So They Call You Pisher!

A Memoir

Michael Rosen

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781786633965
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786633972
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

"If you didn't know whether to risk doing something, what's the worst that could happen? 'So they call you pisher!'"

In this humorous and moving memoir, Michael Rosen recalls the first twenty-three years of his life. Born in the North London suburbs, his parents, Harold and Connie, both teachers, first met as teenage Communists in the 1930s Jewish East End. The family home was filled with stories of relatives in London, the United States and France and of those who had disappeared in Europe.

Unlike the children around them, Rosen and his brother Brian grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution. Party meetings were held in the front room, summers were for communist camping holidays, till it all changed after a trip to East Germany, when in 1957 his parents decided to leave "the Party." Michael followed his own journey of radical self-discovery: running away to march against the bomb at Aldermaston, writing and performing in experimental political theatre and getting arrested during the 1968 movements.

An audio version of this book, read by the author, is available at: https://www.audible.co.uk

1

The Missing

About a year before I was born, my brother died; he was not yet two. I don’t know the exact dates of his birth or the death. They were never marked or mentioned in our house or anywhere else. There was no memorial for him. There were no framed photos of him in our house. He was invisible. My arrival into the world must have been a mixture of delight and dread. Delight that I had come along to fill up the gap left by the one before. Dread that I could go too.

It’s possible that I would never have found out about it, if it was not for the moment when I was ten, and my brother Brian and I were sitting on the floor of our front room, going through boxes of old photographs. I picked up one of my mother with a baby on her knee. I held it up.

‘Is that me or Brian?’ I said.

Our father, who we always called Harold rather than Dad, took it off me, looked at it closely and said, ‘That isn’t either of you. That’s Alan. He died. He coughed to death in your mother’s arms. It was during the war. They didn’t have the medicines. He was a lovely boy.’

Brian and I sat right where we were, not knowing what to say. Mum looked so happy in the photo. For a moment I felt ashamed I had made this discovery. Maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t found it.

I must have been the replacement child. Perhaps I was also a cough waiting to happen. Every snuffle, every slight rasp of a breath must have given them reason to worry. I’ll never know if either or both of them voiced such thoughts because, as I say, my father only ever once told the story of the brother who died. My mother never told it, never mentioned it, never said the boy’s name, never let on that she knew that our father had talked about it to us.

The first sounds I heard in the world were in a nursing home called ‘The Firs’ in Harrow, halfway between Harrow-on-the-Hill station and Harrow School. The road, Roxborough Park, ran up a hill to the school, disappearing into a dark, green alleyway of old trees. The houses on both sides spoke of double-fronted, Edwardian wealth, some showing their middle-class past through their stuck-on black beams. ‘Mock-Tudor’ was something my father would spit out on walks down the roads of Pinner, three miles away, where we lived. He had another phrase that topped mock-Tudor: ‘phony barony’. He would look over the hedges along roads around Pinner and say with venom in his voice, ‘Look at that – phony barony.’

Brian, four years old by then, can remember coming to see me at ‘The Firs’. Mum held me up in the window while he and Harold waved from down below. I can imagine them walking in and Harold saying to her, ‘Blimey, Con, I didn’t ever think we’d bring a kid into the world in a phony barony place like this.’

Quite why ‘phony barony’ was such a problem has only seeped into me slowly as an adult, from when I got to know more about where my parents, Harold and Connie, grew up. The places of their childhood and mine are as different as the middle of Paris and the Lake District. There had been no mock-Tudor where they were brought up, though the streets where they grew up aren’t any more ‘real’ or authentic than the ones in Pinner. I think it was something he needed to say in order to show us that he wasn’t attached to Pinner and Harrow: in his mind it wasn’t only ‘phony barony’, it was full of phony barons.

Harold and Connie came from a place of myth: ‘the East End’. In reality, their East End was one small part of the eastern end of London, stretching from the River Thames in the south up to Bethnal Green in the north, with an eastern boundary at Bow and a western boundary at the City.

