Published: 11 August 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
FOR BRITISH JEWS OF a certain age, Alfie Bass, David Kossoff, Warren Mitchell and Lionel Bart were household names in the world of popular music and theatre. They were also children of London’s Jewish East End who aspired to make it in the wider world, felt very Jewish, but at the same time were perplexed by it.
Isabelle Seddon’s well-researched and revelatory book, East End Jews and Left-Wing Theatre: Alfie Bass, David Kossoff, Warren Mitchell and Lionel Bart, reclaims them from recent history and describes their often arduous journey through life.
All married non-Jews except for Lionel Bart – the writer of great songs in the British musicals of the 1960s such as Oliver and Fings aint wot they used t’be – who was gay.
Kossoff, who started off playing a rabbi in The Yellow Star in 1945, ended up by relating his humorous paraphrasing of biblical stories to enthusiastic audiences in churches, took on “the aura of a Jewish saint,” and eventually converted to Christianity.
All were products of the inter-war politics and culture of the East End – socialists, witnesses to poverty and injustice – “Jewish cockneys” who came of age during the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust and the rise of Israel. They were all graduates of London’s left-wing Unity Theatre.
FULL STORY Jews breaking into the arts (Jerusalem Post)
Photo: Warren Mitchell (BBC)
