Nov 10, 2024
A. N. Stencl outside his East London flat, taken in 1977 by Shloimy Alman.
Avrom-Nokhem Shtentsl [Abraham Nahum Stencl] best known as A.N. Stencl (1897–1983) was a Yiddish poet and writer, from a noble Hasidic lineage, who grew up in a small mining town in Russian-occupied Poland. He fled that world in 1919 after receiving his military call up papers then wandered around Europe for some years writing poetry. In 1921 he entered Berlin illegally then lived a bohemian life there until 1936. He published extensively and started a Yiddish literary society during Nazi occupation with Dora Diamant, known as Kafka’s widow. In November 1936 Stencl arrived in London as a stateless refugee and soon settled in the heart of the Yiddish speaking Jewish quarter of Whitechapel, which he affectionately called his “Jerusalem of Britain.” His poems were strongly inspired by observing the busy streets of Whitechapel and the characters in the Jewish cafes, markets, and theatres. He lived there for the rest of his life championing Yiddish language and life.
I have been fascinated by this legendary Yiddish writer since first hearing stories about him as a child from my paternal grandparents, Malka and Gedaliah Lichtenstein. They, like Stencl, were also Polish Jewish emigres who found refuge from persecution in London East End before the war. My grandparents became founding members of the Literarishe shabes-nokhmitiks (Literary Saturday Afternoon) meetings Stencl established there in 1937. These lively gatherings, which later became known as The Friends of Yiddish, were busy noisy events in their heyday, and attracted large crowds of Yiddish speakers from many different backgrounds and communities who were living in East London and beyond at that time. On occasion guest writers came from abroad to read from their works; others performed the great Yiddish classics, sung songs, or discussed politics. Post war as the community died or moved away, the meetings got smaller and smaller, but Stencl never gave up and kept the group running, even if only one person came along. Stencl died in 1983 soon after collapsing penniless, dressed like a beggar and alone on the streets of Whitechapel.
I moved back to the streets of East London my grandparents had so willingly left over thirty years ago now, searching for any remnants of the lively Yiddish speaking world they had described. By the time I arrived most traces of the Jewish East End had disappeared but there were still people living in the area who remembered Stencl. He had once been a familiar and much-loved character there, famous for walking the streets with his pockets stuffed full of poems, with copies of his Yiddish journal Loshn un lebn (Language & Life) tucked under his arm, as he stood outside the Jewish lecture halls, Yiddish theatres and meeting places, crying, “Koyft a heft!” (buy a pamphlet). Many people did, even if they did not read Yiddish, because they wanted to support him.
Stencl with his great Neice Miriam Becker in East London c.1949. Miriam Becker private collection.
These stories inspired me over the years to try and find out more about this poet and his world. Over time I interviewed the last remaining members of his Yiddish literary society, as well as his friends and surviving family members, and you can hear some of their stories here in the radio documentary The Last Poet of Whitechapel. All the first-generation Yiddish speaking immigrants whose testimony I recorded are no longer alive. They include the Polish-born Yiddish musician Majer Bogdanski, who took over as the Chairman of the Friends of Yiddish after Stencl died; the Romanian-born Yiddish actress Anna Tzelniker, whose father was a major Yiddish star of the stage in pre-war Europe and in London; and the East London historian Bill Fishman who grew up amongst the Yiddish speaking tailors and cabinetmakers of Jewish Whitechapel.
It was Bill Fishman who first told me about the archive of material from Stencl’s London flat that had been deposited in the Special Collections of SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in Bloomsbury after the poet died thanks to the Yiddish scholar and great friend of Stencl’s Dovid Katz. This rescued archive consists of papers and personal communications, as well as some of Stencl’s publications of Yiddish poetry and a collection of the Yiddish magazine Loshn un lebn (1941-1980) that Stencl edited, contributed to, and lived off financially by selling the magazine to local Yiddish speakers on the streets of East London.
Bill also alerted me to the wealth of stories buried within Stencl’s long out of print Yiddish journals, which record not just the histography of Yiddish literature and culture in London during that period, but also Stencl’s own autobiographical writings. I am not a fluent Yiddish speaker, although I am starting to tentatively learn, and hope one day to be able to read Stencl’s memoirs myself. Thanks to funding from Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K. (where I teach creative writing) and a Leverhulme British Academy Grant, I have been able to work with the fantastically talented Yiddish translator Lena Watson to access the incredible stories written by Stencl in these magazines about his life. Over the past two years, Lena has summarized many volumes of Stencl’s memoirs, which are scattered throughout hundreds of copies of Loshn un Lebn — over half a million words in total! She has created detailed English translations of the historic tales within in English, which inform the creative nonfiction book I am now writing titled The Prince of Whitechapel (William Collins, 2026) and reveal amazing stories of now entirely lost Yiddish speaking worlds, as Jake Schneider’s translation of one of Stencl’s Berlin episodes published here reveals.
