With Love and Squalor
Alec, the Jew boy of the title, would not recognise his East End were he to take a stroll through the area today. He would be surprised to see queues outside the old Brick Lane beigel bakery late at night, when clubs are closing and party-goers need refuelling; the display of Singer sewing machines in the window of the nearby All Saints would look familiar to him, but definitely out of place — as a tailor he knows they belong in a sweatshop rather than a swanky clothes shop. All that glamour would come decades later; in the 1930s the area is firmly in the grip of poverty and the tension between workers and their employers is growing.
Anna Aslanyan reviews the London Books reissue of Simon Blumenfeld‘s Jew Boy.