A busy few weeks

What a week it’s been here in the UK! In fact, for me it’s been an interesting and busy few weeks all round and here are some of the reasons why:

The Election:  I promise this will only be a short moan...

For those who have missed it, most people expected Labour (the left) to do well, well enough to form a coalition government. They didn’t. Cameron and the Tories (the right) now have an overall majority. I'm not going to discuss policies here. Lots of other bloggers have covered that. What I find most surprising is that, everywhere I go, people are expressing their displeasure with the results. So where are all those people who voted another Conservative government in?  ...End of moan!

A cartoon illustration from the
Children's Book of Richard III

Children’s Book of Richard III:  The book is continuing to sell really well and I’m delighted with all the positive feedback. I'm still doing schools visits. I may blog about some more of them soon! This week I’ve met with the theatre group who are performing my Children’s History of Leicester in schools. They have plans, funding permitting, to take my Children’s Book of Richard III into schools using the same hilarious format. I’m very excited about this and so am typing with my fingers crossed (metaphorically speaking, of course).

Jewish Gilroes:  I'm still receiving and adding family stories to the Leicester Jewish Cemetery website. If you're interested in social history, or if you know members of the Leicester Jewish Community, you might like to catch up on these additional stories. You can see the list here:  Jewish Gilroes Stories

Jewish Voices:  I love the way that my Jewish Voices book in still in demand. I get a steady stream of email requests about it. If anyone would like a copy I have some to spare, courtesy of the Heritage Lottery. It’ll only cost you the postage. Here is a link to the website to remind you: Leicester Jewish Voices

Plus:  And of course I haven't yet mentioned my new writing project that I'm researching (fascinating but I'll save it for another blog post), my regular writing workshops, life, the universe, etc, etc.......

A small taste of an immigrant’s welcome

The cataloguing of the cemetery and writing up of the website work is still ticking over. Every story that I have researched has given me yet another perspective; not only into historical events, but also into the way we treat each other and life in general.

I spent a fascinating morning recently with a friend, gathering information for a story about her father who is buried at the cemetery. It is now posted onto the website and you can read it here.

There are two things in this story that I’d like to talk about. The first is the way that non-English speaking immigrants were treated in the early 1900s. It could be that immigrants are still treated the same way today. I don't know. My friend said that her family was convinced that the immigration officers gave out a generic name for all Jewish immigrants if they couldn’t understand the Yiddish speakers. In their case, all the families were given the name Goldberg. I accept that this is not an act of cruelty, but it is a dehumanizing approach to people who are already displaced and escaping persecution.

My second point is the photograph. Do visit the web page and have a look at the two men. Don’t you just love those Victorian male bathing costumes? I think they’re fabulous!

I'm out and about

I'm so pleased with the results of the Lives Behind the Stones cemetery research project that I'd love it if other communities followed suit and created their own website along the lines of the one that I've been responsible for developing during the last year. Indeed, one of the final aims of the project is to promote the idea as a template and so I have been out and about these last few weeks doing just that.

Today I'm over at Simon Mayer's blog talking about the project. If you'd like to pop over and visit me there you can find me at Simon Mayers - Researcher and Historian

I can also be found in this week's copy of the Jewish Chronicle and you can read an online version of the article here.

Lives Behind the Stones - The Finale

As many of you know, for the past year I have been coordinating a project to catalogue our local cemetery. I’m delighted, relieved, pleased to say that the year is almost over. This weekend I’m holding a presentation to celebrate our achievements and, as I jot them down in preparation for my speech, I’m proud to say that the outcomes far outstrip the aims. In fact, had anyone suggested at the outset that we would get this much work done, I would have been quite ‘negative’ with them.

We now have information boards at the cemetery. These include plans of all the plots. There are row markers and small plaques for every unmarked grave…

And more than that, we now have a website with all the basic information that anyone might need to know about the cemetery…

And much more than that, the website contains a record for every burial with data about that person and search facilities. It is now a fully functioning genealogical website…

And even more than that, the website contains many researched stories about the lives led by a number of the people buried there. This is why we called the project The Lives Behind the Stones. We’ve managed to gather a fair cross-section showing contributions made to the local community, to the city, in some cases to the country. There are contributions to commerce, celebrations of scientific developments and, sadly, many moving stories of refugees and evacuees who sought shelter here in Leicester.

I’m sorry you can’t all come to the presentation but, if you’ve not looked at the website recently, you might like to see the finished product and discover what I’ve been up to all year.  You'll find it here.

Thanks to my team and to all the volunteers who have worked so hard and, of course, many thanks to the Heritage Lottery people who have funded the work and supported us during the year. 

Nothing Lasts Forever

Website Launch

It's been a long and hard year of work but the task to catalogue our old and crumbling cemetery is nearing completion. For those of you who have expressed an interest in the project, please visit the official Project Website at Jewish-Gilroes It helps to explain why I've not been around much on the Bloggersphere recently.

Nothing lasts forever. This photograph shows some of the older stones as they were last year. Sadly, since then, even more stones in this part of the cemetery have become unsafe. Every time we go to the cemetery we see that the Council have erected more and more orange netting. It surrounds the dangerous stones; the ones that are crumbling or have succumbed to subsidence.

I know that even the Internet and Websites don't last forever but I hope that we've preserved something; the images of the graves, information about the people buried there. It's all on the Website for future generations.

This has been a really worthwhile project and I'm extremely grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for all their support but I can't wait to get back to writing something frivolous, something purely fictional. I think I can feel one of my ditty-style poems coming on!

