Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  Her own husband, Philip, had once looked that way to her. Five children later he was still doing piece-work for a tailor. They survived like all the others, by pooling their resources and treating a penny like a pound. Subletting their Batty Street house from someone who had sublet it from someone else and he, again, from another, they paid the lease by taking in lodgers. In total there were fourteen people stuffed into three rooms. Fifteen into four if you counted the young man in the attic.

  Even so, after all this time, what did she know about him? Not much, really. Israel Lobulsk from Warsaw. That was his name before he had changed it to Lipski – to Anglicise it, he had said. The landlady took it as a compliment; it made him part of the family and when they moved to Batty Street from Batty Gardens, Israel came along with them.

  As for his apprenticeship in the umbrella trade, he had been a keen and ready student, quickly becoming a skilled stick-finisher. Certainly, Katz had no complaints. In fact, it wasn’t long before a match had been arranged between the young man and Katz’s niece, Kate Lyons. It was one of those formal arrangements, quite business-like, and clearly a sign of faith in this young man’s future prospects.

  Yet who could have foretold the extraordinary weather conditions – those weeks upon weeks of blue sky and brilliant sun, the parched earth, the lack of rain that had thrown the umbrella trade into such a terrible state? What could a man like Katz have done but lay off his employees, at least till the weather got worse – or better, depending on one’s perspective.

  That was the problem, she had told him. To sell your labour for tuppence was one thing if you had a job and were learning a trade. To find yourself out of a job and your trade suddenly worthless was quite another. For what good was an umbrella-stick finisher during a drought? What could he do? Make walking sticks, perhaps. Except for that, he’d have to go into business for himself.

  She knew he would prefer to have waited till he saved up a nest egg, but now there was no alternative. He took what he had, which wasn’t much, and pawned it, getting enough to rent the Batty Street attic and buy a few tools. He had got up the courage to ask Anna Lyons, Kate’s mother, for a small loan – which he promised to repay promptly with a good rate of interest. She pawned her pearl-handled hairbrush and gave him the proceeds – one gold sovereign.

  Katz, he told her, had given him a few business contacts. Israel tracked them down, showed them a few samples, mentioned a price. They told him what they would pay. It was a thoroughly ruthless amount, little more than the cost of the materials and wages. He did some quick sums in his head and agreed. He would be working for nothing. They knew that and so did he. But he would be working.

  That was the week before. The last few days he had quickly set up shop with the help of the lad, Pitman, who had also worked for Katz, running back and forth, getting last minute supplies and seeing if he could drum up future business. Yet everything was more expensive and took more time. Wasn’t it always like that?

  Leah, the landlady, had been aware of his dilemma. A small artisan with no business experience had an infinite number of problems to solve before he could ever hope to turn a profit. She had seen him, stiff and anxious, struggling to get it all together by the time his new employees, two men he had found milling around the hardware shop, came to work – one to shellac the finished sticks, the other to fix on the metal tips. What could he tell them if there was nothing to do? And worse, what would he tell his customers if he couldn’t deliver?

  Then, this morning, when she saw him in the kitchen, he had summoned up all his courage – or so it seemed to her – and finally asked for a small loan, just a few shillings extra to purchase another vice for the workshop. Unhappily, she turned him down. She had nothing that month, nothing at all. Especially since the new woman in the upper front room had asked her to wait a week on the rent, pleading that she and her husband had spent the last of their money on doctor bills as she was having such a difficult pregnancy.

  His smile had been wafer thin and stoic, like someone who had managed to find a tiny bit of irony in a wave of bad luck. He had asked for his coffee and she left to fetch it for him. That was two and a half hours ago. Now it was still sitting there in the metal pot. She touched the side. It was as cold as a gravestone.

