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April 2018 marked the centenary of the death of the East London poet, Isaac Rosenberg. Born in 1890 to a working-class family of Yiddish-speaking immigrant Lithuanian Jews. His death in the French trenches during the final months of ‘the war to end all wars’ left English poetry with some of its most brilliant and moving poems of human conflict and aspiration. Rosenberg was one of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, a group of young Jewish men in East London who would meet regularly at the haven of Whitechapel Library, all deeply influenced by the aesthetic and socialist ideas in the streets all around them. In this tribute to his poetry, Chris Searle seeks to consider Rosenberg’s words as a narrative of his times, his world and his unique imaginative outreach. As one of the great poets who grew out of bilingualism, Rosenberg was an innovator and his friend Joseph Leftwich, another ‘Whitechapel Boy’, described his poems as jewels of English poetry and He was in the tradition of great visionary poets, like Blake. Searle’s account is accompanied by a photographic essay by the English photographer Ron McCormick, who lived and worked in Rosenberg’s streets and who documented the passing of the ‘Old Jewish’ Whitechapel during the early 1970s, portraying the street scenes and atmosphere that would have been familiar to the ‘Whitechapel Boys’. His powerful depiction of a unique mix of neighbours and community evokes the spirit of Rosenberg’s East London half a century before.
