My father, Chaim Neslen, who has died aged 79, was a leading Yiddish writer, teacher and musician. He ran the Friends of Yiddish literary circle in Toynbee Hall, in Whitechapel, east London, for more than a decade and cut a dash on the capital’s Yiddish music scene, regularly performing from a wide repertoire of folk songs on his guitar.
“I’m only giving you back what was already yours,” he would tell concertgoers. Later in life, he managed the Vi and John Rubens Yiddish club in Redbridge.
Chaim also taught Yiddish at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and, together with his friend Barry Davis, co-wrote the first Teach Yourself Yiddish self-access book. Experts in a rarely heard language, Chaim and Barry provided advice to film-makers, and background Yiddish voices for films including Schindler’s List (1994).
Chaim’s father, Norman, a tailor and union activist with Bundist (Jewish socialist) beliefs, had escaped from Poland to Toronto in the 1930s. His mother, Bertha (nee Dzaldowski), a shop worker, arrived in Canada via Denmark. Chaim was born and brought up in Toronto and studied at the University of Toronto. In the 60s, though, he migrated to London and dedicated his life to keeping alive memories of the farshvundene velt (vanished world) of Yiddish language, culture and values that had shaped and sustained him.
Norman, who lost his own father and two sisters in the Holocaust, had been active in smuggling survivors out of Europe in the 40s. While still a child, Chaim had helped other traumatised children from the camps to adapt to new surroundings. It imbued him with a sense of responsibility, selflessness and caring for others, particularly the vulnerable.
In the late 70s, he opened the first shop in London selling aids to people with disabilities. He went on to develop innovative products and services for visually impaired people at the Royal National Institute for the Blind, retiring around 10 years ago.
Chaim was raised in the values of the Bund, which fired his involvement in the Jewish Socialists’ Group, and in campaigns against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.
The group’s concept of doikayt (“hereness”) was central to Chaim’s beliefs, and to those of his wife, Diana (nee Jacob), whom he married in 1966. Its rejection of communal currents such as Zionism also inspired younger activists in groups such as Jewdas, at whose seminars he sometimes taught. They in turn paid tribute to him at a passover seder attended by Jeremy Corbyn.
Chaim is survived by Diana, his children, Esther and me, and four grandchildren, Asher, Sophie, Charlotte and Dorothy.
