From Diamond Cutters to Dog Races: Antwerp and London in the Work of Esther Kreitman

Esther Kreitman was a talented Yiddish writer with a unique voice. Her work is notable for its richly idiomatic Polish Yiddish and for her illumination of unusual corners of Jewish life. This paper looks at the dominant themes of the two novels and the short stories and sketches she wrote during her many years of residence in England. Her autobiographical first novel deals with the psychological effects of the imbalance in the treatment of boys and girls growing up in Polish hasidic families between the 1880s and World War I. Although other themes were added later, she continued throughout her writing career to demonstrate the correlation in women between the lack of education, low social status, and mental illness. She also made good literary use of the remarkable knowledge she gained through her marriage, of the exclusive milieu of the so-called diamond Jews of Antwerp and London. The detailed descriptions of the lives of the families in this subculture, which is still largely mysterious to the outside world—including informative discussions of the technical aspects of diamond cutting, polishing, and the commercial practices of the merchants—constitute invaluable documents on both a literary and sociological level. Similarly, her shorter prose fiction includes rare portraits of the Yiddish-speaking community in London as it sinks into gradual decline, journalistic accounts of the Blitz in Yiddish, and acute observations on the changing role of women in the Jewish immigrant community and English society as a whole.