Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884-1914. Vivi Lachs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2018.

Reviewed by Joseph D. Toltz

Vivi Lachs’ Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 provides a fresh perspective on the rise and fall of Yiddish in Great Britain. In this excellent and articulate study, the writer contributes a nuanced, historical examination of Yiddish life in London from the mid-1880s to the beginning of the Great War.

In this highly approachable and well-written book, Lachs—a scholar and musician who actively performs the Yiddish repertories that she researches—weaves through streets, music-halls, socialist gatherings and religious debates of the period to paint a portrait of a complex, conflicted community encountering modernity in the Anglosphere. Lachs describes how individuals both resisted and embraced Yiddish in many varied ways. She does so primarily through the analysis of song and verse, complementing this material with experiential narratives from audiences and performers sourced from reviews, articles and memoirs. Lachs filters the material through two distinct lenses—the manner of their engagement with the process of acculturation, and the way in which her subjects (both personalities and songs) reflect the transnational and transcultural nature of the Yiddish community in London. Throughout the work, her particular focus is on what would have been referred to by the Anglo-Jewish establishment as the three forbidden subjects of polite conversation: religion, politics, and sex. It is most refreshing to read an acknowledgement of the diverse nature of the construction of immigrant culture in an historical examination of pre-Holocaust Yiddish life.

Whitechapel Noise is divided into two distinct sections: Part I examines places where the Yiddish-speaking community struggled to establish a new home within English society via the Music Hall, and in organized political movements in London. Part II considers the forces of secularization, socialism, modernity, religion, and sex, and new possibilities for cultural renewal, specifically within the lyrics of the Yiddish music hall themselves.

In chapter one, Lachs describes the tense dynamics between established unions and immigrant workers, the establishment of Jewish tailoring unions, alliances with prominent socialists such as William Morris (textile designer, poet, novelist and activist), and the strong presence of Jews in both socialist and anarchist circles, among them Morris Winchevsky (poet, newspaper publisher and activist). It is here where the historical struggles of the new immigrants were forged: in the precarious sub-contracted world of “sweated workshops”, where work was seasonal, and conditions appalling.

Chapter two deals with the rise of Yiddish theater, specifically the culture of Yiddish music hall, a parallel phenomenon to that of the British music hall (a popular working-class form of theatrical entertainment, somewhat analogous to the American vaudeville setting, originating in pubs, with food and alcohol part of the experience). Lachs adds nuance to assumptions about the division between “high” and “low” culture, arguing that the emerging Yiddish theater and music halls provided a network for the cross-fertilization of ideas among actors and musicians, providing writers and performers with the chance to earn a regular wage and develop their crafts (pp. 41–2). The stock character of “the Jew” in the British music hall is described as a point of contention and disconcertment for the new immigrants (pp. 49-50). One of the most pertinent phenomena in relation to acculturation and transcultural expression is the application of Peter Bailey’s concept of “knowingness,” described in relation to language (p. 51, p. 138). In the Yiddish music hall, “knowingness” of culture and language allowed performers and audiences to break the fourth wall, encouraging active audience participation and collusion in shaping the drama through participatory choruses, heckling, boos, and catcalls. Further transformations of the Yiddish theater continued with new artistic movements and new immigrant arrivals, especially the Bundists, who brought a desire for more ‘highbrow’ cultural material and the expansion of the Yiddish press.

Part II of Whitechapel Noise (beginning with chapter 3) focuses on song lyrics and what they tell us today about the social mores and behaviours of that time. In her introduction, Lachs constructs an argument for the processes of transnational and transcultural hybridity producing a particularistic English Yiddish-language culture (pp. 14–8). In chapter 3, she expands on this idea in an innovative and thoughtful argument, describing five major milieus explored in the lyrics: the heym, the East End Jewish community, the Anglo-Jewish establishment, the non-Jewish English community, and other Yiddish diasporas outside England. As she describes, each milieu shaped the experience of the English-Yiddish immigrant, and all were in a constant state of flux, so that the lyrics that emerged from these processes of transculturation were embedded in current goings on in Britain. “They enact the process of anglicization despite the fact that they were written in Yiddish,” as Lachs argues, and “on the other hand the lyrics include allusions to the politics of the wider Yiddish-speaking world and a geography of Eastern Europe […] partly enabled by the fact that they were written in Yiddish” (p. 68-69).

Chapters four and five offer a micro-study of the politics and poetry of the leading Yiddish socialist, Morris Winchevsky—the first comprehensive study of the writer’s poetic work in London. Often derided as badkhones (akin to the rhyming couplets improvised by a badkhen/jester at a wedding), Winchevsky’s verse brings the complex world of Socialist Jewish London at the turn of the century to the reader today. Chapters six and seven deal with sexual subjects in the Yiddish music halls: innuendo, marriage, lodgers, and transgressive sex. Again, the concept of ‘knowingness’ is crucial to understanding the messages hidden within many of these songs, and Lachs goes into exceptional detail to explain nuances that would have been familiar to the contemporaneous audience, but may be lost to the modern reader.

The final two chapters deal with the complex relationship between religion and social class. The presence of religious terminology in Yiddish and the use of this subject matter by resolutely anti-religious or reformist poets brings to the fore once again the dynamic push and pull forces of acculturation and transculturation shaping Yiddish identity in Great Britain (reminding this reviewer of some of the splendid analysis in Michael Wex’s works. Lachs concludes the book with a brief summary of arguments covered in previous chapters.

There are tantalizing questions that emerge in light of the subject matter raised in this historical ethnographic study. How does this subject inform the subsequent history of Jewish involvement in the British left, especially in light of recent ideological debates in the Labour Party? Would it be useful to examine Yiddish cultural material in a similar way in other parts of the Anglosphere such as Australia, South Africa and Canada? And finally, given the importance of experiencing these songs in live performance, and the talent of the author as a musician, when will we able to hear accompanying tracks for the book? Such questions are inspired by a work that is at once entertaining, humorous, fascinating and engaging.

Joseph Toltz, Sydney Conservatorium of Music and The University of Sydney