Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  Still a young man, not yet thirty years of age, Krantz had left his boyhood shtetl in Russified Poland only six short years before. But his sojourn in Paris as a student, tempered in the white hot dialectics of Hegel, Lassalle, Proudhon and the strange metaphysical stew of Yiddish anarchism, had given him both the intellectual credentials and the political savy to win the notice of those tired revolutionaries in London looking for new blood. Krantz was their man. In the simmering cauldron of East End politics, he made himself felt along with his comrades from the old Poilishe Yidl, the forerunner of the Arbeter Fraint, lending a powerful voice to the independent Jewish labour movement.

  By 1887, out of nowhere, Krantz and his cohorts who banded around their weekly masthead of revolutionary Jewish socialism, now ensconced in the International Workingmen’s Club, had suddenly become a force to be reckoned with. And just as suddenly it had become a threat to the Jewish Board of Guardians who, up till then, had encountered little organised opposition within the Jewish community to their draconian assimilationist policy of shaping up or shipping out.

  Even though Z admired the forthright energy of these Jewish militants and, in the main, supported their cause, he found them lacking somewhat in their approach – particularly their insistence that the Jewish workers sever their ties to the religious and cultural institutions so central to their life as exiles in England. To Z, this denial of their roots, their heritage, whether based on mysticism or convoluted memoirs, was rending a people from their spiritual home which went far beyond the notion of God or religion. For what did it leave them with? A vague connection with an international proletariat who may or may not rise up sometime in the great and distant future? And, if they did, what would stop this same proletariat who had risen up from turning on the Jews just like the peasantry in Russia?

  On the other hand, Z sometimes hated the Guardians almost as much as the anarchists did. In his mind, he still preserved an image of the despised Lord Rothschild presenting the awards at his school for poor immigrants, not deigning to touch their little hands lest he contract some putrid disease from their scum. His patronising words, which in essence demanded their life-long fealty for tuppence, still rang in his ears. For Z was one of those children forced to stand stiffly hour upon hour, dry of mouth and swollen of bladder, waiting for the Great Man to appear. And when he did, Z could see in his eyes, that this Highly Respected Lord of the Realm truly detested them, little urchins as they were. Yet it was so much in the Jewish tradition to offer service to the poor that he came and did his duty and then, Z thought, most likely, went home and had his servants scrub him down in the bath tub for an hour with the strongest disinfectant they could find in the Good Lord’s pharmacopoeia. (This, by the way, was the same Lord Rothschild who was, much later, to generously assist Z in one of his more Quixotic ventures – but that’s another story from another life and part of the multiple ironies and contradictions that make history so convolutedly adorable.)

  The performance was over by the time Z had arrived, and the ragged collection of derelicts, penniless intellectuals and tired sweat-shop workers relieving thoughts of drudgery before the coming of the dawn, were filing out the multipurpose room that was theatre, lecture hall and work space, all in one.

  Krantz had gone back to his office, a little attic room at the top of the stairs, and Z, having enquired to his whereabouts, had been directed there. Climbing the rickety steps and glancing at the dingy walls, fragrant with mould and mildew, Z wondered at the man who confined himself to a life of poverty, secluded at the top of this strange house which throbbed with unrealised dreams of Elysian fields in the aftermath of some ill defined Worker’s Revolution.

  The door to the tiny room was open. Krantz was sitting at his desk, underneath the eaves, focused on his writing. Z stood there for a moment looking at the man working feverishly under the flickering light of a burning candle and thought he saw himself. It was a strange sensation. Z could almost feel the pen in his hand, he could sense the words as if they were broadcast through some sort of mental telegraphy.

  Krantz suddenly glanced up and the spell was broken. There was a look of confusion on his face – a momentary disorientation as he re-connected to the world of life from the world of pen. Then a smile of recognition and standing, he held out his hand, saying that he hadn’t expected Z so soon but was hoping he would come.

