Singing in Yiddish about London : 1880-1940 is the story of six Yiddish songs that tell of mainly East End people and places and experiences; these snippets of history give insights into what was happening in London at the time. They tell of poverty and work, of street life and of love. They tell of characters; an old fiddler, a bagel seller, a prostitute. They tell of places, the Pavilion Theatre, Victoria Park, Morgan Street. They sparkle with life, whether deeply moving or comic. This article explores Jewish history through the songs, as well as exploring the history of the songs themselves. The songs were collected in Denmark, Canada, Germany, Liverpool and London. The article describes some of the people who sung them, who collected them and who wrote them. There is a lot unknown about the songs and why they were written, so there is much to conjecture by London Yiddishists and folk collectors. These answers throw more light onto the politics and issues of the day. Today these songs are being performed by Vivi Lachs and Klezmer Klub, a London-based band who are seeking to revive them and imbue in them a sense of their meaning for today Tsu undzere shtetlekh men vet dikh Vaytshepl tsurekhenen [Amongst our stetls, Whitechapel will be counted] Avrom-Nokhem Stencl from the poem 'Vaytshepl' This is the story of six Yiddish songs about London. It is a story of the songs, the singers, the collectors and the thousands of Jews living in East London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who inspired and populated these songs. The songs evoke the history and experience of ordinary folk. While the songs are about the past, versions of these experiences exist in London today among different cultural groups. In this way, although the songs are in Yiddish, they are about human experience. I am not a historian. I am a London-based scouser, some of whose family were immigrants from Poland to London in the 1900s. I have been a teacher in Hackney schools for over 20 years. I am a singer, a Yiddish student and a socialist. These songs speak to me. Five of them were probably written between 1890 and 1920 and one in around 1940. The songs tell the social history better than I can, but here is a brief introduction. * Vivi Lachs, born in Liverpool, has Polish ancestry via the East End. A Hackney teacher for 24 years, educational writer, Yiddish student and singer. European Judaism Volume 42, Number 2, Autumn 2009: 94-1 06 doi: 1 0.3 1 67/ej. 2009.4202 1 0 ISSN 0014-3006 (Print), ISSN 1752-2323 (Online) This content downloaded from 157.55.39.124 on Wed, 20 Jul 2016 06:06:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms