General Chat

It is a story of obsession and possession. It is a story about disappearing people, disappearing buildings and a disappearing way of life. Most of all, it is the story of a man who vanished, and the woman who set out to find him and, in the process, found herself.
One day in 1980, a room in the East End of London was unlocked for the first time in 11 years. Inside, everything was just as its occupant had left it. A half-finished cup of tea stood next to the unmade bed. A pot of porridge was still on the stove. One witness claimed to have been able to make out the imprint of a head on the pillow.
The room was littered with a chaos of newspapers, books and papers - evidence that its occupant knew at least 15 languages, many of them dead, and had a strong interest in the cabbala, an ancient Jewish mystical tradition. And there were more personal items: gramophone records, clothes and an A-Z marked with obscure journeys into the London suburbs, scraps of paper and sweet wrappers, all covered with indecipherable scribblings in many languages.

The attic room above the synagogue at 19 Princelet Street became a magnet for writers and journalists. David Rodinsky, the Jewish scholar who lived in the house for most of his life then vanished without trace, entered the mythology of the East End as surely as Jack the Ripper or the Kray twins.
And he was truly a local hero. As we now know, he was born in 1925 just a few minutes' walk from Princelet Street at 73 Hanbury Street. He and his family moved into their garret in Princelet Street seven years later. And after his mother and sister died in the early 60s, Rodinsky stayed on until the day in early 1969 when he appeared to vanish into thin air.
Nineteen years later after the world first began to wonder about Rodinsky, another remarkable East Ender, the artist Rachel Lichtenstein, has finally put some flesh on the story.
Princelet Street is one of a maze of thoroughfares lined with tall Georgian houses at the eastern end of Spitalfields, where it meets Brick Lane. This is an area where the past is layered, stratified like geology. Each building is clothed in many histories that reflect the waves of immigration over the last 300 years. The mosque on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street was previously the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, and before that housed Methodists. It was originally built as a Huguenot chapel in 1742.

Now change is sweeping through the area. It will soon be sanitised, prettified. The air is thick with the dust and noise of renovation and bulldozing. It feels like the property boom of the mid-80s all over again. For over 500 years Spitalfields has been a buffer between the City and east London, but now the City is eating into its margins. Former warehouses and tenements turn almost overnight into loft apartments. And as they do, the Jewish East End is vanishing - the community that linked Rodinsky and his unlikely biographer.
Rachel Lichtenstein was born in 1969, the same year that David Rodinsky disappeared from his attic room. Like Rodinsky's parents, her grandparents came to east London from eastern Europe. The Lichtensteins were from Poland; the Rodinskys were originally from Kushovata, a traditional Hassidic community in the Ukraine. Over a quarter of a million Jews were murdered here during the pogroms of the 1880s; many more during the Russian civil war. It was during this period that the Rodinskys fled to London, but not before Haicha Rodinsky, eventually to become the mother of David Rodinsky, had been raped. She never fully recovered, either emotionally or physically.

Lichtenstein's grandparents' first home and watchmaking shop was in Princelet Street. They may even have married in the Princelet Street synagogue. In the mid-30s, just as the Rodinskys were moving into the attic room above the synagogue, the Lichtensteins moved across the Whitechapel High Street to New Road. The building is still there, now an abandoned kebab shop. The family prospered and around the time of the second world war they moved to Southend, although the family business remained in Whitechapel until the 60s.
The Lichtenstein story was one you hear often - an unremarkable story of successful immigration and assimilation. It was not long before they had anglicised their name to Laurence. A week after her grandfather's death, Rachel reclaimed the name Lichtenstein by deed poll and headed for art college.
The Rodinsky family story took an entirely different run. It was a story of retreat and despair, of a sense of exile and loss so great that the family could never prosper. They were doomed to retreat into their attic, high above the margins of this most marginal society.
Yet despite their differences, Rodinsky came to fascinate Lichtenstein. "The room was a trap," suggests Iain Sinclair, the novelist and chronicler of the East End who fictionalised Rodinsky for his own novel Downriver.

After leaving college, Lichtenstein moved to the East End, where her grandparents' history in this country had begun. She started work as unpaid artist-in-residence at the heritage centre that was starting to take shape at 19 Princelet Street. In between doing education work with local children and exhibiting her own work, she began examining and photographing the contents of Rodinsky's garret, which had now been boxed up by the Museum of London and returned to Princelet Street.
From these fragments Lichtenstein began to create her own art and performances, performances that were themselves broken in nature. Mulling over the detritus of an unknown man's life, she began to divine the true story of David Rodinsky.
All stories are for telling, but perhaps every story has only one true teller. If that is the case, then Lichtenstein is David Rodinsky's. Sinclair, her co-author on Rodinsky's Road, the book about her quest for Rodinsky, tells how from "the rags in the attic, Lichtenstein created a life". As Sinclair points out, there are shades of the Golem myth here. Also of the Dybbuk and the orthodox Jewish belief that when the soul of a righteous man dies it flies into one of the newly born. As Sinclair says, what Lichtenstein became engaged with was as much autobiography as biography.
Unlike all those who had been mesmerised by the room itself, Lichtenstein realised that if she wanted to find Rodinsky the man rather than Rodinsky the myth, she would have to look beyond the four walls into the streets outside. Beyond them too, into the suburbs marked out in Rodinsky's tattered copy of the A-Z, and beyond them to eastern Europe itself.

