Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  Even Krantz wouldn’t have had a problem with this idea of pragmatism due to special circumstance. Nor would Myers. Nor would Hayward. But Hayward coming from a Christian background was steeped in the notion of repentance – or, in other words, paying dearly for one’s sins. The image of Christ suffering on his cross retained, in a metaphorical sense at least, a certain terrible beauty of martyrdom. Whereas for the Jews, the cross was nothing to be gloried in as, all too often, it was reserved for people just like them. They didn’t feel the blessed pains of soulful suffering, just the hurt of rusty nails pounded with heavy hammers through their flesh. And the blood that seeped from their ragged wounds was hardly transcendent; it was hot and sticky and stank of existential misery and torment.

  However, the better side of Christ which touched on the ideas of peace, forbearance, justice and forgiveness, and that empowered men like Hayward and women like Maggie to devote themselves to selfless acts of human salvation (as much as anything as grand as salvation can ever be selfless) – this sense of Christian mercy had a certain purity about it which Z much admired. His people, he realised, were impelled out of a sense of misbegotten guilt. Where did it come from? All he was certain of was that it had always been there – in the darkness of his closet, in his shaving mug, in his cereal bowl, in the pocket of his trousers. It was there when he felt bad and it was there when he felt good.

  Then where did it come from? Certainly not from the Great Accusation; he didn’t buy into that at all. Those dark shadows imposed by centuries of blame were only taken seriously by the accusers themselves projecting onto the Jews their own torment at somehow having missed their opportunity to meet the Son of God before he had been swept back into the Miasma of the Universe. But what if Christ had stayed? What then? What if he had gone to Rome? Would he have been welcomed there or thrown bodily to the wolves? What if he had met an ancestor of the Pope? Would that Papal predecessor have given him bread and washed his swollen feet in fragrant oils or set his hungry dogs on him?

  And, even more intriguing, what if he had been accepted as the Lord of Lords? Would he have had to set taxes in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth? And what if those taxes were set too high? Who would his people have rebelled against? No, Christ only made sense as a universal martyr who died for the sins of everyone. So those who threw stones at the Jews might just as well have thrown stones at themselves. That wasn’t the source of the guilt used so effectively by his people to keep their offspring in tandem.

  So if it wasn’t that, what was it?

  What was it, indeed? Z knew, of course, as did everyone who came of age as a son or daughter of the Diaspora, of the Great Wandering. Perhaps they couldn’t articulate it. But they knew. They knew it in their heart of hearts because it was a primal force that was rooted not in the intellect but in the blood. It was a force that said they were meant for better things than simply to wander the earth like gypsies. And those better things could happen only when they returned to their home, back to where they had come from.

  But where was that? Where had they come from those many years ago? Where had they left? Was it that little plot of land in the Levant, where their ancestors would turn each day as the sun rose slowly in the celestial heavens? Was it that fertile crescent somewhere to the east, where they had fructified? Was it the richness of Moorish Spain where they had gloried for bountiful centuries? Was it the Kingdom of the Khazars that had mysteriously vanished like a land-locked Atlantis, spewing their people far and wide over the fertile Caucasian heartlands? Was it the lands to the north where they lived in relative peace and happiness in small villages and farms? Was it that confined and nurturing Pale where Russia and Germany and Poland and Lithuania met in a cultural and linguistic montage of beauty, wailing, ugliness and splendour? Was it the world of the shtetl? Or was it the ghettoes of Venice, of Frankfurt, of Vienna, of Rome where the gates closed each and every night to keep out the terrors and create the illusion of safety and solitude?

  Where was home? Was it a place on Earth? Or was it another country of a different universe?

  CHAPTER 35

  SONNENSCHEIN’S WAS A local café in the heart of the ghetto. It was small, dirty and smelled of rancid chicken fat and chopped liver, but it also had a certain unique charm due to the exuberant presence of the owner who once had been a minor performer in the Yiddish theatre and now contented himself in serving his impoverished audience edible morsels from their Eastern European trough of remembrances and providing a space, small as it was, to act out their own miniature dramas that had more to do with the land of beet borsht than the one of Beluga caviar.

