Whitechapel Noise by Vivi Lachs
New perspectives on Anglo-Jewish history via the poetry and song of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London from 1884 to 1914. Archive material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London’s Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the Yiddish texts are closely analysed and quoted to draw out the complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas: politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants to English life is an important part of the development of their social culture, as well as to the history of London. In the first part of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment, and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press, establishing a context from which these popular texts came. The author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden social histories of the people writing and performing them. Lachs also explores how themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. In the theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution; and satirical writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and growing secularization was changing immigrants’ daily lives in the encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found in Whitechapel Noise offers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London, and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London, and migration studies.
Vivi Lachs is a social historian, Yiddishist, and research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a teacher, Yiddish singer, and the author of Whitechapel Noise (Wayne State University Press, 2018). She organizes the Yiddish Open Mic and the Great Yiddish Parade and has produced two CDs of London Yiddish songs from the old East End: Whitechapel, mayn vaytshepl, and Don't Ask Silly Questions. Vivi Lachs was a 2019 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow. This volume is in part a result of her fellowship.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780814343555 |
| ISBN 10 | 0814343554 |
| Title | Whitechapel Noise |
| Author | Vivi Lachs |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Wayne State University Press |
| Year published | 2018-05-30 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |