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Cockney Girl is a second-generation Jewish-British child's eyewitness account of tumultuous East London and her eccentric family in England 1934-1950, from the time she was five years old to age twenty. It is what Elie Wiesel called "unmapped history," the story of a family, based on memories and diaries. and is, according to Elie Wiesel, 'unmapped history.' Gilda Haber says, "Joycey Kennel and I roamed East London most Saturdays while my operaphile mother set and permed ladies hair and my deaf barber father, shaved dockers for pub nights and Christmas. One Christmas, Mummy dropped me, aged five, at a Dickensian orphanage for two years. I joyously returned to sooty East London witnessing the 600,000 Fascist - Anti-Fascist 1936 Cable Street Battle and was bridesmaid at my aunt Mitzi's posh wedding. In 1939, London children were hastily evacuated from expected Nazi bombing to country foster parents who ranged from kind to concupiscent. When I was 14, Mummy sent me to The White House Jewish refugee orphanage: Great Chesterford. Here, contemporaneously with Anne Frank, I began my diary, rejoined the tribe and, while a teenager, met Yank servicemen and wounded British soldiers. With peace, aged 16, I returned home, a stranger, attended LSE and immigrated to America, but remained a Cockney Girl."… (más)
Gilda Haber’s Cockney Girl transports the reader to England in the 30’s and 40’s through the eyes of a Jewish girl who grows from five to twenty during these tumultuous years. Gilda’s mother adores opera, but sullenly endures her deaf husband, her work perming ladies hair in the family beauty parlor, and Gilda. One busy Christmas season, Gilda’s mother takes her to an orphanage straight out of Dickens and leaves her, ‘forgetting’ to pick her up after the busy season was over. Gilda loves the hustle and bustle of London, but is compelled to leave it many times over these years, first because of her mother and then because of the war-time evacuation of children from London. Besides her colorful family of two sets of grandparents, an aunt and an uncle and other relatives, Gilda meets an array of characters out of central casting over these years--from the numerous ‘aunts’ her mother finds to take care of her, to the dizzying succession of foster parent billets in which war officials place her. Each of the characters Gilda encounters along the way is memorable and exquisitely drawn. They live and breathe on the page—from her friend, Violet, and Nurse Harris in the orphanage to Mr. Shapiro in the Jewish refugee hostel. The prose sparkles and compels the reader to keep turning the pages to find out what happens to Gilda next. Along the way the reader also receives a history lesson. Of all the countless books about WWII and the Holocaust there are few about Great Britain. Gilda reveals the deep-seated anti-Semitism that emerges in the Cable Street battle. Unlike Kristallnacht that happened two years later in Germany, however, Jews, dock workers, unions and others surged into the streets to foil the Fascists’ intent to destroy property and beat up the inhabitants in the Jewish neighborhood on London’s East side. This same anti-Semitism also appears in the countryside where some of her foster parents checked her head for Jewish horns. Gilda dedicates her book to the memory of Anne Frank. Gilda was lucky to have been born in England and saved from Anne’s fate at the hands of the Nazis. There are, however, some similarities in their books. Both were put into confined circumstances not of their own choosing and most importantly, both were writers. Despite both girls being out of main action, both describe their times, paint the portraits of those in their vicinity, and make the reader smile as well as weep. ( )
Cockney Girl is a second-generation Jewish-British child's eyewitness account of tumultuous East London and her eccentric family in England 1934-1950, from the time she was five years old to age twenty. It is what Elie Wiesel called "unmapped history," the story of a family, based on memories and diaries. and is, according to Elie Wiesel, 'unmapped history.' Gilda Haber says, "Joycey Kennel and I roamed East London most Saturdays while my operaphile mother set and permed ladies hair and my deaf barber father, shaved dockers for pub nights and Christmas. One Christmas, Mummy dropped me, aged five, at a Dickensian orphanage for two years. I joyously returned to sooty East London witnessing the 600,000 Fascist - Anti-Fascist 1936 Cable Street Battle and was bridesmaid at my aunt Mitzi's posh wedding. In 1939, London children were hastily evacuated from expected Nazi bombing to country foster parents who ranged from kind to concupiscent. When I was 14, Mummy sent me to The White House Jewish refugee orphanage: Great Chesterford. Here, contemporaneously with Anne Frank, I began my diary, rejoined the tribe and, while a teenager, met Yank servicemen and wounded British soldiers. With peace, aged 16, I returned home, a stranger, attended LSE and immigrated to America, but remained a Cockney Girl."
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(4.25)
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Besides her colorful family of two sets of grandparents, an aunt and an uncle and other relatives, Gilda meets an array of characters out of central casting over these years--from the numerous ‘aunts’ her mother finds to take care of her, to the dizzying succession of foster parent billets in which war officials place her. Each of the characters Gilda encounters along the way is memorable and exquisitely drawn. They live and breathe on the page—from her friend, Violet, and Nurse Harris in the orphanage to Mr. Shapiro in the Jewish refugee hostel.
The prose sparkles and compels the reader to keep turning the pages to find out what happens to Gilda next.
Along the way the reader also receives a history lesson. Of all the countless books about WWII and the Holocaust there are few about Great Britain. Gilda reveals the deep-seated anti-Semitism that emerges in the Cable Street battle. Unlike Kristallnacht that happened two years later in Germany, however, Jews, dock workers, unions and others surged into the streets to foil the Fascists’ intent to destroy property and beat up the inhabitants in the Jewish neighborhood on London’s East side. This same anti-Semitism also appears in the countryside where some of her foster parents checked her head for Jewish horns.
Gilda dedicates her book to the memory of Anne Frank. Gilda was lucky to have been born in England and saved from Anne’s fate at the hands of the Nazis. There are, however, some similarities in their books. Both were put into confined circumstances not of their own choosing and most importantly, both were writers. Despite both girls being out of main action, both describe their times, paint the portraits of those in their vicinity, and make the reader smile as well as weep. (