East London memories

Press, 5 October 1985, Page 20

East London memories

Time Remembered. By Ralph L. Finn. Futura paperback, 1985. 190 pp, $12.95. The East End of London in the early 1900 s was a pool teeming with life bursting its way out into the surrounding world. Finn is a successful journalist who looks back on his Jewish boyhood there and describes the hardships, the joys, the companionship, and the somewhat sickly sentiment he holds for the scenes of his youth. The area exists no more. Its tenements have been pulled down, the street stalls have become dull shops and the shouting matches stilled by patrolling police cars. At one time, however, it produced Charlie Chaplin, famous surgeons, philosophers, and business tycoons, who returned only for occasional visits of nostalgia. This book, first published in 1963, enshrines prostitutes whose hearts of

gold make them the vessels of initiation for pubescent boys, the child prodigy violinist who develops a degenerative brain disorder that leads him into spectacular insanity, and the constant battles between the “Choots” — Anglicised Jews — and the “Polaks,” who were the recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Finn’s own mother was a saintly chicken-soup sage, beloved and respected by the whole community. ' This is a chapter in cultural evolution well worth documenting yet again. But does the author in his ageing remember only eccentricities written larger than reality? The hardships of his youth have become over the years little obstacles rather than the major handicaps which resulted in numerous lives never reaching their full potential in what were undoubted slums, marginally fit for human habitation. — Ralf Unger.