  There was a bottle of Russian vodka sitting on the shelf, a gift, Krantz said, from a young student named Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (later known simply as ‘Lenin’) in appreciation for an article Krantz had written in defence of his brother who had recently been hanged for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.

  Two glasses were wiped clean, the vodka was poured and Krantz proposed a toast to the liberation from the yoke of tyranny and the triumph of the spirit, which certainly was vague enough for Z to celebrate wholeheartedly and, in response, he drained his glass with the same alacrity as Krantz and then allowed him, without objection, to pour a refill.

  Looking at the clear, corrosive liquid in his tumbler, Z wondered aloud whether this was the spirit Krantz had toasted and, further, if this gift of appreciation hadn’t a curious connection to the dreaded event which had brought them together. Though this man, Vladimir Ilich’s brother, was hanged for a plot, what was Lipski about to be hanged for? A murder he may or may not have committed?

  If Lipski is hanged, Krantz replied, the connection would be contrary. Vladimir Ilich’s brother was hanged to frighten the masses. And Lipski would be hung to placate them. But both would have been hung to get their respective governments out of a mess. And saying that, he followed Z in bolting down this second glass of liquid heat and vigour.

  There was, in fact, a more substantial reason for wanting to see Z, Krantz told him, wiping away the residual fiery droplets from his chin. Referring back to the meeting in Hayward’s office, he wanted Z to know that there was a spy in attendance who was not at all interested in truth or justice but only in maintaining the status quo. And if that meant sending an innocent man to the gallows – so be it.

  Of course Z understood that Krantz was referring to De Souza and though he was not about to defend someone whose links to the Guardians was well established, he was loath to go as far as Krantz in his accusation. Could Krantz, he asked, amplify on this?

  Did Z know, asked Krantz, that the Arbeter Fraint had been forced to cease publication since May? It ceased, not because they lacked the funds or the staff, but because certain leaders of the Anglo-Jewish Board of Guardians, who viewed the paper as a danger to the community, had set out to destroy it. They had first attempted to bribe their printer and failing that, they bribed the compositor with a one way ticket to New York. The printer was then threatened once again. If he persisted in continuing his contract with them, his other work would be withdrawn. Sadly, even this brave man finally gave way to the odious forces of repression.

  But this wasn’t all. This they could contend with. Funds were being raised as far afield as America to provide them with a press of their own so they could control their means of production and thus defy that hideous censorship, so devious and underhanded. All this could be expected in the heat of brutal class hostilities. But what was obscene, what Z probably didn’t know, was the diabolical depths these forces were prepared to go in order to protect their power and their privilege.

  Then Krantz looked at him searchingly and after a moment of silence, his gaze shifted up to the skylight window, out into the starlit night beyond the cosmos of the Milky Way. And he asked if Z recalled that terrible episode at the Yiddish theatre in Princess Street last January.

  CHAPTER 29

  BACK IN HIS chamber, Z searches through his file of clippings till he finds the one he wants. It’s an article from the Jewish Chronicle, dated January 21, 1887:

  Even though it’s only six months old, the clipping is already showing signs of age with the paper darkening around the edg
es. But in his mind’s eye, the events are still sharp and clear, as if time has refused to relegate these memories to the storeroom of the past, locked and forgotten.

  ‘A shocking disaster is reported by us this week. Seventeen poor people were trampled to death in a panic on Tuesday at the Hebrew Dramatic Club, Princes Street, Spitalfields…’

  He mulls over the words – ‘A shocking disaster’ – and thinks it such an inadequate way to describe that dreadful night when the world seemed to stop in its orbit and everyone blinked in disbelief until the reality had finally hit home to them. The ghetto had imploded, suddenly shrinking in size, for everyone knew someone who had been there.

  ‘A larger audience than usual was assembled for a benefit night when the alarm of fire was raised. Someone turned off the gas lights; and in the darkness there ensued a terrible scene. The first impulse of the crowd was to rush out, but some of those near the entrance, after obeying the instructive desire for the open air, recoiled and turned their faces to the hall again in the vain endeavour to help their relations.’

