Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Ivor Harry Lightman collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.

I was born in the East End of London in 1928. I grew up living in a place where people had no money but they had to make a living, and my Uncle Harry and my Uncle Sam lived in and ran a grocery shop where we did our shopping, and which provided for our day-to-day living. My two uncles and the grocery shop were the strongest factors in my life, and I remember them working all the time. We lived at the bottom of a tall house, and we climbed up the stairs to get to the area where we lived, a long way upstairs. It was a very basic sort of life, and I had very poor housing, very poor everything. Our family was originally from Poland, and Yiddish was a very common element in our lives. It was even more common with my grandparents who lived in the same house and spoke Yiddish almost exclusively. Education mattered to my father, and I got a proper education. As far as my father was concerned, he was very anxious that we should grow up as English people in the society in which we were living, and that was really why we became very Anglicized. In the whole area of Stoke Newington all the Jewish shops were there with Jewish characteristics and all the rest of it. We lived in a Jewish circle and it was very active, very busy, and most of our family and local life was Jewish – people who took a strong interest in what was going on in Britain and Israel. My parents were strong politically, and got involved with Zionism and used to attend meetings. That lasted for a long time but religion didn’t really figure very much in this. It didn’t go far into Jewish life in the sense of synagogues and all that; we had no active synagogue part. I missed my bar mitzvah because it was during the war and I had been evacuated to Colwyn Bay. There were features of life which were very threatening. There was the war and bombing and spitfires, and general mayhem going on all around the place. Where we were living in north London the fascists were very active in that area and I used to have to listen to them playing their part and being very aggressive. We learned about anti-Semitism because there were members of non-Jewish families who persecuted us and made a nuisance of things, and behaved in an alien sort of way to us. So that was why we were aware of an alien world, and that’s what really had a major effect on us until the time when I left school at sixteen. I had a successful career in the Civil Service. I went in as a clerical assistant and then a clerical officer. I progressed on from there and did rather well, to my surprise, and gradually, over a long period of years, got promoted through various grades, including the Welsh Office in Cardiff from 1980, my final department. I had various responsibilities which fluctuated quite a lot and made me grow up quite a bit because they were difficult areas in which I was unfamiliar. I didn’t know anything about Wales when I arrived and had to learn fairly rapidly.