Whitechapel Boy: a reading of the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg by Chris Searle & Ron McCormick

April 2018 marked the centenary of the death of the East London poet, Isaac Rosenberg. Born in 1890 to a working-class family of Yiddish-speaking immigrant Lithuanian Jews. His death in the French trenches during the final months of 'the war to end all wars' left English poetry with some of its most brilliant and moving poems of human conflict and aspiration.
Rosenberg was one of the 'Whitechapel Boys', a group of young Jewish men in East London who would meet regularly at the haven of Whitechapel Library, all deeply influenced by the aesthetic and socialist ideas in the streets all around them.

In this tribute to his poetry, Chris Searle seeks to consider Rosenberg's words as a narrative of his times, his world and his unique imaginative outreach. As one of the great poets who grew out of bilingualism, Rosenberg was an innovator and his friend Joseph Leftwich, another 'Whitechapel Boy', described his poems as "jewels of English poetry" and "he was in the tradition of great visionary poets, like Blake."
Searle's account is accompanied by a photographic essay by the English photographer Ron McCormick, who lived and worked in Rosenberg's streets and who documented the passing of the 'Old Jewish' Whitechapel during the early 1970s, portraying the street scenes and atmosphere that would have been familiar to the 'Whitechapel Boys'. His powerful depiction of a unique mix of neighbours and community evokes the spirit of Rosenberg's East London a century before.

Chris Searle has written or edited over fifty books on subjects as diverse as education, poetry, language, journalism, cricket, and jazz. Among them are The Foresaken Lover (Martin Luther King Award in 1973), Classrooms of Resistance, The World in a Classroom, Words Unchained: Language and Revolution in Grenada, Your Daily Dose: Racism and ‘The Sun’, Pitch of Life, and Forward Groove.  He writes a weekly jazz column for the socialist daily newspaper, the Morning Star. In 1971 he collaborated with Ron McCormick to produce the influential book of schoolkids' poetry, Stepney Words, and other projects in East London. More recently in 2017, they were commissioned by Rich Mix, the Shoreditch media arts centre to produce a new compilation of children's poetry, STEPNEY WORDS III (available in this shop)

Published by Communimedia & Blurb in 2018
Paperback Student Edition
124 pages
15.24 x 22.86 cm
Also available as a hardback at £25 - contact [email protected]