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COPYRIGHT 2001 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
A DOUBLE THREAD: A CHILDHOOD IN MILE END -- AND BEYOND by John Gross Chatto, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 189, ISBN 0701163305
The `double thread' of John Gross's title boasts of what used to be slightly shameful. Now that pluralism is the badge of all our tribes, English Jews can inhabit, and relish, two traditions without accusations of dual loyalties. The transition from the Mile End Road, where he was the son of an immigrant doctor and his apparently self-effacing wife (we never discover the first names of either), to the editorial chair of the TLS, via Wadham College, Oxford, has left Gross marked, but not scarred, by the Judaism he does not practise and by the Yiddish of which, as an English pundit, he has fondly specific memories, but makes small use.
Jewish nostalgia for the East End (which is now largely Bangladeshi and Indian) has to be...
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