stained yellow from the nitric acid forced down her throat, her half naked body mercifully covered so the prurience was left to the feral imagination of those who crushed up against the phalanx of police straining to block their way, saving the last shred of dignity for this wretched corpse on its way to the autopsy table where a six month foetus would be ripped from her lifeless womb and her vagina scrapped and inspected for any traces of sexual molestation (as if there was anything left to molest). And all this – except, of course, the final, degrading humiliation on the cold stone of the autopsy table – all this was done by one of their own.
Who would have done such a terrible deed? Not that terrible deeds weren’t enacted each and every day in that cauldron of Hell’s kitchen. But this went beyond the mundane horrors of poverty and prostitution, this verged on pure, unvarnished evil. And yet, perhaps, that was part of its fascination. For monstrosity itself created a profane celebrity of sorts. The greater the monstrosity, the more infamous the villain – and in the minds of those native born denizens of the doss house who tenuously shared their turf with the deluge of the Diaspora, the villain in question smacked of the Wandering Jew who needed blood to bake his matzos.
The inquest into the death of Miriam Angel was held Wednesday evening, June 29th, in one of the smaller rooms of Vestry Hall by the coroner, accompanied by his deputy. The body of the woman was lying at the mortuary a little distance away, where the jury had already been to view it.
By the time the proceedings started, the little room was packed to overflow. Z, who fortunately had arrived early, managed to squeeze himself into a space in the back, while in the corridor and the street outside a large crowd waited anxiously, eager for any report or rumour.
Z quickly jotted down the events in his unique shorthand which he later deciphered at home and then fleshed out:
Isaac Angel, the husband of the deceased woman, was the first witness called. He was short and stocky, with coarse, black hair plastered over his brow; his face a yellow, sickly hue. The fact that he hadn’t shaved for several days gave him an unkempt appearance, which his shabby clothes, punctuated by a dirty red cravat, only intensified. His brief residence in London hadn’t yet given him much fluency in English so he addressed the court in Yiddish that was barely understood by the interpreter who supposed like many of his sort that it was simply bastard German.
In the early part of the evidence one of the jurymen, who understood the nuances of this unique and wonderful verbal formulation which allows Eastern European Jewry to communicate with one another no matter what linguistic region they happened to have found themselves in, protested against the ‘inefficient’ manner in which the interpreter was performing his duties and went so far as to suggest that the questions were neither properly put to the witness nor were the answers accurately given. The coroner replied that the interpreter had been appointed by the police, and therefore he must take it that the gentleman was properly qualified to interpret the evidence. The juryman was still unsatisfied and brought forward a man named Harris who was standing at the back of the Court who, he suggested, would do the job better. The official interpreter strongly objected to this blatant attempt to take away his business. Ultimately a compromise was worked out at the suggestion of the coroner who intimated amid applause that it was only fair that a poor foreigner should be as fairly treated as an Englishman. The man Harris was therefore allowed to stand by while the evidence was being given and to correct any mistakes made by the official interpreter in the translations.
The result of this arrangement was that when corrected in his translations by Harris, the official interpreter became quite livid, even though another juryman – also familiar with the tongue – ventured to express his belief that this man had absolutely no idea what was being said by the witness. That was too much for the dignity of the official, who rose with folded arms, and uttered a long drawn, ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ and stared at the offending juryman for some five minutes until the coroner, looking at him severely, requested him to sit down – a command which he speedily complied with.
When, finally, the court was brought to order, Isaac Angel briefly stated that he and his wife came from the Province of Warsaw and that on the morning of the tragedy he left home at a little after six o’clock for his work at George Street where he was employed as a boot riveter. His wife was still in bed at the time of his leaving but was awake and saw him saying his prayers. Just before he left she asked him what he required to eat when he came home. At this point in the evidence, the coroner said it was most important that he should ask the witness whether he had any intercourse with his wife on the night of Monday or on the morning of Tuesday. After considerable difficulty in interpreting the question, and with some hesitation on the part of the witness, he answered point blank that he had not. In further examination, he stated that he had never seen any intimacy between Lipski and his wife, admitted that she was six months pregnant, and swore, with tears in his eyes, that they had always lived on most affectionate terms.
Philip Lipski, the husband of Leah Lipski and the tenant of the house where the tragedy took place, said the accused (who was no relation) was about 22 years of age and unmarried, haling from Warsa
w and that at about half past six or seven in the morning of Tuesday he was in the yard at the back of the house when he saw the young man and asked him what he was doing. The accused had replied that he was looking for a piece of piping. In response to a question by the coroner, he said he had never seen any sign of the remotest intimacy existing between the accused and the deceased.
The last witness of the evening was Dr Kay who affirmed to having been called in to 16 Batty Street on Tuesday and finding the woman dead and subsequently, after seeing Lipski beneath the bed, to finding a bottle between the bedclothes bearing the label of Bell and Co, Chemists, 6 Commercial Road, containing a small portion of nitric acid, which he had no doubt was the liquid administered to the deceased and to the accused. He had taken from the body a six month foetus. There was an appearance of recent intercourse having been had with the woman, but he could not assert it positively without a microscopical examination. There were no marks of violence on the private parts of the woman or on her thighs. At the suggestion of the coroner, the doctor promised to make a more minute examination of the vagina and for the purpose of receiving his evidence on the subject, the inquiry was adjourned until Friday morning.
When the inquest was reconvened it was in the larger and more spacious Vestry Hall where many more of those eager to partake in this gruesome drama could be seated. Z was able to find himself a comfortable spot where he could focus on documenting the proceedings without suffering the indignities of stray elbows and knees as in yesterday’s crush.