Describing a life in 500 words

By the end of August I hope to have completed most of the text for the Website that records the cataloguing of all the graves in our local cemetery. As soon as it’s done I will post up the url because I’m starting to feel quite proud of it, but there’s a lot of hard work still to be done.

The original project plan was to select one or two of the older stones and research the life ‘behind the stone’. In other words we’d write up a short biog in no more than 500 words. In practice it’s almost impossible to describe a life in 500 words especially as we are including contributions made to the local and wider community, family, interests, career, and the journey that led to Leicester – particularly interesting as a lot of the graves are for people who survived pogroms and holocaust atrocities.

It soon became obvious that the word count was the least of my problems. There were too many interesting stories to tell. My job was to decide which names to include in this ever-growing list, but by definition, this also meant that I had to decide which names to omit because we just can’t produce over 900 individual stories. The problem is that everybody has got a story to tell. We may not all have had a long and dangerous physical journey to arrive where we are today but many of us have had long emotional journeys. 

Side-headings

I’m giving the researched stories side-headings but that made me think about me. What side-headings would I give to my own story-so-far? 

Teacher That would have to be there.
Writer I couldn’t miss that one off.
Mother Goes without saying but I’ve said it anyway!
Animal Lover I’ve rarely been without a pet throughout my life.

But would I include the more painful periods of my life? 

Divorce It can’t be ignored.
Family Illness I couldn’t omit my husband’s stem cell transplant, my mother’s long and final illness, my daughter’s recent major operation, and then there’s my own struggle with agoraphobia as a teenager.
Not a Good Traveller That is very much a part of who I am but would it find it’s way into my story-so-far?

I suspect I would gloss over the negative, play up the positive and provide the reader with a ‘rose-tinted’ version of myself.

What side-headings would you give your life’s story-so-far?

You don't know what you don't know...

You don’t know what you don’t know until someone tells you and then you realise that for all those years you never knew that you didn't know. Let me explain...

The title proper of my Cemetery Project is Lives Behind the Stones. This was the original interest, before we started filling in the Heritage Lottery Fund application. As we wrote down our plans we realized that we needed first to catalogue the entire cemetery, set up a database with basic information about all the graves etc. We have just about done those things and so we’ve moved on to the most interesting part; finding out about the lives behind the stones.

Some of the deceased have family still living in the community and so, rather than researching files, folders and internet sites, I’ve been visiting, chatting and gathering their stories together. That was when I realized that I didn’t know what I didn’t know… but now I do and, yes, I am going to share.

Before the war there was a street in Leicester called Wharf Street. It was a busy shopping street full of character. One of the shops belonged to a man called Sam Jacobs, the grandfather of a friend who is also a member of my project team, so I went to speak to my friend's father to find out more about Sam Jacobs.

Sam Jacobs had a shop selling ladies fashion wear. We talked a bit about the shop and about Wharf Street and then my friend’s father became animated as he remembered that his father would get the clothes altered for the customers by two sisters who lived in London. These sisters also made dresses for his mother for special occasions. They must have been very good dressmakers, I thought. My friend’s father continued,

“I was the one who was sent down to London. I was only a lad. I had to take the dresses that needed altering and bring back all the work they’d done. Then when war broke out,” he said, “They came to Leicester to escape the bombs. They stayed here after the war was over and carried on working for my father. They were two sisters, little ladies, foreign, spoke Yiddish. Their names were…”

And then I stopped him because I knew what their names were and I was right. They were good. They were my Grandma and my Great Aunt. I talked about them here a few years ago, about their private dressmaking workshop and the way I used to ‘help’ by picking up pins but I never knew that they were doing business with someone from Leicester long before war broke out. I never knew why my family chose Leicester when they evacuated from London but now I do. They had business contacts here. It’s amazing what you find out when you’re least expecting it.

On the left is a photograph of my Grandma Bessie and on the right is a photograph of my Great Auntie Alice. These were the two sisters who worked for Sam Jacobs all those many many years ago.

Richard III and Fancy Headstones

A blog post of two halves:

Richard III

The other day I went along with Lynn, my publisher, to the printers, Soar Valley Press to do a final, final check of The Children’s Book of Richard III. I found myself discussing gutter marks and bleed lines. I’m learning so much! Here is a preparatory version of the complete outside cover; back, spine and front.

Everything was good with the proofs so now the printers are printing and binding while I sit back and sip tea… I wish! We have two launches to arrange; a media launch and a private launch. We have promotion to do; schools, retail outlets, anyone who will listen and I’m proposing to do school visits next term.

The school visits are going to be fascinating. The contents of the book are relevant to a number of areas of the curriculum, not only history, and we hope that this element proves to be an additional selling point. It’ll be strange standing up in front of children again, a bit like being a grandma. I can have lots of fun, drawing on skills that I honed when I was younger, and then I can hand them back at the end of the session.

Fancy Headstones

For those of you who are getting fed up of me rabbiting on about Richard III, I thought I’d tell you a bit more about the cemetery project. This week I’ve been working on an article about headstone embellishments. It was researched and written up by one of my team and I’m sorting out photos to illustrate it and preparing it for uploading onto the project website.

In modern Jewish cemeteries it’s customary to have plain headstones, usually with just a Star of David embellishment on them but in the early 1900s the designs in our cemetery were quite elaborate and very similar to the headstones in the non-Jewish part of the cemetery. A recurring theme among the earlier headstones is ivy adornments, ivy being a symbol of immortality. One of the most fascinating headstones has a cut down tree, representing a life cut short and probably a reference to the ‘tree of life’ mentioned in Genesis.

I seem to be learning something new every day at the moment. Steep learning curves are exciting but just a little tiring. Maybe I will sit back and sip tea after all.

Have you experienced any kind of learning curve recently?