Change and Decline in London's Jewish East End: The Yiddish Sketches of Katie Brown

• Published in: Shofar (West Lafayette, Ind.) Vol. 42; no. 1; pp. 73 - 99
• Main Author: Lachs, Vivi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: West Lafayette Purdue University Press 2024
• Subjects: Actors; Children; Community; Cultural factors; Culture; Decades; Families & family life; Females; Hebrew language; Immigrants; Immigration; Jewish culture; Jewish life & ethics; Jewish people; Political factors; Theater; World War II; Writers; Yiddish language; England; United Kingdom > UK; Eastern Europe; North America
• DOI: 10.1353/sho.2024.a932338
• ISSN: 0882-8539; 1534-5165

The British Yiddish writer Katie Brown wrote humorous stories and sketches for the London Yiddish newspapers Di post (The Post) in the 1930s and Di tsayt (The Times) in the 1940s. The stories, set in London's Jewish East End, concern the day-to-day effects of immigration, poverty, and Jewish culture in Britain. After the Second World War, in a bombed-out East End where Jewish migration to the suburbs was accelerating, Brown did not write entirely new sketches, but rather edited versions of her prewar stories. Looking at the earlier and later stories together, we get a sense of the changes happening to London's Jewish community: the decline of Jewish culture and religious practice, the changing relationship with the Eastern European homeland, and the decline of the Yiddish language. Through close reading and analysis, this article gives historical background to Brown and the social, cultural, and political context of her stories. It situates Brown as the only female journalist writing regularly for the press and identifies her unique perspective in making poignant interventions into Jewish debates of the day through stories of small incidents in family life. She raises questions around how to maintain a Jewish identity in England and visibility as a Jew in a Christian world, and traces change through two decades by describing the tension between the immigrant generation and their children. Using a range of neglected source material in Yiddish, this article throws new light on the Jewish East End in its twilight years.