  Z stopped by here occasionally to have tea served Russian style in a glass with a wedge of lemon and a cube of raw sugar, which custom dictated was clamped between teeth, upper and lower, to be sipped loudly (the noisier the better) while picking up on the neighbourhood gossip, traces of which, like the indelible stains from tannic dregs, would eventually find their way into his ghetto tales.

  The characters who came here at all times of day were well known to him by sight if not by name. But everyone here knew everyone else and even if they didn’t actually know them they knew someone like them which, as far as they were concerned, was just the same. It was, therefore, somewhere they felt comfortable and, small and insalubrious as it was, sheltered from the buffets of the alien outside world. What’s more, it provided them, the clientele, with a moveable feast of information, which flowed from table to table as conversations ebbed and swelled. It was not unusual at all to find a person entering into a debate that was being held three tables away from him, giving the appearance of a chaotic meeting hall.

  Who needed newspapers there? Even though newspapers – especially the Yiddish press – were strewn communally around, they were mainly used to wrap up the precious leftovers to take back home and add to meagre dinners. For here news was being made on the hoof, filtered through the practiced anecdotes of these natural story-tellers who could turn a simple, one-line incident of a man who lost his hat into a never-ending saga of love, grief, jealousy and betrayal – all with an obliquely Ashkenazi twist to it, like a gigantic overly salted pretzel.

  This motley circus of the dispossessed, a collection of everything the water-taxis had brought in from refugee ships that arrived day after day at the ports of Tilbury and Southampton, had found a joyous home at Sonnenschein’s – a place where they could be themselves and re-create their former life in food and banter.

  The bulk of the café work, of course, was done by Mrs Sonnenschein, a portly woman of indeterminate age who wore her flaming red hair rolled and knotted at the back of her head (though, what began as a neatly coiffed chignon, ended up, after a day of cooking, cleaning and excitable discussion as a ragged puff ball of the sort that cats, for no particular reason, might tangle themselves up in).

  Mr Sonnenschein was more comfortable playing the role of petulant host, part-time friend and, to Mrs Sonnenschein eternal displeasure, frequent money lender to a multitude of gonifs (in her words) or writers, artists and businessmen (in his) who were just a farthing short of some magnificent venture which would resound in glory throughout the universe (or at least the back streets of Whitechapel).

  This particular day that Z came in, Mrs Sonnenschein was to be seen engaged in a heated debate with a sour faced, bedraggled man who once, it was said, many years ago, had been rich and happy (though nobody knew exactly when), about the nature of The Kugel and whether it was best made with noodles or potatoes. Mr Sonnenschein was at a table of appreciative shnorreres (appreciative because in order to get them to listen he topped up their glasses with a carefully measured drop of exceptionally cheap schnapps, a case of which had been given to him by a wandering merchant in exchange for several nights’ food and lodging which turned into a week and then a month) bellowing forth the lines of his favourite passage from the Rag Picker of London (which had been adapted from an earlier play entitled The Rag Picker of O
dessa – which, itself, had been adapted from an even earlier one called The Rag Picker of Paris, first performed to laughter and tears at the time of the Paris Commune in 1871).

  Already a star in this cloistered firmament, Z was greeted by Mrs Sonnenschein who was thankful to have any excuse to break off her Kugel Dialogues with a man whose brain, she had decided, was no bigger than an a grain of uncooked kasha, by an effusive mixture of welcome (how good it was to see him) and complaint – Where had been so long? Didn’t he like them anymore? And then barraging him with questions – Why did he look so thin? Wasn’t he taking care of himself? Why hadn’t he yet found a wife? And, by the way, did he want to meet her niece? A very fine and intelligent young woman; she didn’t know how to make blintzes, but that’s what was happening to young girls these days – they would rather read than learn to cook for their husbands. And he needed a good woman to fatten him up. Wouldn’t he like a nice piece of strudel? Of course he would!

