ABSTRACT
When I asked Fegel Firestein, a founder member of Proltet, how it began, she said it grew out of a Yiddish Drama Group already in existence in the East End Jewish Workers’ Circle. And how did that begin? O that, she said, grew out of a literary group there; and that was formed by the Progressive Youth Circle within the Jewish Workers’ Circle, which began . . .It seems that there is never a beginning, strictly speaking. One simply draws an arbitrary line and says, start here.Fegel Firestein, Alf Holland and my late husband Alec Waterman were among a small group of young Polish-Yiddish immigrants who arrived in London in 1927 or 1928. Fifty years later Mrs Firestein still speaks with a sense of outrage at the cultural desert in which they found the Jewish youth of the East End and, to some extent, their parents also. The older people were members of the mass migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; long hours of sweated labour or the demands of one-man businesses hampered or entirely precluded their efforts at self-development and education. They spoke a strange mixture of Yiddish and English and their children hardly spoke Yiddish at all, and knew little or nothing of the rich cultural heritage created in Eastern Europe. The Whitechapel Theatre gave Yiddish performances but the productions were poor; it came to life only when the lively Vilna Theatre came from Poland for a season, or Morris Schwartz or other well-known actors came from America to perform there. The Jewish Workers’ Circle, then in its heyday, played a great role as a cultural and social venue for the immigrant population. But it did not attract the youth.It was this situation that these newly-arrived immigrants, with a number of like-minded others, set out to remedy by forming the Progressive Youth Circle* inside the Workers’ Circle. All were * For a lively account o f the Progressive Youth Circle in a fictional setting see Ray W aterman’s novel o f East End life in the 1920s: A Family o f Shopkeepers, published by W. H. Allen, 1972, pp. 191-213. [Ed.]
young workers earning a living as skilled or semi-skilled tailors and dressmakers, cabinet-makers, hairdressers and shop assistants. Politically they were a mixed bunch representing left-and right-wing Zionist, Labour, Communist or Anarchist views; a few were non-political; but on the whole they were orientated towards the left-wing of the labour and progressive movement. Their speeches and activities reflected a passionate desire to improve and eventually to change the existing social order for a more just form of society.The cultural development of Jewish youth through the medium of the Yiddish language was seen by the Progressive Youth Circle as an essential element of these strivings. Its leaders and membership, while struggling with the new language, were still in love with the mother-tongue and hoped for its revival.Starting off with lectures and discussions on political and sociological topics such as women’s rights, free love, Zionism, Communism, etc., the PYC was an immediate success, attracting not only the youth but often their elders to the crowded room they occupied at the top of the Workers’ Circle in Great Alie Street. Among those who came to speak for the PYC or to take part in discussions were Simon Blumenfeld (author of Jew Boy), Professor Hyman Levy, who spoke on the Jewish question, Aron Rollin and Jacob Fine, trade union leaders in the garment industry, who spoke on the history of British trade unions, Moishe Ovid the antique dealer, Sam Alexander, who spoke on the history of the Jewish people, and many others. Some of the lecturers were at home in both languages, some only in English.With an eye to the future, Alf Holland re-activated a defunct school for Yiddish that had at one time been run in the Workers’ Circle. He and Alec Waterman both taught these Sunday morning classes until the need for a more professional teacher brought Dr Natanyi from Poland. The school flourished for about three years in the early 1930s until support fell off.The Progressive Youth Circle also set up a Literary Section which arranged talks on the work not only of Yiddish writers such as Sholem Aleichem and Peretz, but also on English-language writers and dramatists such as Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser and others. Occasionally scenes from a book were dramatized and the characters put ‘on trial’ as a way of studying the writer in depth. From such beginnings grew the Dramatic Group. (There
had once been a Children’s Yiddish Drama Group in the Workers’ Circle. I saw them perform to a good professional standard in the Whitechapel Theatre in the late 1920s. It was a charming political fantasy with music and songs called Children of Tomorrow by S. Palme, an immigrant poet.)The new Dramatic Group was intended to attract young Jewish people whose knowledge of Yiddish was limited, and to give expression to the ideas motivating the Progressive Youth Circle. They performed scenes from the work of established dramatists and also wrote their own. These performances were given in the Tailor & Garment Workers’ Hall in Great Garden Street, Whitechapel (which held about 350 people), the Workers’ Circle Large Hall (about 200), and the Notting Hill Branch of the Circle (about 60-80). The Yiddish Drama Group were lively and inventive in their productions and at a public performance of amateur dramatic groups they attracted the attention of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, who invited them to join as a Yiddish-speaking group of the WTM.And that is how Proltet began.I hope to be forgiven a digression at this point. I myself was a member of an English-speaking group of the WTM in the East End (it was called either Red Radio or Red Players, I don’t remember). We performed sometimes near the London Hospital in Whitechapel in a side street whose two levels offered a convenient platform, and sometimes in London Fields, Hackney, where we were once pelted with over-ripe tomatoes (not then in the luxury class). We retired in disarray to clean up, deciding that the young workers we had hoped to inspire were not yet ready for our message.To return to Proltet, it was the only WTM group performing exclusively indoors. Although the East End of those days was immigrant Jewry’s shtetl,* only a fraction of a street audience would have understood Yiddish. This distinction apart, Proltet modelled itself entirely on the Agit-Prop style of the English-speaking groups. Both sexes wore the navy bib-and-brace overalls and white shirt to symbolize their sense of identity and solidarity with the working class, and also the concept referred to by Tom * shtetl - Yiddish name for the small towns o f Jewish settlement in Russia and Poland.