My search for Stencl over the years has taken me across the globe, tracking down his scattered archive of material and walking in the places where once he trod. I have been to his hometown in Poland and visited his family house, the grave of his father, and other places he mentions in his memoirs such as the former Hasidic shtibl where his parents were married and the site of the yeshiva in Sosnoweicz where his brother once taught. In 2023 I visited Berlin, which is such an important place in Stencl’s development as a poet. It was there that Stencl mixed with Yiddish poets and writers from many different backgrounds, and published many volumes of his work including acclaimed collections such as Fisherdorf (Fishing Village, 1931) which was praised by Thomas Mann. Stencl eventually became the last Yiddish poet to still be publishing in Nazi occupied Berlin in 1936.
After an introduction from Dovid Katz, I went to Berlin to collaborate with the dynamic international collective Yiddish.Berlin, a loose group of artists, scholars, activists, and enthusiasts based in Berlin who are dedicated to Yiddish – as a language, as an expression, as a statement, as a way of life. They organize thematic art exhibitions, literary events, talks, reading groups, conversation circles, salons, film screenings, and other activities that sustain living Yiddish culture and both remember and transmit its rich legacy. Jake Schneider is a member of this group, and along with other key members of the collective including Arndt Beck, Horst Bernhardt, Hilde Haberland, and Jordan Lee Schnee, we devised a mixed program of live events about Avrom Nokhem Stencl, which was shared with an audience in Berlin. I took a travelling exhibition with me about Stencl, which I had written and developed in collaboration with the Manchester Poetry Library in 2022. This exhibition was also shown at an event at the Manchester Jewish Museum in the U.K. called The Friends of Yiddish and you can see the recording here. That event included story and song from the brilliantly talented Yiddish musician, academic, and writer Vivi Lachs, as well as an interview with Stencl’s great niece Miriam Becker who lives in Manchester, who has supported my research continuously over the years.
It was wonderful to see this exhibition transported to Berlin, which became the backdrop to a series of public events over the following week, which included trilingual poetry events, bilingual readings, a showing of the experimental short film on Stencl I made, which was originally commissioned for the Manchester Poetry Library during lockdown, and a lively exhibition opening with printed pages from my artist sketchbook on Stencl on the wall. Most of the group had not heard of Stencl before this time, and since then many of them have become “Stencilities”’ like me. Collectively they have been reading Stencl’s poetry in its original Yiddish in their reading group for over a year now and some members of the group have translated Stencl’s poetry from the Yiddish into Polish, Hebrew, German and English. Following on from the earlier work of German Yiddish scholar Dr. Heather Valencia, Bernhardt and Schneider have both been engaged in translating parts of Stencl’s memoirs from his Berlin period and this summer they led me around around the streets of the city, to visit the remnants of sites Stencl mentions.
Blown up images from Rachel Liechtenstein’s sketchbook at Stencl pop up exhibition, Berlin 2023.
These locations, along with other places I have also visited in Poland and in London, will be geolocated on a Memory Map of Stencl’s life and work, which I am currently producing. This digital web based project is based on previous projects I have collated including The Memory Map of the Jewish East End and The Memory Map of Jewish Manchester. Stencl’s memory map will launch at the same time as the new book on Stencl and The A.N. Stencl Digital Archive Project, which is funded by Arcadia. 1 1Arcadia is a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1.2 billion to organizations around the world.
This international archive project has just launched and over the next two years, I will be tracking down and digitizing previously undocumented material relating to Stencl’s life, work, and Yiddish activities, from both private and public collections, in the U.K., and across the globe then create a bilingual (Yiddish and English) multi-media website that both shares and safeguards this story for future generations. High resolution copies of everything collected will also be deposited with the Center for Jewish History in New York and become part of the permanent online collections of their partner organization, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which will be accessible to researchers via their online digital holdings discoverable at search.cjh.org.
While considerable efforts have already been made to preserve and digitize some of Stencl’s printed and handwritten material, mainly that which was gathered from his flat after his death, there remains a less tangible but no less important yet-to-be collected archive. This is scattered around the world and includes ephemera, film footage, letters, manuscripts, as well as rare articles and publications particularly from his Berlin period. Given the age of Stencl’s contemporaries, now is an urgent moment as these are the final years we may be able to gather the living memory of the last of Stencl’s cultural circle in London before this testimony is lost to time.
The digital archive project aims to unite Stencl’s dispersed materials, safeguard oral testimonies, and provide universal access to Stencl’s work. If anyone reading this blog has stories to share about Stencl, letters from Stencl,or photographs of him in the attic, or is aware of the location of any previously unrecorded material in an archive somewhere around the world, please do get in touch, by emailing [email protected].
From the Editors: You can read a translation, by Jake Schneider, of an excerpt from Avrom Nokhem Stencl’s memoirs of urban wandering in Weimar Berlin here.
