Jews and the British Yiddish Imaginary c. 1900

Mass immigration to Britain at the end of the 19th century by Yiddish-speaking Jews led to the creation of a new British literature – one that was written in Yiddish and inspired as much by developments in the global Yiddish public sphere as by local contexts. The “British Yiddish” imaginary, this article proposes, is best understood as the dynamic and changing creative expression of those trying to synthesise the lived experience of immigrant Jewish life in Britain. Pursuing a close reading of a hitherto uninvestigated piece of Yiddish fiction published serially by Hyman Polski in Britain in 1897, Tsharli der unterpreser (Charlie the Underpresser), the British Yiddish imaginary, it is argued, was characterised by an incipient Judeopessimism which challenges the contemporary celebration of immigrant literature as showing the stability and viability of British immigrant futures and not their difficulty or even impossibility.