  And then Mr Sonnenschein, not to be outdone by his woman, waving his arms effusively and shouting out – Why? What had they done to him that he should have stayed away so long? Had he found another place to eat his strudel? Could he really find strudel somewhere better than that made by Mrs Sonnenschein? Of course not! So what was the reason? Was he near to death? Did his money run out? If so (in sotto voice, pretending not to be overheard by his wife, who, of course heard every word as she was meant to) Z need only ask and he would lend him enough for a month, a week or the rest of his life, if necessary, at a small but reasonable rate of interest, of course (followed by a wink to Z and an innocent smile to his wife who glared back at him).

  So why had Z come that evening? True, it was a bit of home where he could let a part of him relax and be itself (the rest of him was left outside in the damp, waiting, impatiently for that other part, the beet borsht self, to glutton-up on fatty food and folksy non-sequiturs, where meaning came not from straight lined logic but through convoluted twists and turns in a giddy, sometimes brash and sometimes gentle, roller-coaster irony that reminded him where he came from and not to take that part of him he left outside too seriously even though it was cold and wet and hungry).

  But why had he really come? Why had he been drawn there now after so many months of absence? He used to come on a regular basis, writing up notes on the people and jotting down their stories, laughing with them, crying with them, dreaming with them. But then it stopped. Had it something to do with Jerome and his quiet asides as they walked down the fashionably Bohemian streets of Bloomsbury after a day at the reading room in the British Museum? What a marvellous writer he could be if only he could leave the ghetto. The bright lights beckoned and the brilliance of his pen could be applauded by more than just a bunch of hopeless refugees without money, influence or power. There was more to life than chicken fat. For here they were, in the heat of Jubilee Summer, with the red stain of Empire covering half the map, and here they were in the centre of it all, with voices that could span the millennium. Who could ask for anything more than that?

  CHAPTER 36

  THERE WAS ANOTHER reason he had come to Sonnenschein’s that day. It was to garner information that could be procured no other way. For the ghetto was a complex organism with its own eyes to see, ears to hear and lungs to breathe. Sonnenschein’s could be its ears – one of the thousands that were connected to this strange amalgam of spittle and slime, hopes and mystery. It could also be its eyes: eyes that were everywhere, for nowhere in the ghetto did one find that very English notion of personal space or the pleasures of obscurity. There were too many eyes and too many ears for that. Physical privacy was unknown; the only sense of seclusion existed within the world of the mind, that single realm where one could be alone. For some this mental space expanded into a miraculous universe that winged them far from the dirty streets of Whitechapel. For others it contracted into a tight, vascular ball, compressing all the miseries of fear and deprivation.

  Z, in fact, had come to Sonnenschein’s on a mission. Up till now, few strands of evidence had been gathered which could be used to cast enough serious doubt as to the safety of the verdict that would influence a bull-headed Home Secretary like Matthews and certainly nothing that would have sweaty editors rushing to stop the printing of their latest edition while new headlines were composed that shouted ‘Lipski Proved Innocent!’ And with only one investigator, very young and inexperienced, trawling the labyrinthine streets of the East End for clues, using the part-time services of Greenberg for translation, while the precious sands of the legal hourglass emptied granule by granule like drops of vitrified blood draining from Lipski’s veins, there was a growing feeling of inertia. For the sense of buoyancy that was felt in Hayward’s office had more to do with the blind hope of belief than the harsh reality Z sensed when he was off on his own, disconnected from the tight group that formed the nucleus of Lipski’s defenders.