In Hassidic myth there is the story of a God who is a glass vessel. The God is shattered and the fragments become scattered across the world. Lichtenstein sees a parallel in this story and her own quest for Rodinsky. "In the Rodinsky story, it looked as if everything, all the clues, are in the room, but in fact they were scattered all over the world."
Her search took her from the streets of Whitechapel to a burnt-out mental home in Surrey, to another in Claybury in Essex, to a rabbi in Israel, to Warsaw and Auschwitz and eventually to a pauper's grave in a Waltham Abbey cemetery. Her quest is detailed in Rodinsky's Room, and also in a guide book commissioned by Artangel called Rodinsky's Whitechapel, which takes the reader on a walk round the area in which the fast-disappearing Jewish landmarks become entwined with Lichtenstein's search for Rodinsky, a history of her own immigrant grandparents and the histories of those who never made it to Whitechapel, lost for ever in the Nazi death camps.
Even before her story became so linked to Rodinsky's , Lichtenstein was obsessed with the Holocaust. She photographed a wall of photos of children of the Holocaust and became convinced that her own face was among them. In a 1993 installation, Shoah, she printed photos from the eradicated Polish ghettos on strips of linen. She made a permanent exhibition about the Holocaust for the West London Synagogue. Like many Jews of her generation, she had an overwhelming need to find out about those members of her family who had been wiped out. Her search for Rodinsky ran in parallel with this personal quest. She pieced together the evidence from the stories of old people in crumbling Tower Hamlets tower blocks, asking questions in cafes and shops, chasing the stories across the world to Jewish research centres in Israel and Warsaw. And all the time she was building up a more detailed mental map of the old Jewish East End.

But the more she searched for Rodinsky, the more he seemed to disappear. He was all things and he was nothing. He was, according to different witnesses, both very short and very tall. He was backward and he was a genius. He was rich and he was poor. He was painfully shy and he entertained others by playing the spoons in a local cafe. He was clean-shaven and he was bearded. There was no photo of him. At times he seemed like a man who did not exist.
But Lichtenstein would not give up. There was no ending to the story, but she was sure she would find one.
She had confirmed Rodinsky's death early on. There was evidence of a lonely demise in a Surrey mental hospital at the age of 44. Rodinsky died in March 1969, just a few days before Lichtenstein's own birth. But the story that she started to unravel was far more tragic and interesting. Of an Orthodox Jewish family transplanted from the Ukraine to Whitechapel and unable to cope with the change. Of a sister who ended her life in a Claybury mental hospital, her only possessions a pair of gold earrings. Of a period that Rodinsky described cryptically as "the lost years", the clues to which stare out from his old copy of the A-Z. Of the frugal life of study that would have gone unremarked on in the Ukraine but in the East End set Rodinsky apart. He was, as Sinclair once posited, the invisible man.
While Lichtenstein was writing her book, she made a trip to Poland to find out more about her own family and Rodinsky's, and to visit old Jewish sites. "Writing the guide book has been so much like going on that tour. There is nothing to see. It has all been wiped out. We spent days and days travelling and visiting sites and there'd be nothing there but a car park with a mass grave underneath. We could do nothing but stand in the rain saying Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead."
It was while saying Kaddish at Auschwitz that Lichtenstein realised how her quest must end. The only way she could bring the story to completion was by saying Kaddish for David Rodinsky too.

To do this, she must turn detective again and find his grave.
It was around this time that Lichtenstein discovered she was pregnant. The book, the guide book and the pregnancy all proceeded together towards some inevitable gestation. Lichtenstein gave birth to a son, and six weeks afterwards went to Waltham Abbey cemetery. There in plot WA25, row T, number 708 lies the body of David Rodinsky. Lichtenstein said Kaddish for him.


I enjoyed reading this story, I hope you do too.

Thank you Carol, I enjoyed reading that,It is the type of story that I enjoy!

Thank you Carol, that was a wonderful story. I enjoyed it too.

Thank you for posting this Carol.I have read most books by Chaim Potok, and detective writer Faye Kellerman, both Jewish writers, who allow us insight into Jewish ways and customs, Chaim Potok the most. I find anything to do with Judaism fascinating, even though I was baptised Catholic.There are many more Jewish writers of course, some better than others.
Is the story you tell here a book or an article?
Eileen x

Marvellous. Thank you..

Thank you for taking the time to post this i enjoyed it.

Claddagh, we have not spoken for a while, remember, I wear your ring.
I did not realise Faye Kellerman was Jewish, and I have read many of her books, also those of her husband and her son.
Take Care
Julia in Derbyshire

Carol, have you thought about joining the writers group????

Hi Julie, I remember you saying you wear a Claddagh ring, I still do too.
Faye Kellerman is a really great writer, only like her books with Peter Decker & his wife Rina Lazarus as central characters.Her other books are really good too, but scare me too much.Her husband, Jonathan Kellerman is another good writer, but his books are far too gory and violent for me...I sleep badly as it is...lol.Their son is indeed following in their footsteps..There is another female Jewish detective book writer, but I can't think of her name...so annoying.I want to try get her latest....
You take care too.
Eileen

What a great post.
Thank you Carol.

Liz

Carol, as Helen said, have you thought about joining the writer's group, or are you already a writer? This is fascinating reading, was hoping there was more on the way.....

Take care. Eileen

Wow, I know all these places, I was born in Forest gate, brough up along the Mile End Road, Trained as a Nurse at the London Hospital, walked around whitechaple for much of my life, The East End was full of Jews and Catholics who respected each other totally, Waltham Abbey is also another place I know well as I had friends there for many years so.........why have I not heard about this author before, I must now buy the books and Thank you so much for telling us all about it.
Oh yes I also wear a Claddagh as do my sisters, my husband and my children all of whom are adults, it is as important to me as my wedding ring and even when I needed surgery I put a plaster over both my wedding ring and the claddagh!!

Please enlighten me. What is a Claddagh ring? Seems vaguely familiar. I always thought there was some jewish in our family, but can find no evidence, just the appearance of mothers siblings.