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Synopsis
Bernard Kops’ autobiography of his early years in London’s East End through to his emergence as a major writer in Soho in the 1950s and his drug-induced madness in the 1960s has been re-issued. ‘The best East-end autobiography for many years. Kops allows life to flow over him, never losing his sense of sheer delight, in its size, its possibilities and its outrageousness’. — the Guardian 'Brutal, grim, factual, but the mind that interprets is unfailingly dramatic, and exalts a most horrible history into a fantastical rhapsody.’ — New York Times ‘A writer of outstanding talent.’ — Sunday Times ‘A remarkable autobiography which blends loathing and love in an evocation of the city.’ — Evening Standard ‘These chapters of ‘The World is a Wedding’ rank with the fiercest pages of de Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, the dizzying abysses of Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre and its Double’, William Burrough’s dislocated junk world.’ — Jewish Quarterly Bernard Kops celebrated his 80th birthday with a new BBC Radio 4 play and the launch of Bernard Kops’ East End last year. He is still writing plays. His Dreams of Anne Frank, first produced in 1992, tours internationally and Playing Sinatra, first produced in 1991 has again been revived in the USA.
The re-publication after forty-four years of The World Is A Wedding, Bernard Kops’s memoir of a East End childhood, a Soho youth and the birth-pangs of a writer, is a significant event. Not only because Kops, the least lauded of his generation of Jewish playwrights, is at last being recognised as a master, but also because it sees the light of day as the East End itself enjoys a new lease of life......Kops’ book stands out because it recounts an archetypal, mythical story. A young man leaves his émigré community to pursue his literary vocation. Disappointments and triumphs ultimately affirm his love of life....It is as a modern classic, a text of self-making, rising through the post-war debris of blitz and breakdown, that I propose to treat it. Not so much a review, this will be a re-consideration, a kind of Talmudic re-reading, of Kopsian insights that speak urgently to us now.'My father said poor people couldn’t afford to be religious,' we read in the opening pages. The Kopses were dirt-poor and there is little in Anglo-Jewish writing to compare with Kops’ description of their harassed, hand-to-mouth existence, between the soup-kitchen, the pawnbroker and the Jewish Board of Guardians. Kops bends down in search of sixpences on the pavement, but he also warms to the memory of a close community particularly the vivid language they coined and used with each other, in the pre-television age. And he understands the drive to excel that thrust East End Jews into the wider world, pushing and sometimes pushy, clever and sometimes criminal....See www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=309 for more.
Michael Kustow
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