A DOUBLE THREAD - A CHILDHOOD IN MILE END AND BEYOND.

The 45th book read for the 100+ Reading Challenge and the 6th and final book in the What's In A Name Reading Challenge (A book with size in the title category.)

A DOUBLE THREAD - A CHILDHOOD IN MILE END AND BEYOND by JOHN GROSS.

John Gross is the son of a Jewish doctor who practised in Mile End at the time of the Second World War. His parents were children of immigrants, steeped in the language and traditions of a European past, yet outside the home he grew up in a very English world of schools and books. Looking back on his childhood, Gross reflects on this double inheritance. The richness of Yiddish words, the rituals of religion set against the daily life of the East End, where gangsters were heroes and patients turned up on the doorstep at all hours. Yet in the background, behind the wit and the colour, lie the shadows of anti-semitism and the Holocaust.

...... Outer back cover.

FIRST SENTENCE: "You're such a lobbes!" *

MEMORABLE MOMENT (Page 10): ..... one of her specialities was baking taigelach - small treacle-coated biscuits which no dentist could have approved of and few children would have been able to resist.

KEEP IT OR NOT?: Not.

Perhaps the shortest book review I have ever written or am likely to write, I can sum A Double Thread up by saying that it had the potential to be an interesting and informative read but, to me,  was let down by the style of writing - reading less like a memoir and more like a collection of school essays I found this dull and such hard going that my mind kept wondering. Never have a mere 190 pages seemed so long.

* Meaning something like 'rascal'.