They talked of this area, or gestured towards it again and again and again. And yet, I was never taken on a trip to the streets of their childhoods. It never became a real place. By that time, Mum’s parents, who we visited, had moved northwards, a mile up the road in Hackney. In contrast, Harold’s mother had moved eastwards by a few miles to live with her daughter Sylvia’s family in Barkingside. This put them near to where Sylvia’s husband Joe worked, at Ford’s.

While I was growing up, Harold and Mum decided not to bother with the scores of relatives that they each had. Aunts and uncles and cousins were mentioned – particularly on Harold’s side – people called Lally and Milly and Rae and Leslie Sunshine and Hilda and Bernie and Murray and Sam and dozens more – but we never saw them. Harold even did an imitation of his grandmother calling out all their names as she tried to remember which one she really wanted to come and help her: ‘Rosie, Addy, Milly, Lally, Rae …!’ But it was as if they had been lost or locked away, living in places that would take days or weeks to reach.

It was only as an adult that I looked at the streets they lived in, the old brick terraces and tenements of inner London. Yet as I grew up my father peopled the little house where he grew up in our imaginations. He told us of the eleven others living there, of sharing his bedroom with his Uncle Sam, who he didn’t talk to. He refused to talk to Sam because, he said, he, Harold, had come home with a hat from ‘the Lane’ – Petticoat Lane Market – and Sam had turned it inside out and back again, and spoilt it. In the language that they spoke before I was born, Yiddish, he and Sam were broygus – not talking. Broygus but sharing a bedroom.

It was into this house in Nelson Street, behind the London Hospital in Whitechapel, that Harold arrived on a boat from America in 1922, aged three. He came with his older sister Sylvia, his younger brother Wallace and their mother, Rose. This was half a family. The other half stayed in the States. Harold’s father Morris, a factory boot and shoe worker, stayed behind with my father’s elder brothers Sidney and Laurence. My father only ever saw Laurie again – the others never – though the story always was that one day Morris would come. He never did.

Harold’s mother, Rose, the woman he called ‘Ma’, was an extraordinary, perhaps outrageous, person. The family story says that on the day she left America, these two oldest sons were working in the fields near to the ‘row house’ where the family lived in Plymouth Street, Brockton, Massachusetts. Rose gathered together my father aged three, the baby Wallace and my father’s sister Sylvia aged five, and headed off without even saying goodbye to the boys in the field.

The little party headed for the train station to take them to a boat leaving Boston Harbor for Liverpool: it was the SS President Harding. But they needed help to get to the train station, so it was Max, Morris’s brother, who stepped in, along with Max’s son Ted, then aged twelve.

Over seventy years later, I went to see Ted and his wife Gladys in Manchester, Connecticut. I saw them several times in the 1990s. He told me what happened. I scribbled a few words down but I got muddled about what happened when, or what was left where or whose fault it was. It had to be someone’s fault. I went again to see him – we all did, my own family, wife and two little ones, aged four and eight in 2009. Ted was 101 years old and afterwards he sent me a letter. I read it to myself in his slow, deep American voice:

Dear Michael,

Last night I read part of Harold’s book. ‘Stories and Meanings’. He describes his mother’s pride in her ‘black trunk’. I remember it very well. When your family moved to Rochester from Brockton, I pulled that trunk on our cart all the way to the railroad station.

Aunt Rose walked in front carrying Wallace. Sylvia walked with me, holding my left hand. My right hand held the handle attached to the cart. Harold varied his walk. Sometimes walking beside his mother and sometimes slowing down to walk with Sylvia.

When we reached the railroad station, there was about 20 steps to go up to the station. I left the cart and the trunk at the bottom and helped the children up those steps. The train had just pulled into the station.

I left them there and went down to get the trunk. I had to go around to a road that led up to the station. The road was a little rough for the cart and trunk but I finally got up to the station level. The train was leaving just as I reached the station. I watched it leave, and pulled the cart and the trunk all the way back to our store.

My father called American Express to pick up the trunk and send it to Rochester. They charged $4.95. I told my father that I thought it was a lot of money. He did not think so. It was a heavy trunk. After reading about the trunk, I agree. It was not a lot of money.

