6. Look back in shmaltz

Episode 6 takes a wallow in nostalgia. Nadia and Vivi listen to a shmaltzy song yearning for Jewish Whitechapel and look at how postwar Yiddish and English-language writers remembered and reinvented the East End. We hear a story, movingly read by Miriam Margolyes, in which the smell of traditional Friday night gefilte fish in the back streets of the East End triggers memories of the Eastern European ‘shtetl’ (town) where the writer grew up and which was destroyed in the Holocaust. We look back at the origins of Jewish East End nostalgia in the nineteenth century, explore Alexander Baron’s fiction from the 1960s and continuing resonances in Eastenders’ memories. Aditi Anand shows us around the Migration Museum in London exploring how migrants to London from around the world remember their origins through food.

The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs

Produced by Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Guest: Aditi Anand, Artistic Director, Migration Museum

Contributor: Celia, Holocaust Survivors’ Centre Yiddish group

Archival recording: Georgia Brown from the radio programme Our East End (BBC Home Service, 1962)

Reader: Miriam Margolyes

Featured story: Ella Zilberg, ‘Gefilte Fish’, translated by Vivi Lachs. From East End Jews: Sketches from the London Yiddish Press (Wayne State University Press, 2025)

Featured song: Chaim Towber with Johnny Franks Orchestra, ‘Whitechapel’ (Shellac, 10″, 78 RPM, 1951). Digitised on the CD Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World Yiddisher Jazz in London’s East End 1920s-1950s (Playloud, 2018)

Theme music: Klezmer Klub, ‘Vaytshepl mayn vaytshepl’ (trad) and ‘Yiddisher Honga’ (trad). From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)

Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson

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