Meretz UK Home of British Meretz

Meretz UK invites you to hear David Merron introduce his much praised memoir Goodbye East End: An Evacuee’s Story (Corgi, Penguin, 2015). Merron vividly describes the close-knit Jewish community of Whitechapel, the experience of dodging bombs in 1939 and V2 rockets in 1944 – and his enforced departure as an eight-year-old 77 years ago to another England altogether!

• Sunday, 18 September: Reading and brief talk followed by questions from the floor, and then refreshments. Donations: £5

Learn more about David here. On 8 September he will be subject of an Imperial War Museum’s Meet the Author event.

Regular visitors, please not the earlier than usual start of 4.30pm.

A powerful genre has emerged: novels and dramas about child evacuees during the Second World War. They are all moving accounts of displacement and culture-clash, describing how children from the East End, often Jewish, came to terms with being moved to very different parts of Britain, placed with uncomprehending, sometimes even unwelcoming families. …Best of all [in Merron’s book] are the small details that could pass unnoticed: the Fifty Shillings Tailors “where Dad bought his suit” (note it is “suit” not suits); old Max’s fish-and-chip shop in the East End, “where we used to buy a ha’porth of chips and a penny gherkin” (not fish- too expensive); and when David sees his name on the list in the village hall, waiting to see who he has been placed with, he notices “in a small square at the side, the capital letter ‘J’. I supposed that meant ‘Jewish’.”

– JC review of Goodbye East End