  True, on the political front at least, progress had been made. Cunningham Graham was preparing his question to put to Matthews, the Home Secretary, in the Commons and sixty MPs had already signed a petition asking for reprieve with more to come. But the government was beginning to see this case shift from minor irritant to major annoyance which detracted from important issues on their agenda, like the dreadful Irish question, which had left them as a wounded beast, angry and defensive. For this case had opened up a rag bag of other issues, casting a searchlight on the sinister poverty of Whitechapel and the unrelenting surge of immigrants swelling into the slums of the East End, stirring up base fears and resentments among the even more impoverished native born citizens. (This, of course, had the benefit of shifting blame for joblessness from government policies to alien refugees who, supposedly, were grabbing all the work. But that, the government understood from witnessing the anarchy unleashed in other parts of Europe, required a lid kept on the simmering pot, with the fire turned down, lest the bitter stew of toil and trouble boil over, scalding everyone). So if there were pressures for respite, there were even more pressures to get this case over and done in order that the dirty linen of London’s dispossessed be stuffed safely back into the dark closet of ignorance once again.

  But if Sonnenschein’s was anything to go by, there was another front to the Whitechapel murder case that was emerging. That day when Z came in, the talk was of nothing but Lipski (with the exception, of course, of the Kugel Dialogues and the recitation of bits from the Rag Picker of London). A petition lay prominently on the counter for people to sign (several pages had already been filled with scrawled signatures – some in Hebrew lettering, some in Cyrillic) and a poster, with the boyish face of the prisoner wearing a disarming smile advertising a meeting of Jewish anarchists to save Lipski from the clutches of International Capitalism (conveniently side-stepping the fact that he was a nascent sweat-shop owner).

  Arguments, debates and monologues flowed freely from table to table concerning the latest rumours and innuendos springing to life without rhyme or reason, like some strange, hermaphroditic organisms. Sipping his tea, eating his strudel while doing his best to listen in, Z found himself awash in outlandish theories of collusions, conspiracies and cabals. Some thought it was a plot cooked up by the Russian Tsar to push his pogroms into England. Others swore they saw the wicked hand of the church, secretly promoting the Blood Libel and quietly lending its authority to rumours that the murdered woman was actually a Christian whose blood Lipski had used to make his matzos. (An argument then ensued as to whether using blood to make matzos would actually cause the flour to rise, defeating the idea of unleavened bread and therefore one could no longer, in truth, call the finished product ‘matzos’ as the name, itself, meant ‘bread that doesn’t rise’).

  As these crazy ideas spun through the grizzled air like little whirlwinds that washed over the greasy tables until they petered out only to be replaced by another squall just as ridiculous, Z realised the difficulty of being a spy in a community of disconnected refugees where the lin
e between fantasy, fact and fiction is so dreadfully thin. On the other side of Aldgate there were fictions too that posed as fact, but those fictions were generally unquestioned. Here everyone had their own fictions, it seemed. And they all offered them up into the great morass of confusion which only others of their sort could filter through and hear. For humour, irony, innuendo and drama were all part of their language which helped them find solace in pain and cope with the meaningless tragedies of life which had given them little, if anything, to cheer.

  But what, Z wondered, was reality anyway except an agreement by certain groups to observe things in a similar manner? England had cobbled together a set of social and political realities that had been enforced by language and custom. Here in Sonnenschein’s, much to the dismay of the Anglo-Jewish Guardians, the language of English and customs dictated by propriety and deference, were banished and replaced by the loud and boisterous energy of irrepressible spirits that, like shipwrecked sailors, had found themselves marooned on an island where the natives were as strange and curious to them as the Hottentots were to the crews swept by savage seas onto the coast of Southern Africa.

  He, of course, was between two worlds, so sometimes things at Sonnenschein’s made sense to him and sometimes they didn’t. He liked the food and he liked the humour. He liked the feel of a community where no one inspected his nose nor asked him where he came from as it was simply assumed he came from the same place as they did. But where were they going? They might be eating now, but tomorrow they’d surely be hungry again. So what was to become of them? And what was to become of their children?

  Perhaps that’s what the Guardians might have said as well. Should they stay or should they go? If they go, then God be with them. But if they stay, they had better become Englishmen.