The Cockney Yiddish Podcast

Who is the gramophone man? In the final episode of the series Nadia and Vivi go down an extraordinary rabbit-hole of East End history. They investigate the mysterious figure of Solomon Levy, immortalised in Yiddish East End street songs. But what is his connection with the ubiquitous gramophone man who haunted Petticoat Lane market with his clapped out gramophone on a rusty pram playing old Yiddish songs? This iconic figure featured in the famous 1955 film A Kid for Two Farthings as well as photographs, drawings and is our podcast image. What is fiction and what is real in the history of the Jewish East End? To help us answer this question, we invite broadcaster Alan Dein for an East End musical tour.

The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs

Produced by Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Guest: Alan Dein

Contributors: Monty Bixer, Nat, Charles Fox, Sylvie Reid, Alice, Hannah Grant, Naomi, Emanuel Litvinoff

Reader in English: Miriam Margolyes

Featured story: Moshe Domb, ‘Petticoat Lane’, translated by Barry Smerin. From East End Jews: Sketches from the London Yiddish Press (Wayne State University Press, 2025).

Featured songs:

• Josef Rosenblatt, ‘Eili, Eili’. From Best Yiddish Songs (Victor Matrix, 1923)
• Klezmer Klub, ‘Old Solomon Levy’. From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)
• Mendel and his Mishpokhe Band, ‘A Kosher Fox Trot Medley (Petticoat Lane) Part 1 (1929). Digitised on the CD Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World Yiddisher Jazz in London’s East End 1920s-1950s(Playloud, 2018)

Theme music: Klezmer Klub, ‘Vaytshepl mayn vaytshepl’ (trad) and ‘Yiddisher Honga’ (trad). From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)

Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson

Episode 6 takes a wallow in nostalgia. Nadia and Vivi listen to a shmaltzy song yearning for Jewish Whitechapel and look at how postwar Yiddish and English-language writers remembered and reinvented the East End. We hear a story, movingly read by Miriam Margolyes, in which the smell of traditional Friday night gefilte fish in the back streets of the East End triggers memories of the Eastern European ‘shtetl’ (town) where the writer grew up and which was destroyed in the Holocaust. We look back at the origins of Jewish East End nostalgia in the nineteenth century, explore Alexander Baron’s fiction from the 1960s and continuing resonances in Eastenders’ memories. Aditi Anand shows us around the Migration Museum in London exploring how migrants to London from around the world remember their origins through food.

The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs

Produced by Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Guest: Aditi Anand, Artistic Director, Migration Museum

Contributor: Celia, Holocaust Survivors’ Centre Yiddish group

Archival recording: Georgia Brown from the radio programme Our East End (BBC Home Service, 1962)

Reader: Miriam Margolyes

Featured story: Ella Zilberg, ‘Gefilte Fish’, translated by Vivi Lachs. From East End Jews: Sketches from the London Yiddish Press (Wayne State University Press, 2025)

Featured song: Chaim Towber with Johnny Franks Orchestra, ‘Whitechapel’ (Shellac, 10″, 78 RPM, 1951). Digitised on the CD Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World Yiddisher Jazz in London’s East End 1920s-1950s (Playloud, 2018)

Theme music: Klezmer Klub, ‘Vaytshepl mayn vaytshepl’ (trad) and ‘Yiddisher Honga’ (trad). From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)

Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson

This episode, entirely in Yiddish, focuses on the pressures on interwar immigrant and second generation Jews to engage with English life and the particular dilemma of what to do about Christmas. We hear Katie Brown’s story of a family negotiating Hanukkah and Christmas and the street song ‘Mayn heym in Ventvort Strit’. This week’s guest, Yiddish teacher Sima Beeri describes her multilingual background and her experience of Lithuanian-Yiddish Christmas. We discuss the way English and Cockney words, like ‘kapati’ (cup of tea), creep into Yiddish texts, with participants of the UK Sof-Vokh Yiddish learners’ and speakers’ Weekend, and the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre Yiddish Group.

The episode is entirely in Yiddish. Go to our website for an English transcript.

The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs

Produced by Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Guest: Sima Beeri

Contributors: participants from the Yiddish Sof-vokh 2024: Joseph, Pam, Justin, Tamara, Jake, Barry, Motl, and participants of the London Holocaust Survivors Centre Yiddish group

Readers: Vivi Lachs,Sima Beeri

Featured story: Katie Brown, ‘Krismes Prezents’ (Alts in eynem, 1951)

Featured song: Raymond Kalman, ‘Mayn heym in ventvort strit’ (streetsong)

Theme music: Klezmer Klub, ‘Vaytshepl mayn vaytshepl’ (trad) and ‘Yiddisher Honga’ (trad). From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)

Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson

Did you hear the one about Haimy and Moishe …? In this episode Vivi and Nadia tell some of their families’ favourite Jewish jokes and find out about Cockney-Yiddish rhyming slang with actor Nick Cassenbaum. We look at Yiddish humour with our studio guest, writer Michael Rosen. We discuss his family’s fragmentary use of Yiddish and how he drew on it in his comic writing. We mull over what is so funny about a story of Jewish technical incompetence, and the outrageous adventures of an East End Jewish wife in a Yiddish music hall parody of a famous ragtime song, Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home.

The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs

Produced by Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Guests: Michael Rosen and Nick Cassenbaum

Reader: Michael Rosen

Featured story: Asher Beilin, ‘A Jew Takes a Pleasure Trip’, translated by Vivi Lachs. From East End Jews: Sketches from the London Yiddish Press (Wayne State University Press, 2025)

Featured song: Katsha’nes, ‘Vos geyst nisht aheym, sore-gitl?’ (Lyrics: Arn Nager. Music: Hughie Cannon). From the CD Don’t Ask Silly Questions (Katshanes, 2017)

Theme music: Klezmer Klub, ‘Vaytshepl mayn vaytshepl’ (trad) and ‘Yiddisher Honga’ (trad). From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)

Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson

Pack your picnic, practise your heckles and come with us to the Yiddish theatre. This episode looks at Yiddish theatre and music hall from its early days in the late nineteenth century, from the popular theatre with its cheap songs and audience misbehaviour to highbrow performances of Shakespeare and opera in Yiddish. Nadia and Vivi bring you a short story about audience antics, and ‘Gevalt polis!’ (Help Police!), a comic song about East End crime. We are joined by the actor and writer David Schneider whose family had a leading role in London’s Yiddish theatre. David performs his grandfather’s translation of Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew’ speech in Yiddish, and historian David Mazower describes the doomed attempt to set up a London Yiddish art theatre.

The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is written and presented by Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs

Produced by Natalie Steed at Rhubarb Rhubarb for Queen Mary University of London

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Guests: David Schneider and David Mazower

Reader: David Schneider

Featured story: A. M. Kaizer ‘When You Go to a Yiddish Theatre’, translated by Vivi Lachs. From London Yiddishtown: East End Jewish Life in Yiddish Sketch and Story, 1930-1950 (Wayne State University Press, 2021)

Featured song: Katsha’nes, ‘Gevalt Police’ (Lyrics and music: Anon). From the CD Don’t Ask Silly Questions (Katshanes, 2017)

Theme music: Klezmer Klub, ‘Vaytshepl mayn vaytshepl’ (trad) and ‘Yiddisher Honga’ (trad). From the CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl (Klub Records, 2009)

Podcast image: © Jeremy Richardson