A Double Thread

John Gross is the son of a Jewish doctor who practised in the East End of London from the 1920s through the Second World War and beyond. His parents were steeped in the customs and traditions of Eastern Europe, yet outside the home, he grew up in a very English world of comic and corner shops, sandbags and bombsites, battered school desks and addictive, dusty cinemas. Looking back on his childhood, he traces this double inheritance. The religion that underpinned family life - Yiddish stories and jokes, the rituals and mysteries of the synagogue - is set against the life of the streets, where gangsters are heroes and patients turn up on the doorstep at all hours.