  He had been among those who went to the West Ham cemetery to witness the internment of some of the victims, for he had known one, a sweet young girl of sixteen. A shy child, a bit lame and slightly cross-eyed, she had intrigued him by always managing a smile even though everyone knew that hers would be a difficult match in the ruthless matrimonial bartering game. She had so little. Her clothes were threadbare, hanging limply on her narrow frame like a sack to dump potatoes in. And yet she had her love. Not a boy, not a man but the theatre – her theatre, the Yiddish theatre. And she looked forward to those wonderful evenings of visceral delight, holding on to those precious moments and jealously coveting them like a cache of exotic treats, to be secretly dipped into during her long and tedious hours sewing miles upon miles of cotton garments she would never possess for someone she never knew and never saw but who paid her father tuppence out of which she received a miniscule allowance to save up for her next secret foray into the surreal world of the ghetto playhouse.

  Z knew her as one of the characters he had studied for his stories of the Jewish East End. There was something about her silly, cross-eyed look, masking a quiet sense of naïve rapture, that fascinated him. Now her body lay cold in her cheap coffin of rough wood – the best her impoverished father could afford. And Z couldn’t help but wonder why an all-knowing God would forsake such a special girl as her instead of one of the miseries whose outward beauty disguised a soul that was dry and moribund.

  ‘Whole families had gone to the play together and many a distracted mother turned bewildered to gather her flock. That return, that looking back meant death. The irresistible surge from the rear of the hall pushed on and passed over the prostrate bodies of these hesitating women. Of the seventeen dead, many were no more than youths…’

  What had happened on that terrible midwinter night in those frigid months before the blistering heat of Jubilee summer? What had happened really? Krantz had stared into his eyes, searchingly, as if trying to discover something in Z that may or may not have been there – something that Krantz had sensed in him, a seed, a spore, a bionic crumb which may not yet have germinated.

  There was no fire in the theatre that night. There was no smoke. There was nothing at all to indicate a danger. Yet someone raised the alarm. Someone shouted that fearful word. Someone doused the gas lights. Someone caused the panic to occur. Why did it happen? What purpose did it serve?

  Z looks down at the clipping and studies the terrible headline again:

  ‘Shocking Disaster! Seventeen Trampled in Panic at Hebrew Dramatic Club!’

  It was the Yiddish theatre, not the Hebrew Dramatic Club. Why couldn’t they bring themselves to use the word? It was the Yiddish theatre – that heart and soul of the immigrant community, adored by those who still looked at the Russian pale as their spiritual home. It was their theatre, the theatre of the Ghetto. It was the theatre that mixed the esoteric and mystical with the spontaneity of life – the shouts, the laughter, the sighs, the raw exaggerations of joy, pity, remorse, compassion, unbridled love and unrepentant passion – that showcase of the peasant soul, rooted in centuries of wanderings of a landless people. All this was expressed on the stage of the Yiddish theatre to the eternal embarrassment of the Guardians of Anglo-Jewry.

  And the best of the best of the Yiddish theatre was the troupe of Jacob Adler ensconced in the heart of the ghetto in a recently converted building through the largesse of a Dorset Street butcher in January, just one year earlier.

  The story Krantz had told him differed somewhat from the articles Z took from his file of clippings. A rumour, Krantz said, had been circulating for some time that the Guardians once offered Adler and his troupe money to emigrate to the States. Adler had, of course, refused, saying that they were needed more in London’s East End. Later more money was offered, along with veiled threats. Adler refused again.

  Then came the fatal evening in question. On the 18th of January a special benefit performance was being given and the audience had swelled to five hundred, crammed into the tiny playhouse space. At the height of the drama being depicted on stage, someone in the building cried ‘Fire!’ and suddenly the gas lights went out. Panic stricken, the audience stampeded toward the exit.

