London Jewish … and Working-Class? Social Mobility and Boundary-Crossing in Simon Blumenfeld and Alexander Baron

Abstract

This chapter examines multiple and shifting social class in the work of two London-Jewish novelists active between the 1930s and the 1960s. Simon Blumenfeld and Alexander Baron combined novel-writing with other activities during versatile literary careers. Here their writings are contextualised in twentieth-century British views of social class, and conceptualised via Lotman’s theory of dynamic border-crossing between semiospheres. The case studies are novels with multiple protagonists by each: Blumenfeld’s Phineas Kahn: Portrait of an Immigrant (1937), and Baron’s From the City, From the Plough (1948). A typology of the heterogeneous British working class needs to include writers such as Blumenfeld and Baron (and others with ‘Jewish East End’ backgrounds). Static in neither geography nor social position, they self-consciously don and remove the mask of working-class Briton.