  The landlady’s thoughts were suddenly disrupted by Mrs Levy who had just entered the kitchen followed by an elderly woman whom she, unfortunately, recognised. Dinah Angel was the mother of the front room tenant on the second floor – the one with the pregnant wife. When Leah Lipski considered this woman who boldly swept into her house as if it were her own, always making demands, always critical though pretending not to criticise, she thought how ridiculous it was that someone like her should be named after a messenger from God. Her own mother, Mrs Rubenstein, who lived in the house, might have been stone deaf and might drift easily into a world of quiet fantasy, but she was a real angel compared to the one who just came in. That one, the mother of the peasant upstairs – there was nothing quiet about her. So even though her instincts had told her that the couple above were going to be trouble when she first rented them the room, the landlady couldn’t help but hold a touch of sympathy for that harassed young woman whose mother-in-law expected her punctually for breakfast every morning at 9:30 AM.

  On the other hand, knowing she was a kvetch, a complainer of the worst sort, the landlady was still willing to admit that life for Dinah Angel was hard. She was a woman alone and that in itself was difficult. Some people, she thought, could be in Heaven, itself, and find things to complain about. So what if she were in a strange country where she didn’t ask to be taken? God sent people on journeys that only He understood. And unlike some, Dinah Angel had her children, her sons, and that was more than enough to be thankful for, she thought.

  In the end, the landlady did have a touch of sympathy for the old hag. For she understood that even with all her kvetching, what motivated Dinah Angel was fear. She was afraid as they all were afraid. She was afraid of the bleakness, the foulness, the drunks on the stinking streets who found a moment of raw pleasure in throwing stones at Jews. She was afraid of the endless void of poverty and hunger which always threatened to swallow them up – for even if they had enough to eat today who could be sure about tomorrow? And her defence – and everyone had their defence, didn’t they? – her defence was to lash out at everything, especially those that she loved. So when she spoke about her daughter-in-law so disparagingly – ‘She sleeps – that she is good at! She eats and sleeps! What will she do when the child comes?’ – what she really meant was, ‘How will she cope? How will they survive?’ That she couldn’t say, not in those words. What she said instead was: ‘So where is she now? Almost noon and where is she? You see if I’m right! I’ll tell you where she is, that lazy good for nothing! She’s in bed!’

  When Dinah Angel had finished relieving herself of her bile which, it seemed, helped lighten her chest, she shuffled her arthritic body back down the hallway toward the short flight of stairs which led toward her daughter-in-law’s room. Mrs Levy, who had busied herself unpacking the supplies from their shopping trip – salt, some onions, black tea, fresh bread – placing them on their appropriate shelves, now turned toward the landlady, pursed her lips and shook her head as if to say she wouldn’t want to be in that poor young woman’s shoes, not for anything. It was bad enough to be pregnant and penniless. And then they both looked up at the cracked plaster ceiling, imagining the scene above.

  What they heard was the clumping of Dinah Angel’s heavy feet going up the stairway: thump, thump – and then a pause to catch her breath. Thump, thump - pause. Thump, thump – pause. The cycle repeated itself nine times over. Then the shuffling of feet on the plank floor, the rattle of a door and her grotesque voice entreating Miriam to open up. A minute of silence. The door rattled and in a firmer tone, she called out to her daughter-in-law again.

  Mrs Levy glanced at the landlady who returned her questionin
g look with one of her own. Miriam Angel, like her mother-in-law, was a creature of habit. Besides, it wasn’t like her not to answer the door. Mrs Levy was about to say that the poor woman must be ill, but she hadn’t time to speak the words. They heard a sound – a very terrible sound. They didn’t know what it was, but they understood it was bad. And as they rushed up the stairs, not really knowing what to expect, they were certain that whatever it was, Mrs Angel left to her own devices would only make it worse so they had better get there fast.

  They saw her in the half-light of the upstairs hall, bent at the waist, as if trying to peer in through the keyhole. She straightened up as the two women came toward her. The look on her face was one of profound confusion, as if she could hardly make sense of what she saw. Mrs Levy leaned down and looked through the gap in the door where a replacement lock had been clumsily fitted. It was a difficult perspective with which to get a proper view, but she thought she could see Miriam lying on the bed.

  While Mrs Levy began pounding on the door, calling out the young woman’s name, the landlady walked over to the stairway which led to the attic. Half way up there was a small window that looked into Miriam Angel’s room. The glass was clouded and covered on the inside with a thin gauze curtain. Putting her face to the glass, the landlady could see the ghostly shape of Miriam Angel on her bed, her chemise drawn up to her thighs. Her legs were bare. Her body was completely motionless.

