Born London, June 25, 1910. Died London, January 13, 2009, aged 98.
February 26, 2009 12:17Writer, poet and teacher Chaim Lewis produced a slim but carefully honed and crafted body of work during a lifetime of communal service.
One of five children of Russian immigrant parents, he was born in Soho, whose village charm formed the backdrop to his writing.
His 1965 book, A Soho Address, written after his mother’s death as an act of memorial, lovingly detailed the characters who peopled his Soho shtetl. The area supported four shuls.
The one he first attended was in Manette Street near Foyle’s bookshop. (Soho also had its long-standing red-light reputation, and a friend who asked the young salesgirl in a bookshop: “Have you got a Soho address?” met with an indignant rebuttal.)
The book made Chaim Lewis joint winner of the 1966 Jewish Chronicle book award.
His Orthodox father struggled to make ends meet with a grocery on Berwick Street, Soho’s market street. At 14 Chaim left the local school, where he wrote his first poem about a local Jewish cobbler, and moved in 1925 to the East End’s Etz Chaim yeshivah for five years’ talmud study.
In the evenings he filled his gap in English literature by devouring books in Whitechapel Library. He also contributed to a Yiddish magazine. After a further two years’ study of Jewish history and liturgy at Jews’ College, he gained a degree in English and German from University College London.
In 1935 he married Ada Malka Ferber, daughter of Zvi Hirsch Ferber, the rabbi of Dean Street shul, Soho’s best known and longest-lived synagogue.
From 1937-39 he lectured at teacher training college in Chelsea, then became the last headmaster of West Hampstead Day School, which closed in 1939 and reopened as the North West London Jewish Day School in 1945.
On evacuation, Mr H Lewis, as he was then styled, took his pupils to Lewes, Sussex, reopening as West Hampstead Boarding School for Jewish Children.
In 1941 he was drafted into the technical intelligence division of the Ministry of Aircraft and from 1944-45 served on the German Control Commission with the rank of colonel.
He left teaching after the war for writing, and wrote freelance scripts for the BBC’s Middle East overseas programmes. To earn a living, he was also joint secretary of the Federation of Synagogues from 1946-48, edited the Mizrachi movement’s Jewish Review and taught English at Hasmonean School. One of his private pupils was a young refugee from Nazi Germany, the future Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits.
In 1964 he went to South Africa as editor of the Zionist Record and South African Jewish Chronicle, the official organ of the South African Zionist Federation.
Four years later he transferred to the South African Board of Deputies as director of its cultural department and editor of its journal, Jewish Affairs.
While in South Africa, he contributed poems to PEN’s annual New South African Writing. With the publication of his first volume of poetry, Shadow in the Sun, in Capetown in 1972, he was considered a South African poet.
But after his daughter, Norma, emigrated to Israel with her family in 1969, and his wife died in South Africa in 1980, he returned to England to became the freelance editor of JCNS, the Jewish Chronicle News and Features Service.
His two later verse collections, Clouds of Glory over Soho Rooftops (1991) and From Soho to Jerusalem (2000), reverted to his earlier theme of childhood environment.
His elegiac style was pithy, penetrating and thoroughly human, making his work accessible and sympathetic. He had several poems published in the JC’s literary supplements and read two others on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please programme in 2003.
Conscious of human frailty, he wrote in Self-Portrait: “My pockets are ready for surrender...Too well I know the threat in each living moment” and set out his philosophy in History’s Survivor: “The Jew travels light.”
He is survived by his daughter, four grandchildren and 14 great-grand-children.