From Here to Obscurity [Paperback]

"Shulem was born in the same year as Trotsky and Einstein. Of the three, only Shulem could make a decent pair of trousers"

'From Here to Obscurity' tells the story of the now lost Jewish East End of London through the eyes of Shulem, an immigrant from Poland, his wife Rivka, and Yulus, their English born youngest son. The opening half introduces us to the family, the thriving Yiddish-speaking community that inhabited the East End, its customs, landmarks and characters, and its turbulent history including the poverty and fascist incursions.

We meet the family, Shulem, the sweatshop overseer - Rivka, the warm and sympathetic matriarch - and their eight children - the master tailer, the princess, the seamstress, the socialist, the athlete, the housekeeper, the school 'station master', and, of course, Yulus, the youngest whose arrival forces the family to move from their two room dwelling off Brick Lane to a larger abode in Goodman's Fields.

"An unforgettable book. The historical detail, anecdote, and vivid descriptions of life - games, markets, traders, schnorrers, Speaker's Corner hecklers, crockery merchants, Petticoat Lane and Cable Street, Russian vapour baths, Jewish pilot crash landing in Lampedusa, British anti-semitism etc etc - have an epic, Dickensian quality. The writing is a great strength of the book, that is, the memory-observations, language, speech and dialogue bring across the individuals and bit-players each of whom embodies the bigger themes of the Jewish East End." Nick Barlay, Author

September 1st 1939 is the pivotal moment of the story. Shulem escorts Yulus to be evacuated to "God knows where" as the Nazis march into to Shulem's mother's town in Poland. And so begins the destruction of the East End's Jewish home through the targeted bombings of Hitler's Luftwaffe.

"Hardest of all, the Luftwaffe will smash Stepney. I know the East End! Those dirty Jews and Cockneys will run like rabbits into their holes" Lord Haw-Haw

Yulus is evacuated along with his schoolmates at Jews' Free Central School to 'sohamelycambs' in the Fenlands, whilst Shulem stays behind in war torn London. Their lives are shattered by the war. On the morning after Yulus's Barmitzvah, he is unable to enter his home because of the thousand pound unexploded bomb that Hitler sends him as a birthday present. His school in the country finally closes due to lack of staff caused by recruitment into the armed forces, and he has to take his matriculation under the threatening onslaught of the German V-1 flying bombs. Later, even after the Nazi concentration camps are liberated, over twenty members of his youth club are killed in the last German V-2 rocket to fall on London.

Shulem's relatives are caught up in the Holocaust. His mother, sister and family, who remained in Poland, are transported to the Treblinka death camp. He doesn't know the fate of his brother and family who lived in Hamburg in Germany. But after the Jewish Hagganah in Palestine accidentally sink the Patria, a British deportation ship, another brother and family, escaping from Danzig, are deported to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean for the duration of the war.

Despite all these traumatic historical events, 'From Here to Obscurity' is an uplifting tale of human warmth, humour and solidarity in the midst of overwhelming global forces.

Yoel Sheridan, author of 'From Here to Obscurity', was born in the East End of London in 1928. Some years ago, whilst watching television, he saw Joseph Burg, the then Israeli Justice Minister, on a visit to his one-time home town in Germany, pointing to an undamaged building and saying that that was where he had lived prior to being forced to leave Germany due to the rise of Nazism. "I turned to my wife Tova and said how strange. Why strange? She asked. Well, I said, I cannot visit my previous abode in the East End of London, because it was totally destroyed by the German bombers in world war two. Not only was my house destroyed, but the whole street. Destroyed too, were my infant and senior schools, the Synagogue in which I had my barmitzvah and the infrastructure of the thriving Jewish Yiddish speaking community that lived there prior to the outbreak of the war." So began, Yoel's research into the history of the Yiddish speaking East End between the wars, and finally this novel that faithfully re-creates that community and its demise, through the eyes of one family.