  The future Jewish historian will have to describe the Victorian Age as the most marvellous era in Anglo-Jewish annals. For it is impossible to imagine another space of fifty years working a revolution equally vast in the condition of the Jews of this country, and more truly causing a people that walked in darkness to see a great light.’

  The Jewish Chronicle on the Queen’s Jubilee

  PART I

  Weeks 1-4: The Inquiry

  CHAPTER 1

  THE OFFICE OF the Jewish Record was small and cramped. A large Georgian window would have overlooked the road below had not the view been hampered by years of accumulated grime. As well as the stale light, a lingering odour of rancid grease from the workers café below wafted through the floorboards. However, neither the dankness nor the sour smell fazed Z in the least as he sat upright at his desk, hidden behind a wall of inky papers heaped in disordered piles – each stack belonging to one of a number of scribes who came to this cloistered room on occasion with the intention of completing an article or picking up a new assignment, while coveting a few square inches of precious desk space for his own.

  Mordecai, the managing editor (who was also the publisher of the Record) was puffing on his pipe stuffed with tobacco fresh from one of those newfangled air-tight tins which had just been introduced earlier that year, letting the billows of acrid smoke overcome the smell from downstairs while perusing a copy of the Pall Mall Gazette. Z who was hard at work, scribbling out the completion of his weekly column, couldn’t help but note that the portly proprietor, though reading silently, would on occasion send forth signals through his pipe that he had come across something which either disturbed, amused or angered him. One could learn to read those signs, Z suspected, like smoke puffs used to telegraph messages of great or (in Mordecai’s case) minor importance. Dipping his stylus into the adjacent inkwell, he let that notion percolate even as he scratched out another series of well-crafted phrases which seemed to roll effortlessly from the nib of his pen. As the idea began to take shape in his head, he found himself staring at Mordecai’s pipe, which up till then had been quietly issuing gentle curls of pale blue and had suddenly started to blaze with sparks of incandescent red.

  This growing obsession with Mordecai’s smoke signals caused Z to feel some annoyance because he knew that his carefully nurtured train of thought was about to be decisively broken. At the same time, it pleased him that another interesting character trait had been effectively made part of his literary palette for use in dressing up a minor figure in one of his vignettes sometime later. But what had made Mordecai’s pipe so fiery hot? Could it have really been the paper that he gripped in his thick, stubby fingers (the tips of which were stained indelibly black from too many years of fondling smudgy newsprint). It piqued Z’s curiosity. The Pall Mall Gazette was written to outrage, he thought, but someone like Mordecai had been inured to its strident tone, the bull-horn of its drum-beating crusader, W. T. Stead – a man with wild eyes and biblical beard who had fascinated him for so long. How different these two newsmen were! Stead thumped and shouted whereas Mordecai held his hat in his flabby hand and did nothing more than whisper. How Z wished he, too, were able to shout and thump and thrust his verbal sword so finely honed. Oh, well – that would come later. But still he wondered what there possibly was in the Gazette that could merit such a visceral eruption.

  Suddenly Mordecai stood up from his chair and turned, so that his short, rounded body with its undulating folds of untrammelled flab directed itself forward toward Z’s desk. It was not a pleasing sight – so unappealing, in fact, that even though Z could feel his editor’s presence in the small of his back, he steadfastly refused to look at him. But, in the end, there was nothing to be done. The man was upon him. Z could pretend not to notice for only so long before it became impossible. How could he not notice a pipe-smoking ape wearing a ridiculous toupee whose ponderous bulk waggled audaciously beside him?

