An appealing schlep through Tottenham's Jewish park life
July 8, 2016 08:48One of the more wistful offerings in the Royal Court's Tottenham Festival is this one-man show written and performed by Nick Cassenbaum. And it's hard to imagine a more pleasurable way to spend the best part of an hour, even though it's billed as half that.
For a start, we're in a bucolic park, not a stuffy theatre. The muster point is made conspicuous by Klezmer violinist Anna Lowenstein (or Daniel Gouly depending on which of the two Sunday performances you opt for) and to her shtetl strains the burly Cassenbaum, topped by a flat cap, bottomed with yellow-laced DMs and with a chunky Chai nestling in his chest hair, leads his flock like a hamishe pied piper.
His tour takes us along Shoreditch High St and Kingsland Road, up to Stamford Hill, though physically we never travel more than a hundred yards or so from where we started. The narrative schlep is more exotic.
Our host comes from deeply atheistic stock, he tells us. His grandfather proudly claimed to be London's first Jewish non-kosher butcher, and when, during Cassenbaum's barmitzvah, the rabbi declared that he would make a great rabbi, Cassenbaum's mum warned her son that she would sit shivah if he ever followed the advice.
So how, asks our narrator, can a Jew like him fit into an area whose Jews are "the most religious of the religious?"
To find an answer he spoke to all kinds of locals, from an elderly Jewish lady in a Stamford Hill day care centre, to a Facebook Rabbi whose every message ends with BH (Baruch Hashem). In the process Cassenbaum unearthed stories saturated with charm and intrigue.
There's the one about the Tottenham fish shop whose pickle jars contained the preserved remains of members of the community while another evokes the knotty confrontations that are possible in an area where deeply held belief abuts real life, such as the day local Muslims offered to help a local Jewish teacher stop anti-Zionist Chasidim from burning the Israeli flag.
But what makes the event magical is the way unpredictable park life co-exits with the storytelling. A passing chasidic couple stopped to listen when they overheard the word "synagogue"' And earlier Cassenbaum regaled not his audience with his story of anti-fascist protest, but the two men sitting on a bench barbecuing their lunch. Cyclists paused and the solitary Chinese lady reading her Cantonese newspaper in a bandstand found herself in the company of an attentive congregation. Everyone was offered a pickled cucumber. "Good?"asked the Chinese lady. "Yes," I said "Good."