LONDON BY-WAYS.

Auckland Star, Volume 55, Issue 22, 26 January 1924, Page 17

LONDON BY-WAYS.

IN THE GHETTO. (By G. CRAIG.) L Walking down Oxford Street, one is in England of the English, but merely to take the Underground to Aldgate, is to be transplanted right to Jewry. The land is still British, but the race and the language are of faraway landsEnglish words become rarer until only the German-Jewish jargon is heard. There is even a theatre where Shakespeare is played in Yiddish, only for the actors to be lacerated next day in the London Press on account of their "writhings" upon the stage. For this is one of London's Alsatias, a city of refuge, whither the persecuted have been driven from Russia and Roamania, from .Poland and Finland. But they are not here for ever. Seldom does more than one generation remain in the Ghetto. Their fathers toiled tinder despots, and some of their children, risen to Park Lane or Chicago, will be despots in their turn. A London child seeing the crowd for the first time would be reminded of its Bible illustrations. The Oriental type is everywhere. Solemn old men with the faces and beards of patriarchs, cry aloud the price of their pitiful goods in the lachrymose sing-song of the Eastern pedlar. They have reached this Land of Promise too late to struggle out of the ruck, and they live to die the poorest of hawkers. The women are handsome, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and the younger are dressed in brilliant colours. The, scer.e in these exotic streets is always to the Gentile unaccustomed and odd. House after house has been transformed into a shop. Windows have been taken out and living-rooms crammed with merchandise, while the proprietor sits in a little front space so packed up with gay clothes and fancy boxes that it seems his only exit must be by a harlequin leap through the open front. In one shop is a clothes' auction in full swing—a shop packed full of readymade suits, which are quickly taken up by an eager crowd of men who simply throw coat, trousers and waistcoat over their shoulders and walk away with their purchase. Next door may be a gold and diamond market of unequalled grubbiness, where men with little washleather bags and velvet-lined cases display to one another their shining treasures. Sunday Activity. Sunday is the great day of the week, and down Brick Lane a Russian post office and a Roumanian restaurant are filled to the doors, while newsboys shout a Yiddish paper in the street. Down the Commercial Road are busy shipping agents and bankers, while in shop after shop the youth, of the district swallow the syrups that are their chief refreshment. Way up another road is a whole page from the East bound up in the book of modern England. Here is a building well named the "Oriental Bazaar"—still in London, but as well in Cairo or Colombo. The market is reached from the street by deep flights of steps; it is open to the sky, and high above "it-is a str_t~'of br___e_,~~aM' a roadway where flit Eastern women with bright shawls thrown over their heads. The shops of the bazaar are tucked away in little recesses, and in these sit the Oriental -gures of the dealers who are as silent and immobile as Arabs amid their unsold wares. Here and there is one where the stock of the day has been sold out, and the proprietor sits at a game of cards with a little group of friends, clustered round the struggling light of a single candle. One notices a monotony of perfection in the head-dress of these women. Be they thirty or sixty, all seem equally well possesed of a head of glossy black hair, even if the face below it is wrinkled and aged. The reason is that most of the Russian Jewesses cut off their own hair on the day of their marriage, and wear a wig for the rest of their lives. To the men. the glory of the women is their hair, and the bride is expected to sacrifice her greatest attraction in order that she may no longer entice the masculine eye. The custom is ancient and is adhered to by these people who come to the Ghetto straight from the ship which lands them, and who rarely go beyond its bounds. For thirty years and more the Ghetto has been growing rapidly until the new district is far greater than the old, and until a straggling and semidependent population of aliens has become a whole region of its own, commercialised and self-contained—where the gentile is seldom seen and not always safe. A Mixed Company. Few of the immigrants can speaK English, and few of their generation will ever learn it, though they spena the rest of their lives in London. But with their children it is different. Finding freedom for the first time for centuries, it seems as if all the suppressed vitality of the race comes to a head in these London-oorn offspring of the chosen people, and the sons of parents who could neither read nor write now often arise as the artists and musicians, the brokers and the financiers of an adopted country. Thus is England internationalised. But if the Ghetto that we see is furtive, grubby and outcast, there is also the Ghetto of the orthodox Jews, and there is the Ghetto of the secret gangs. The Spitalfields Great Synagogue, called by its possessors "The Home ot the Strengtheners of the Law and Guardians of the Sabbath," is th«, StPaul's of Whitechapel, and the members of it have their own Chief Rabbi, their own Court of Justice, and a Board which controls the slaughtering of animals. These are the devout, th e ultra-orthodox, who will not carry a handkerchief or an umbrella on the Sabbath, since to bear any burden on that day is forbidden. The handker chief difficulty is overcome by tying it to the girdle, when it becomes part of the costume and is allowable—but the umbrella problem is not yet solved. Then there are the gangs, which are usually heard of only in the "Mews of the World," after some particularly bloodthirsty crime. The lower type from each neighbourhood in their home country bands together with all its old hatreds and vendettas, which it wreaks upon a similar gang from elsewhere. So there have been the Odessians and Bessarabians, and a hundred others, who knife one another on Saturday nights down the Commercial Docks, and throw the unlucky ones into the river. Much printers' ink has been spilled over them. Such is the Ghetto —a country within a country, a- foreign land in Lond«n, violent, strange and Oriental. Without boundaries or definition it spreads, amorphous, over the neighbouring territory, and every year it swallow, a gentile street or two. ,-" .