  Seventeen people were crushed to death. But there was no fire. And several weeks later, Adler and his troupe left for New York, leaving behind the charred remains of their distress.

  In the same file, Z finds another clipping dated February 18. This one reads:

  ‘Now that the verdict has been given at the inquest held upon the Spitalfields disaster the silence imposed upon us by the reasonable requirements of journalistic etiquette is relaxed and we are at liberty to point out the moral of the sad tale – we plainly tell our foreign brethren that one of the most direct causes of the recent disaster has been the persistent isolation in which they have kept themselves from their fellow Jewish workmen – in all social amenities of life. When they want aid in sickness or distress they are willing to claim their privileges as Jews living in England, but in all their social relations they keep themselves aloof from us and thus forgo the advantages of such an institution as the Jewish Working Men’s Club where every practicable precaution has been taken to avoid such a calamity as the late panic. The recent event ought to be a lesson to avoid such performances of strolling minstrels acting in the jargon of the foreign contingent. In making these remarks we are urged by a consideration of the best interests of those brethren of ours whose chance of livelihood is largely diminished by their not helping to hasten the process of ‘Anglicising’. We have felt at liberty to give this piece of advice as we have fortunately been the means of alleviating much of the distress which has been caused by the accident that gave rise to our remarks…’

  Such arrogance, such ignorance, such lack of understanding brings out in him not anger, but a feeling of deep remorse. Why remorse? To use that word, is there not implied a sense of guilt? And why should he feel even a modicum of culpability? Could it be that such corrosive thoughts spring from the poisonous well of loyalties that are somehow conflicted?

  But, he thinks, why should there be conflict at all? Aren’t the Guardians and the poor Jews of the Ghetto a single people – one and the same? And then he thinks, perhaps not. They profess the same Biblical ancestors, but what does that mean? Certainly they claim a similar heritage of historical suffering, but suffering is a universal human malady to which Christ, Buddha or Mohammed could relate. In truth, they call themselves a ‘People’ only when it suits their purposes, he finally decides.

  So where does that leave him, he wonders? His heart is firmly in the Ghetto, but his mind has been truly Anglicised. And so he feels that tinge of guilt, part of sorrow and remorse, that comes from a sense of betrayal, no matter how small, no matter how miniscule, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

  He picks up another clipping and reads again:


  ‘The disaster itself illustrates in a most striking manner the responsibility of all London Jews to one another. Whether English or foreign the Jews are a collective whole in the eyes of the world at large and whatever befalls one section is held to apply to the whole community … if there is any tendency to repudiate the solidarity among us, this shocking disaster would be sure to show the impossibility of doing so. The reputation of the London Jews is bound up inexorably with that of the Russian Jews of the East End…’

  Z underlines this last sentence with his pencil. Here we get to the crux of the matter, he thinks to himself. It’s a question of reputation, isn’t it? The reputation of the London Jews has somehow become bound with the Jews of the East End. There it is in black and white. The Anglicised Jew was embarrassed by the foreign Jew’s lack of Englishness.

  So what was he saying, Z had asked Krantz? Who was it he was accusing? Was this really a cabal? Could this suspected action have been a cynically motivated, diabolically evil response by the Board of Guardians to the nuisance of a rag-tag theatre? This is something Z finds impossibly ridiculous.

  And while Krantz had savoured the irony of someone like Z minimising the power of theatre that reaches deep into the community’s spirit, into its soul, he patiently (or patronisingly) explained that extirpating poisonous ideas from the minds of the peasantry was something at which feudal overlords were quite adept. In the case of the Arbiter Fraint, there was no question that people from the Guardians would stoop to any means necessary to shut them down. Their actions, in that case, had been short of cold-blooded murder. But in the case of Jacob Adler’s Yiddish Theatre, they – or someone at their behest – had shown what vile lengths they were prepared to go in cleansing the thoughts of those they claimed to be their brethren.