Cultural life in Whitechapel in the 1910s

The Ben Uri was not the first organization to try to touch East End working-class lives with art – the Whitechapel Gallery, and the work done previously by its founders Canon Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, had already led the way there 29 Nor was it the first Jewish art organization in Britain. Two Anglo-Jewish painters had been made members of the Royal Academy over the nineteenth century – Solomon Hart and Solomon J. Solomon. In 1891 the latter had founded the Maccabeans, a philanthropic body of artists and writers seeking to further Jewish culture. This in turn led to the establishment of the Jewish Educational Aid Society (JEAS), which helped poor Jewish students progress in their studies, preferably away from the ‘ghetto’ and into English-speaking integration within British society 30 There had already been several large exhibitions of Jewish art by 1915, and a high-profile modern art exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914 had featured several young Jewish artists (some of them first-generation East European immigrants) sponsored to study at the Slade by the JEAS. 31

Nor was the Ben Uri a pioneer in offering edifying lectures to an East End public. The Barnetts had also founded Toynbee Hall in 1884, a settlement house where students of Oxford and Cambridge Universities could volunteer their services advocating for tenants’ and workers’ rights on behalf of local people. The hall hosted lectures and reading groups which, by the 1910s, were well attended by a new generation of Jewish intellectuals and artists, later dubbed ‘The Whitechapel Boys’. A brief account of this circle and the form in which its cultural life unfolded is apposite as context for the Ben Uri’s history and allows for an introduction to an important chronicler of this period, Joseph Leftwich.

Joseph Leftwich is an interesting figure for the historian, at once invaluable and unreliable. He was undoubtedly an integral member of the Whitechapel Boys, that generation of Jewish East End intellectuals and artists for whom he himself coined the name. The Whitechapel Boys were of a younger generation than the Ben Uri’s founders and had generally arrived in the East End as young children, growing up with both English and Yiddish and very much aware of their bi-cultural heritage. Leftwich’s immediate coterie consisted of John Rodker, Samuel Winsten and Isaac Rosenberg, and the wider group included young East End artists training at the Slade – Clara Birnberg (the only ‘Whitechapel Girl’), Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Bernard Meninsky and Jacob Kramer 32 Of the original group, Rodker and Winsten were writers, Rosenberg a writer and artist. Rosenberg is the best known, though his fame was achieved only after he died in the trenches of the First World War, and in great part through the testament of his friends, who saw to it that his poems and plays were published, and his artworks exhibited. Both Rodker and Winsten went on to publish books and articles. Leftwich was a prolific writer but is best known as a translator from Yiddish to English, and a memoirist. The diary he decided to keep for a year when he was 19 is a fascinating record of the years 1911-12, and he drew on this and other, possibly less directly documented, memories for many recollections of the Jewish East End which he made later in life 33 In some of these, notably several articles about the Ben Uri’s early history, Leftwich seems to remember his own role in events as more important than other accounts would suggest; on the other hand, his anecdotes give a valuable and vivid insight into the world of Yiddish art and letters in the 1910s and 1920s where few others exist.

By Leftwich’s

account, an evening spent in the Toynbee Hall would often preface long talks, conducted as the thinkers walked miles through the London night. He remembered ‘discussing with [the brilliant mathematician Selig Brodetsky, who grew up in the East End] one night the difference, which he as a mathematician posed, between the Jewish Question and the Jewish Problem.’ 34 It is easy to imagine these earnest young men addressing the complexities of contemporary Jewish identity by pacing them out, stimulated by London’s nocturnal environment, sometimes along the Thames, sometimes up into the countryside. Leftwich recollected.

As the streets had been our playground as boys, so the streets were our promenade when we were young men. We walked till past midnight along the stretch of road leading from Whitechapel to the Bank of England and on to the Thames Embankment and back by the Tower and the Dockyard walls, the nightly promenade of my boyhood group. Often we went to Epping Forest, sometimes on all-night rambles. 35

He wrote poems about some of these excursions. ‘Imminence’ (1912) describes one evening spent with his close friends John Rodker, Isaac Rosenberg and Samuel Winsten:

Winsten, Rosenberg, Rodker, I How we are saddened and broken by Struggles and teasing hopes and fears. What awaits us in coming years?

Midnight struck, then one o’clock, two, We still talked of what things we would do. Down Hannibal Road, Jamaica Street, Then back again, with untiring feet, We talked of our hopes and of our fears. 36

Samuel Winsten’s recollection is similar:

See those young people walking around the gas-lit streets talking quietly, laughing at a brilliant epigram, stopping suspiciously under a lamp-post while one fumbled in all his pockets for his latest poem. He read and they criticized, and then they returned to their unsympathetic homes to write a little more while sleep could be conquered. There was a club which drew them together. An artist or critic would sometimes lecture, and he little knew that his ideas were discussed after the meeting in long walks. Epping Forest was less than ten miles away, splendid for an all-night walk, an all-night talk on life and death, love and youth. 37

By the mid-1910s, then, Jewish Whitechapel already had a vigorous artistic and intellectual life. Elements of its art scene were favourably contrasted by some critics with staid West End art conventions, in reviews of the 1914 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition. 38 It is particularly remarkable that so much soul-searching was conducted on foot, as if by leaving the East End and walking north or west one might gather distance, perspective, intellectual resources for tackling the very present questions of Jewish identity and culture as an Eastern European immigrant Londoner. But such reflections could also take place on urban transport networks, as we can see from another poem by Leftwich. In ‘In the Tube’ (1916), he imagines how he must look to fellow passengers on his underground train travelling to Golder’s Green as he mutters the Mincha, the Jewish sunset prayer, to himself. 39

I suppose they’re laughing at me, some of them, And some of them are wondering whether I am mad, Because I stand here holding to the strap, And mumble to myself and seem absorbed and sad. […]

Let them look on and think I am insane –I thank my God! I utter the old Hebrew prayer, And half the time I cannot see these folk for thoughts of God, God hearkening to my prayer […] 40

Leftwich was not known for his religious observance yet feels the need to follow the Jewish phases of the day and is unembarrassed, perhaps even pleased at the mysterious figure he cuts, to say his prayers in the confined space of the underground carriage. In the poem, he looks forward to the brisk walk home from the station, and the company of his brother ‘home on leave – and we shall talk!’. This relishes his private life, his identity as brother, son, Jew, from within the social melee of the train’s carriage.

By crossing the city, from a zone of immigrants and arrival to other zones in which one might stand out, these boys must have been testing out their identities, trialing their ‘Londoner’ persona. This ambulatory experience of the city has its echoes in the movement of the Jewish population, among many others, across London over previous decades, and indeed in more specific travel experiences incurred during daily life, as will be described in the next section.

The Whitechapel Gallery and the Toynbee Hall, the Maccabeans and the JEAS were all British institutions, the first including Jewish art in a section of its own within a wider exhibition, and the latter two promoting Jewish culture as British. Where the Ben Uri differed was in its declaration, from the outset, of its Yiddish character. This is immediately apparent from the society’s archive which is, for the first eight years, almost entirely in Yiddish, from minutes to official notices to members. This was not simply for convenience – most of its committee were fluent in English – but as a statement of intent.