  Had he read the afternoon paper? Mordecai hovered over him waiting for a response. Z sighed. No, he hadn’t. Mordecai shook the broadsheet directly in Z’s face. Page 3, that’s where it was. Page 3, that’s where he should read. And Mordecai pointed out the article with the stem of his pipe. Z must read it, he said. With a sigh, Z reached out his hand. But Mordecai pulled it back. Having changed his mind, he decided to read it aloud, himself:

  Mysterious Occurrence in the East End

  Two Persons Poisoned

  A mysterious affair has occurred in Batty Street, Commercial Road, Whitechapel, resulting in the death of a Polish Jewess and such injuries to a young man as are expected to result in death. At No 16, Batty Street, leading out of the Commercial Road, resided several Polish Jews. Among them was a man named Isaac Angel, a boot riveter, who, with his wife, Rachael, occupied the two rooms of the first floor. On the top floor were also two rooms, one of which was rented by a single young man named Israel Lipski, aged twenty-two, and a walking-stick maker. About half-past six o’clock yesterday morning, Angel got up and left home, as usual, to go to his employment, leaving his wife in bed. At that time, Mrs Angel, who was only twenty-two years of age, appeared to be fast asleep. About half past eleven Mrs Levy, another lodger, not seeing or hearing anything of Mrs Angel, became alarmed, went up to the bedroom, and burst open the door. A shocking sight presented itself. Mrs Angel was lying on the bed, apparently dead. She was terribly burned, evidently with some acid, about the head, face, neck and breast. Dr J. Kay, of Commercial Road, was sent for. The medical man found that Mrs Angel was dead, the cause of death being in his opinion, poisoning by nitric acid. Dr. Kay then noticed a man lying under the bed on his back, apparently dying. This proved to be Lipski, and his clothing was much burned by the acid. Dr Kay ordered the man’s removal to London Hospital. Today it is reported that Lipski is progressing favourably. He vehemently denies having murdered Mrs Angel.

  Mordecai stopped reading and gazed at Z to ferret his reaction. Z looked back at him, blandly, without emotion – which caused his editor to wrinkle his narrow brow in wonder at Z’s apparent equanimity. And then, asking him what he made of it, Z replied that it wasn’t a particularly good piece of journalism – at least by the standards of the Pall Mall Gazette because, first of all, they had the poor woman’s name wrong – it was Miriam Angel, not Rachael – and, secondly, at the beginning they made it sound as if the man, Lipski, found poisoned with her was about to die, whereas four or five sentences on he’s progressing favourably. He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  There was little left
in life to surprise the cholesterol-charged editor of the Record, but somehow Z always did. How did he know about the name? He had been to Petticoat Lane that morning, Z responded. There was nothing but chatter regarding the murder that took place the day before. Even the beggars were talking about it.

  A low moan seemed to emanate from Mordecai’s belly bringing with it the distinct smell of pickled herring as it emerged from the dark reaches of his intestines. It was a moan that Z had often heard before and it seemed to turn the hapless creature standing before him into a more sympathetic being, one of his brethren, for it was not really his own moan that emerged – not one of personal pain – but rather a lingering, ghostly collective moan that spoke of miseries over thousands of years.

  It was never good for a Jew to be accused of murder, Mordecai told him, but to be accused of killing an Angel is very bad, indeed. To which Z pointed out that in this case the Angel was, herself, a Jew. But Mordecai shook his head, accidentally scattering burning ash from his pipe onto one of Z’s stacks of paper and watched in despair as if that itself was a message from God while Z quickly brushed aside the smouldering ember. To Z it might have been yet another act of editorial clumsiness but to Mordecai it was a visual metaphor writ large having to do with sparks upon dry tinder.

  Only last week he had written of the need to quell the massive wave of immigrants from the villages and towns of Russia and Poland before the East End was totally inundated with those who only brought with them more poverty and disease. Yes, they were his brethren. Yes, it was the community’s duty to protect them. But wasn’t their first obligation to those who were here already? And weren’t enough mischief-makers writing about the East End as if it were nothing but a breeding ground for crime and pestilence – escalating their call on Parliament to act? So it was up to them, he had argued, to show that their people were moral, clean, upright, hardworking and loyal – a great bounty to the country in this glorious Jubilee Year. It was up to them to do this before the horrors of Europe were upon them and that dreaded word they dared not speak fall deadly from their lips yet again. Judenhass! Yes, they need only look at Prussia and the remnants of the Austrian Empire. It happened there and it could happen here!