Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
A Double Bind
By Al Alvarez
The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000
by Todd M. Endelman
University of California Press, 347 pp., $55.00; $22.50 (paper)
A Double Thread: Growing Up English and Jewish in London
by John Gross
Ivan R. Dee, 190 pp., $23.50
When the late Cecil Roth retired, in 1968, after his ninth term as president of the Jewish Historical Society of England, he felt he should apologize for devoting his life to such a 'modest cabbage patch.' This was, of course, the polite and appropriately English thing to do, and Roth, the first Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford, was a very English figure. John Gross, who met him at the open house Roth kept on Saturday afternoons for Jewish students, describes him as 'a tall man, with thick glasses, lots of teeth, lank black hair parted in the middle (it was often mistaken for a wig) and a spluttery voice'—in short, a typical Oxford don, except that 'his conversation abounded with what you might call the higher Jewish gossip.'
Review, 2959 words
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