By
Stuart Olesker
4 min read
By
Stuart Olesker
There's a mischievous glint in the eye of Bernard Kops. This is a playwright, poet, novelist, actor and screenwriter, still very much in production in his 90th year. He still retains his almost childlike sense of wonder and delight in language and conversation as well as an element of surprise, like suddenly bursting into song with his version of an old favourite, "I'll be with you in apple strudel time…"
Each time I visit Bernard and his wife of 50 years, Erica, in their warm and welcoming West Hampstead home, I come away refreshed, stimulated and richly entertained.
I've been aware of Bernard since the late '50s when his play The Hamlet of Stepney Green was as popular and widely produced as the work of such up-and-coming playwrights as Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter and John Osborne.
I feel very much at home in his world because, when he talks of his family and East End background - of the colourful and contrasting Kopses and Zetters - I can see parallels with my own upbringing.
My Zaida ran a garment factory in Hanbury Street, off Brick Lane, employing his seven children. It was a crazy world of screaming aunties, rows and jokes in Yiddish, and a smattering of Polish, much singing, betting on horses and the all-pervasive, luscious smells of Bubbe's lokshen soup. In marked contrast, there was my more sedate family, the Oleskers of Richmond. Here, I was introduced to a far calmer almost elegant world of theatre, film, books and debates about religion, education and politics.
But these are worlds ago. Bernard's plays, novels and poems remind me that we are all refugees in a world of constant change, of losses and gains, of tragedy and farce, of honey and stings.
There is, however, always an escape. In Bernard's case, it was through humour, language, music, writing and reading. In his very frank and unsettling autobiography, Shalom Bomb, Bernard writes: "All I could do to keep myself together was write and expiate and exorcise my angels and monsters".
In Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East, Bernard found books that became doors to another dimension, transcending -but still embracing - the here and now.
In By the Waters of Whitechapel, his character Aubrey, a Bernard surrogate, writes of worlds "beyond-beyond. To places without names and ideas without words… Then he remembered that his toenails needed cutting. So he cut them."
Over his many decades as a writer, Bernard armed himself with a caustic wit, not unlike that of Robert Frost's, "Forgive, O Lord my little jokes on Thee/ And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me". For Bernard, locating God has always been a problem. Aubrey "pitches his voice to the sky which was God's last known address". Alas, it seems God has no fixed abode and all is shifting sands.
In his play Returning We Hear the Larks, Bernard sets up a scene in which Leo, the retiring librarian of Whitechapel Library, is in conversation with Aleya, a Bangladeshi girl. After telling her about the Battle of Cable Street and Oswald Mosley, Leo says the following:
"And how this country welcomed the dispossessed. Their ship came up the Thames and my parents stood on the deck and they saw Tower Bridge with its great arms open. They said it was like a huge mother welcoming them to her bosom. They settled here near the docks, like all immigrants, needing to feel as close to the old country as possible. This East End. It is like an Olympic Torch handed from one community to the next. First the Huguenots who made lace and started the shmutter game. Their church in Brick Lane later became our synagogue. And when we disappeared these streets became your streets. Bangladeshi streets. Our synagogue became your mosque. But who will follow you? The stockbrokers. It will all be gentrified for those who live and thrive on the sweat of others.
"If the rich could get the poor to do their dying for them there would be no unemployed in this world. I like your people taking over these streets; they have become alive again. There is a beautiful symmetry in all these migrations. Community is a wonderful thing".
But then Leo ends with a wistful reflection: "All gone now. The Jewish tribe. Across the North West Passage to Hendon, Edgware and Totteridge. All gone. To the Essex coast and the graveyard. And now it's your turn, Aleya. How lucky you are to inherit these streets".
Bernard has the rare gift of moving from the metaphysical to the very physical - and back again. He will surprise you with graphic imagery - "At night the worms nibble my dreams away… The first fingers of dawn stroked the dark hairy belly of the world". And he can inhabit everything from the dark world of his doppelgänger-haunted novel Partners to the hilarious world of that Zangwillesque King of the Schnorrers: Simon Katz, master of irresistible disguises.
But throughout all his work from The Hamlet of Stepney Green to his remarkable - and soon to be restaged play - Ezra about the incarceration of the poet Ezra Pound by the Americans at the end of the Second World War, there is great generosity of spirit, a music beyond the beyond, and a spirituality transcending even the usually crude imagination of Katz who could on Friday evening smell the Sabbath. "He raised his nose to the sky and sniffed the holy smell, the collective libation, the magic liquid: the chicken soup… the smell was rising from the kitchens of those few of the tribe who still remained. The aroma was unmistakable… a golden cloud in the prematurely darkening sky".
Ultimately, Bernard's approach is celebratory: The title of one of his books, The World is a Wedding, aptly describes this. It has been said that, for him, reality is one long vaudeville act. If so, then, like vaudeville, it is packed with songs and jokes.
The poet, Louis MacNeice, has a beautiful line about the "drunkenness of things being various". He could have been describing the world of Bernard Kops.
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