With fondest memories,

Ted

(That trunk. Yes, my father did write about it, and often talked about it. As he and Sylvia grew up, this trunk, he said, was full of stories; all they had to do was open it, and Ma would take out photos and bits of paper and talk for hours about who this person was, what happened to that person. For example, how Ma’s grandmother Miriam had come from Odessa and settled first in Oystershell Row, in Newcastle. It was a mistake. She thought she was going to London.)

In Whitechapel, Rose, Harold, Sylvia and Wallace moved in with Rose’s parents Bessie and Joseph, a sweatshop worker, and three of mother’s sisters, and Uncle Sam. Were there really six of them already? That made ten of them in all. Almost immediately, Harold’s baby brother Wallace died. The story was that this death was the reason why Morris, Sidney and Laurie never came: the moment Morris heard that Wallace had died, he sent angry letters to Rose, accusing her of neglecting the boy. Before that, Morris had been sending dollar coins to my father’s sister, Sylvia. Not anymore.

In time they heard that Sidney ran away from Morris to join the Army. In turn, Laurie ran all the way back to England, working his way on a merchant ship, and joined the Hussars. By the time I was born, Laurie had died. When I was a kid, I had it in my head that he died from swallowing a mothball. I don’t suppose Hussars die from eating mothballs. Sidney, we were told, lived somewhere impossible like Texas or Colorado with a wife called Bess, which meant that we would never see them.

Where did all these people come from? Our parents’ grandparents all came from places we never saw, never visited. These were mostly called Poland, though sometimes exactly the same places could be called Russia. ‘Poland was kind of in Russia then,’ they would say, not that that explained anything. But Mum’s mother came from a place she couldn’t remember but sounded, she said, like ‘Bill, come in.’ Mum said it was Romania. One time Harold called it Austria. I’ve combed old maps. I think it may have been Bukovina. Bill come in? Bukovina? Maybe. All I know is that we didn’t ever go to a place that sounded anything like ‘Bill come in,’ any more than we went to Poland, Russia, or even Whitechapel and Bethnal Green.

All these people were Jews, the oldest amongst them speaking Yiddish, which by the time I came along didn’t exist as a flow of talk. It came interwoven into English, as words and expressions, remnants of one language alive and well in another. It was good for swearing, describing anyone as foolish, crazy or nonsensical; anything to do with eating, gobbling, slurping and things tasting good; anything to do with saying that people were bad because they were thieves, bastards, know-alls, blabbermouths, spongers, tramps or slobs.

It was good for distinguishing a useless person from a big shot. There was a raft of phrases and sayings to say the unsayable. There were three ways of saying you were in trouble. Not so bad trouble, you were in tsures; bigger trouble: ‘You’re in shtuch.’ Serious trouble? ‘You’re in dr’erd.’

Do me a favour! (meaning, do me a favour by not saying what you’re saying): Tut mir ein toyver.

Be good and help me out here: Sei a mensh.

And for any time you needed to say, ‘kiss my ass’, there was kish mir mein tukkhes.

If you didn’t know whether to risk saying something, what’s the worst that could happen? ‘So they call you pisher!’

There were even words my parents said that they didn’t really know what they meant but they said them all the same: a plate of nice food in front of us, and my father would say, ‘Shnobbrergants’. It didn’t mean the food was nice. It meant something like, if I was a shnobbrergants I’d gobble this stuff up – but he didn’t know what a shnobbrergants was. And a mess, for my mother, was a misherdamonk.

My father used more Yiddish than Mum did. I’m guessing that when he saw me, he named parts of me: there was my pipik, my tukkhes, my punim (belly button, bum, face). Most likely he used Yiddish to describe this baby’s bodily processes. ‘Con,’ he’d say (it wouldn’t have been his job), ‘he’s kvetsht up his milk’, ‘he’s grepst’, ‘he’s fotzt’ (he’s puked up his milk, burped and farted). When I winced, ‘Con, it’s something in his kishkes’ (guts); ‘Ach, there’s shmalts all down his bib,’ and when I was washed and dressed, he’d say, ‘Look at the little lobbes! He’s as sharp as a matzo ball and twice as greasy’ (the little yob). If he thought I was small he would have called me a shnip, if he thought I was the kind of new-born baby who bosses his mother about, he’d have called me a gubba. And for as long as I ever knew he told me I had a ‘triangular tukkhes’. I know what Bubbe would have called me when she came: tattele – little chap. It’s what she called me every time I ever saw her.

