Life
My rootsy schmootsy journey to the Jewish East End that was
For my latest novel I studied the east London of my forebears. This is what I found
May 15, 2025 16:32
For my latest novel I studied the east London of my forebears. This is what I found
May 15, 2025 16:32Grey Eagle Street, a pinched Spitalfields back street parallel to Brick Lane, clings close to the wall of the Truman Brewery, once the largest brewery in the world. My grandparents’ home was here, in a house divided into a multitude of sub-lets. The sweet and sour odour of beer-making flowed day and night through decrepit terraced dwellings three and four storeys high. My father recalled that life was not good here. His brother died, then a favourite sister. There was sickness, hunger and exhaustion.
Perhaps my teenage grandparents, Shimon and Sophie, first met inside that densely packed house. Or perhaps they had already found each other before disembarking onto the London dockside, she from Minsk, he from Łodz. When they married, soon after, both gave their address as 36 Grey Eagle Street, London E1.
I wanted to see it for myself, this ancestral place, walk where they walked, look for them. Emerging from the Overground, at once there’s a sense that, although towered over now by gigantic glass and concrete City landmarks, this neighbourhood might still feel familiar to our forebears. There’s a vitality, a thrill of dissent, an incurable squalor and a density of population and peoples – albeit with not a Jew in sight. I pass endless graffiti, turn left and right, and there it is: the street.
Most of what once stood here is gone. No houses survive at all. On one side a single brick wall runs the full length of the street, entirely painted with grotesque if artful graffiti. Exactly where No 36 must have been, the word “Palestine” leaps out. The whole of the other side of the street has become a car park. The past has quite literally been paved over.
There is no smell of brewing any more. That too is a Jewish story. The Zeloof family – Israelis who arrived in the 1970s and prospered in the rag trade – acquired the brewery after it closed down. They transformed the site into its present thriving space of events, studios, markets, clubs, music and eating places. Similarly, at Spitalfields Market, fruit and vegetable stalls have been replaced by ethnic snack stalls, boutiques, and artwork and record vendors. Outside the market, Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s restaurant is further comment on how much the Jewish world has changed.
Down lanes once teeming with Yiddishkeit there’s not a mezuzah to be seen, nor even their tell-tale marks, until I reach Sandy’s Row Synagogue, Spitalfields’ last Jewish place of worship. This beautiful shul, founded by Dutch Ashkenazim in 1867, remains almost unaltered inside. There are Shabbat services every fortnight and a lunchtime mincha on weekdays, suggesting that the membership work nearby but live elsewhere. The huge Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane, to which my father traipsed each morning, has disappeared, together with its morning bell, which, as described by Israel Zangwill, summoned pupils “from the reeking courts and alleys, from the garrets and the cellars, calling them to come and be Anglicised”. There’s a poignant reminder opposite: the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, which fed thousands every day, Shimon and Sophie among them, perhaps. The interior has been converted into flats, but its drab façade preserves the name ornately carved in stone.
Brick Lane is Spitalfields’ main street, the heart of “Bangla Town”. This is London’s curry mile, with dozens of Bangladeshi restaurants. It’s Friday and groups of the devout have gathered outside Spitalfields Great Mosque, its slender, gleaming modern minaret rising from the pavement. The same building used to be Spitalfields Great Synagogue, and before that La Neuve Église, the Huguenot New Church. High on a side wall are the words: Umbra sumus; We are shadow.
Spitalfields has not changed, only changed hands. It rests in an angle between two ancient highways, along which Jewish families escaped the East End. The A10 heads north to Dalston, Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill. The A11 took them east to Forest Gate and Manor Park, salubrious neighbourhoods with burgeoning Jewish communities and the chance to buy a decent home of one’s own.
In the intervening years, everything Jewish in Forest Gate and Manor Park has passed away. Earlham Grove shul has been replaced by a block of flats. Manor Park shul in Carlyle Road enjoys a happier fate as the prettily decorated Sikh temple. It’s not far from here to the well-kept East Ham Jewish Cemetery where my grandparents are buried. In the only photograph my family has of her, Sophie appears proud and defiant. Of Shimon we have no picture, but I remember him gaunt and resolute. At last I find their gravestones. I put down two small stones and leave them in peace.
On Romford Road is out now