Cockney Girl is a second-generation Jewish-British child’s eyewitness account of tumultuous East London and her eccentric family in England 1934-1950. The writer was then aged 5-20. This zeitgeist, before, during and after World War two, is based on memories and diaries and is, according to Elie Wiesel, ‘unmapped history’.
Both cockneys, friend Joycey Kennel and I, roamed East London most Saturdays while my operaphile mother set and permed ladies hair and my deaf, barber father, shaved dockers for pub nights and Christmas. One Christmas, Mummy dropped me, aged five, at a Dickensian orphanage for two years, I joyously returned to sooty East London witnessing the 600,000 Fascist - Anti-Fascist 1936 Cable Street Battle and was bridesmaid at aunt Mitzi’s posh wedding. In 1939, London children were hastily evacuated from expected Nazi bombing to country foster parents who ranged from kind to concupiscent. When I was 14, Mummy sent me to The White House Jewish refugee orphanage: Great Chesterford. Here, contemporaneously with Anne Frank, aged 15,
I began my diary, rejoined the tribe and, while a teenager, met Yank servicemen and wounded British soldiers. With peace, aged 16,
I returned home, a stranger, attended LSE and immigrated to America, but remained a Cockney Girl.
Gilda Moss Haber, PhD is a second-generation British Jewish-East End London cockney educated at Spitalfield Girls’ High School, London School of Economics, Columbia and NYU. She immigrated to America to pursue graduate studies en route to settling in Israel. Still en route, she frequently visits and speaks to audiences across America, England, Israel and other countries. She is a professor at Montgomery College in Maryland, and teaches Social Psychology and English. She has written on Proxemics, territoriality, Opera Houses internationally, Sumptuary Law, and has published short stories and fiction. She is now completing Diary of a Mad Hatter, a U.S. Health Care satire and a book of fiction set in Jerusalem and Washington D.C. She is a member of Mensa and Jewish, academic and author organisations.
Both cockneys, friend Joycey Kennel and I, roamed East London most Saturdays while my operaphile mother set and permed ladies hair and my deaf, barber father, shaved dockers for pub nights and Christmas. One Christmas, Mummy dropped me, aged five, at a Dickensian orphanage for two years, I joyously returned to sooty East London witnessing the 600,000 Fascist - Anti-Fascist 1936 Cable Street Battle and was bridesmaid at aunt Mitzi’s posh wedding. In 1939, London children were hastily evacuated from expected Nazi bombing to country foster parents who ranged from kind to concupiscent. When I was 14, Mummy sent me to The White House Jewish refugee orphanage: Great Chesterford. Here, contemporaneously with Anne Frank, aged 15,
I began my diary, rejoined the tribe and, while a teenager, met Yank servicemen and wounded British soldiers. With peace, aged 16,
I returned home, a stranger, attended LSE and immigrated to America, but remained a Cockney Girl.
Gilda Moss Haber, PhD is a second-generation British Jewish-East End London cockney educated at Spitalfield Girls’ High School, London School of Economics, Columbia and NYU. She immigrated to America to pursue graduate studies en route to settling in Israel. Still en route, she frequently visits and speaks to audiences across America, England, Israel and other countries. She is a professor at Montgomery College in Maryland, and teaches Social Psychology and English. She has written on Proxemics, territoriality, Opera Houses internationally, Sumptuary Law, and has published short stories and fiction. She is now completing Diary of a Mad Hatter, a U.S. Health Care satire and a book of fiction set in Jerusalem and Washington D.C. She is a member of Mensa and Jewish, academic and author organisations.
