Two things happened recently, which started my journey in looking back. The first was the news that the Hackney and East London Synagogue on Brenthouse Road was to close after 145 years, the latest stage in the nutty, Jew-unfriendly, Greenification of that part of town.
Hot on the heels of that came the last two episodes of 7 Up, that astonishing ITV series that chronicles the lives of 14 men and women, from 1963 to the present day.
And so I started reminiscing about my own family and childhood, opening up my laptop to investigate further. The past 24 hours have seen me falling down an Ancestry rabbit hole. Where better to alight on this journey, than 1970s Clapton, in London’s E8?
Every Saturday from when I was a toddler to a moody early teen, my parents would drop my brother and me at Grandma’s, while they went into town to buy furniture from Heal’s and Habitat (I’m not sure why it took them a decade to do this, but that’s approximately the time-frame). Miles and I enjoyed the usual British Saturday afternoon viewing routine of the football scores, Jim’ll Fix it and Doctor Who – but there was also a glorious, cosy, Jewish theme to our weekends.
Our Grandma, Celia Levy, lived on the ground and basement floor of an enormous – or so it seemed to our tiny frames – rackety house on Mildenhall Road. Upstairs dwelt Uncle Hymie and Aunty Hettie: exactly whose uncle or auntie they were remains a mystery, but they were rotund and always smiling. Uncle Hymie was a Leyton Orient fan. I remember the windows perennially steamed up from a bubbling pot of chicken soup.
Saturdays at Grandma’s revolved around that most classic Jewish comfort food. She would cook it with the bits in, including lokshen and fluffy potatoes, which Miles and I loved. Then there was stewed apple, with cream off the top of the “gold” milk. We’d go to the duck pond, then the kosher shops on Ridley Road. If we stayed over – which we often did – on Sunday mornings we’d listen to You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, the Radio London talk show presented by Michael Freedland, father of Guardian journalist, Jonathan. The show ran from 1971 to 1995 and was, as the name suggests, popular outside the community. Can you imagine such a show on the airwaves now? Imagine the comments!
My dad, Lawrence, grew up in that house on Mildenhall Road. Celia had him at the age of 39 and was sadly widowed young: my grandfather, Nathan, died when Dad was nine. Lawrence was an only child. He met my mother at Clapton Club when they were in their late teens.
My mum, Wendy Berger, used to tease Dad that he lived in “Lower” Clapton, while she was from lofty Stamford Hill – which in those days wasn’t only filled with black-hatted frummers, but fancier arty types, such her as Uncle Manny and Aunty Rose – born in Kyiv – who played cello and violin for the silent movies. They weren’t the only ones with colourful stories. Today I discovered that my great-grandfather on Celia’s side, Solomon (Betsalel Ari Leib) Silverhammer, was born on January 1859 in Brest, Russia, now Belarus – the town later immortalised by the treacherous 1918 Brest-Litovsk pact, which handed the lives of millions over to occupation by the German military before the Red Army took control over much of the territory.
Perhaps my great-grandparents saw the writing on the wall. Solomon married Silka, who was born in 1863 in Kalisz, Poland. It’s not clear which year the family crossed the ocean, but according to the 1891 census, the Silverhammers had set up home in Whitechapel.
In this they were hardly alone: the period from the 1880s to the First World War saw the East End filled with Jews from Russia, Poland, the Baltics and Belarus. In the 1940s, there were 50,000 Jewish residents in Hackney alone: anecdotal accounts suggest by 1960, one in three inhabitants in the wider area were Jewish. The Silverhammers had six children, the youngest of whom was Celia, born in 1903. (Sadly there was no son called Maxwell.) A 1905 directory lists Solomon Silverhammer, furrier, at 28 College Avenue, Homerton. I had often wondered how my grandmother, who was of modest means, had such a glorious array of fox coats in her Narnia-capacious wardrobe for us to dress up in.
In moving with her new husband to Clapton, Celia continued the trajectory of fellow aspirational second-generation immigrants. Lawrence got into Hackney Downs Grammar School, whose Jewish alumni include Harold Pinter and Steven Berkoff. (Dad even became head boy, noch, and ran the 100m for London.) He qualified as a dentist, and with my mum moved out to the sunny uplands of Essex, as did so many of their clever east London contemporaries.
And so it is sad that Jewish Hackney is saying its last hurrah. But the up-by-the bootstraps, work-ethic of that generation carries around the North Circular and on with us and our children.
The children of tailors and furriers became doctors, teachers and lawyers; their kids now even have the luxury of becoming writers or artists.
We no longer live in Stepney, but Loughton, Muswell Hill, Whetstone. (Though my nephew has just moved to Hoxton. Perhaps we’re coming back.)
So thank you, Lawrence, thank you Celia. Thank you, Solomon and Silka, Israel and Rebecca, and my other great-grandparents who made that perilous journey from Kyiv, Riga and the Donbas so we could live our lives in comfort and prosperity, and yes, whatever the current fears – relative safety. Here’s to 147 Up.
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