East Broadway to Whitechapel, review: ‘stirring snapshots of a bygone world’

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Dovid Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1956. He studied in yeshivas in Brooklyn and later taught Yiddish studies at Oxford (1978-96), then at Vilnius University in Lithuania. East Broadway to Whitechapel, translated by Barnett Zumoff, is his fourth book of short stories. It is made up of ten stories: five set in Jewish neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and five set in Whitechapel.

The stories set in Brooklyn are curiously old-fashioned. Some are about young lovers. The opening story is about two young woman: Feygi, who is about to meet a young Chasid, a potential bridegroom from Israel, and Lenore, who falls in love with another young Chasid.

Other stories are about Yiddish writers, poets and playwrights from eastern Europe.

Eldra Don is about a murderous feud between LB Aronowitz, a Yiddish playwright from Romania, and his rival ZZ Dobkin, a Yiddish poet.

What is striking about these stories is how poor the characters and their families are. We are a world away from the more affluent heroes of Bellow and Roth. Feygi Engelburger’s parents own a little store on Essex Street on the Lower East Side. Lenore is introduced to her suitor, Heshi, by an old Lithuanian beggar.

The stories set in Whitechapel are very different. They are much more literary, about very different characters, older men, usually scholars or writers. Meyerowitz, the central character in A Day in Whitechapel, is “middle-aged, short, and fat – a Jew with a big bald pate and glasses with thick lenses”. He lives on Commercial Road but in a previous life studied at the University of Vilna and now spends his days in the British Museum Library where he falls in love with one of the librarians. For many years Max Triebwasser used to be a proofreader for a Yiddish daily newspaper in the East End but it closes and he finds refuge in a bizarre obsession: he begins to proofread all the Yiddish books he owned, to such an extent that “he began to think he was the proofreader of Yiddish literature”. The Proofreader becomes more than a story of an old man’s obsession, it becomes a nostalgic vision of the dying world of Yiddish letters. A young journalist asks Max why he doesn’t give his books to an institute or a library. “What for?” asks Max. “So the errors can be corrected for future readers or new editions.” “What future readers? What new editions?” It is the most powerful moment in the entire book, like something out of Cynthia Ozick’s greatest story, Envy; or, Yiddish in America.

There is something else that is intriguing about these stories: their references to real-life Yiddish writers based in London, the poet Stencl and an oblique reference to the poet Itzik Manger. Dubbed “the Wolfman” by Katz, he claims that he was once considered the king of Yiddish poets in pre-war Vilna and carries his manuscripts around in two bulging briefcases. “They said,” writes Katz, “that he carried Shakespeare’s sonnets, like underwear, in the briefcases he carried around everywhere”. An obituary of Itzik Manger described seeing him at a Tube station during The Blitz, with a briefcase full of papers, trying to translate Shakespeare into Yiddish. This seems more than a coincidence for a writer of Katz’s great erudition.

Finally, the London stories refer more to the Holocaust. Meyerowitz survived Buchenwald but his wife and sons were murdered by the Nazis. The Wolfman survived the Holocaust but his brothers and sisters were all killed.

These stories are a moving evocation of a bygone world: the Jewish world of Brooklyn and the East End but also the world of Yiddish literature, of old forgotten men and women.