A Double Thread (Paperback)

John Gross

ISBN 10: 0099422263 / ISBN 13: 9780099422266

Published by Vintage Publishing, London, 2002

About this Item

Paperback. A fascinating and unusual memoir of growing up in London's East End and a profound reflection on living with two separate yet entwined legacies, Jewish and English.John Gross was the son of a Jewish doctor who practised in Mile End at the time of WW2. His parents were the children of immigrants, steeped in the language and traditions of a European past, yet outside the home he grew up in a very English world of schools and books. Looking back on his childhood he reflects on this double inheritance. The richness of Yiddish words, the rituals of religion set against the daily life of the East End, where gangsters were heroes and patients turned up on the doorstep at all hours. Yet in the background lies the shadow of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. A Double Thread is a marvellously vivid picture of a lost London and a vanished culture but it is also the story of an imaginative boy discovering his own path, through books andfilms and school - away from the East End into the new freedoms of a literary life. John Gross was the son of a Jewish doctor who practised in Mile End at the time of WW2. A Double Thread is a marvellously vivid picture of a lost London and a vanished culture but it is also the story of an imaginative boy discovering his own path, through books andfilms and school - away from the East End into the new freedoms of a literary life. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780099422266

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Double Thread (Paperback)
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing, London
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099422263
• ISBN 13: 9780099422266
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

A touching memoir of a Jewish-English childhood in 1940s East End London.

Full of striking characters and odd encounters, this is an evocative picture of a lost London and a vanished culture, but it is also the story of an imaginative boy discovering his own path through books and films and school - away from Mile End into the new freedoms of the literary life.

About the Author

John Gross is theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph. His previous books include The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters and the widely acclaimed Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend. He lives in London, several miles from the East End.