And because my parents were Jews, at the very moment of my arrival into the world in 1946 they were carrying with them the discovery that their uncles, aunts and cousins had disappeared. In our family, accounts of these disappearances came from France, Poland and Russia. There were also other unexpected stories. Just about the time I was born, a man in his twenties arrived on my father’s sister’s doorstep, scarcely able to speak English. ‘Lady Sylvia?’ he asked. He was their cousin, Michael Rechnik. His mother, Stella Rosen, was Harold’s and Sylvia’s aunt, the sister of Morris.

In Poland, Michael Rechnik’s parents had put him on a train going east just as the German army was arriving from the west. The Russians were invading Poland from the east and demanded that the Poles take Soviet citizenship. He refused, so they sent him to a camp in Siberia, but when the Soviet Union was itself invaded by the Nazis, the Russians let Michael out so he could fight the Germans. He joined the Polish Free Army that fought on the same side as Britain and Russia, even though he hated the Russians and the Russians hated him. He fought all the way round the perimeter of Europe, up the middle of Italy and on to the battle of Monte Cassino.

Just as I came into the world he got himself out of a camp where the Americans and British had put him for fighting for them, and came to England. He carried the addresses of the French, British and American uncles and aunts, and was heading for the relatives in the US via London. Sylvia gave him a bed, so he stayed in London. He learned to drive a taxi and never left. He never saw his parents again. How, where and when they disappeared wasn’t known to anyone in the family. I’m not even sure that they dared think about it. Certainly, they didn’t ever talk about it.

The rest of the Rosens weren’t in Pinner, weren’t in London, weren’t in England. They were in America or they were nowhere. On the other hand, Harold’s mother’s family were in England. They were the Brookstones. Rumour had it that one part of this side of the family had started up the Essoldo cinema chain, named after family members, Esther, Solly and Dolly. Was that a joke or was it true? Harold gave the impression that the house in Whitechapel was full of rumours like that. Someone had made serious muzzume, money, in South Africa. Or not. Uncle Leslie Sunshine was going to set him up in the law, Harold had to give him a call after he got his ‘Matric’ and Leslie Sunshine would see him right. Harold got his Matric and rang but Uncle Leslie Sunshine made out he hardly knew him. But wasn’t it Leslie Sunshine who took him to Highbury to see Arsenal play in 1926?

‘No, that was my Zeyde’ (Grandad).

‘Who was it that was going to make you a bar mitzvah suit but when your mother said you weren’t going to have a bar mitzvah, he didn’t make you the suit?’

‘No, you got that muddled. My cousin Bernie was getting a suit because he was getting bar mitzvahed but because I wasn’t, my Zeyde felt sorry for me and said he would make one for me all the same, but the jacket he found too difficult.’

‘And it wasn’t Leslie Sunshine?’

‘No, that was the thing about being a lawyer.’

‘And who was the great lady that you were taken to see?’

‘I wasn’t taken to see her, I went on my own. My mother used to collect people. I don’t know how she did it but they would turn up in our house in Nelson Street. One of them was this grande dame type, called Beatrice Hastings. After a few of her visits, my mother said that I had been invited to see her in Belsize Park. So after what seemed like a journey that took all day on buses and trams, I walked down a street the like of which I had never seen before in my life: huge white buildings with big, big windows.

‘I went in and this Beatrice Hastings lived in thick-carpeted rooms, with pictures hanging on every wall, and little bits and pieces from Paris. She asked me questions I didn’t know how to answer. I ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. The Missing
• 2. No Thank You God
• 3. The Opposite of Wax
• 4. My Other Lives
• 5. Stalinallee
• 6. The Underdone Sausage
• 7. Great Expectations
• 8. Eng. Lit.
• 9. In the Colonie
• 10. The Politics of Culture
• 11. International Connections
• 12. Not Doing Medicine
• 13. Rehearsing the Uprising
• Postscript: To Harold, Who Died in 2008