Prince of Whitechapel

'A beautiful and deeply engaged journey into language and community' EDMUND DE WAAL, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes 'A miracle of research and tactful witness' IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Last London ________________________________ This is the story of Yiddish. It is also the story of a penniless, charming writer on a mission to save his language, and a historian on a quest to follow him to the ends of a vanishing world. The horrors of the Second World War could not stop one irrepressible man. In the aftermath of unimaginable loss, Avrom Nokem Stencl fought to keep his people’s language alive. After fleeing his shtetl, and only narrowing escaping the Nazis, he landed in London where he dedicated the rest of his life to the survival of his mother tongue. Historian Rachel Lichtenstein first heard about this unlikely hero from her grandparents, fellow Polish refugees to Whitechapel, and she became determined to uncover the mystery of his remarkable life.In this historical detective story, spanning the twentieth century and travelling from London to Germany, Poland and the United States, Lichtenstein traces the destruction and miraculous survival of Yiddish. She excavates the vibrant Yiddish-speaking worlds her family and Stencl once inhabited and the haunting absences that still resound within those places. But she also finds a new community of her own in the present, redefining Yiddish life and language for a new generation.This is a story of exile and survival, erasure and recovery, displacement and return. It is an elegy to lost worlds and a tribute to the resilience of a people and their language. 'Something truly special … singular, inventive and deeply emotive' KEIRON PIM, author of Endless Flight