6. Look back in shmaltz

About this episode

Episode 6 takes a wallow in nostalgia. Nadia and Vivi listen to a shmaltzy song yearning for Jewish Whitechapel and look at how postwar Yiddish and English-language writers remembered and reinvented the East End. We hear a story, movingly read by Miriam Margolyes, in which the smell of traditional Friday night gefilte fish in the back streets of the East End triggers memories of the Eastern European ‘shtetl’ (town) where the writer grew up and which was destroyed in the Holocaust. We look back at the origins of Jewish East End nostalgia in the nineteenth century, explore Alexander Baron’s fiction from the 1960s and continuing resonances in Eastenders’ memories. Aditi Anand shows us around the Migration Museum in London exploring how migrants to London from around the world remember their origins through food. The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs Produced by Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Guest: Aditi Anand, Artistic Director, Migration Museum Contributor: Celia, Holocaust Survivors’ Centre Yiddish group Archival recording: Georgia Brown f