This is the story of an investigation into a locked room mystery,
of a vanishing Jew, of Lichtenstein's immigration back through time
and her search of the shadows of the ghetto. What exactly is she
seeking? Perhaps you believe in a sense of place - can the walls
themselves be somehow imprinted by the events that took place
there? If you find this idea difficult to imagine, then this book
might just change your mind. David Rodinsky's attic room at the top
of 19 Princelet Street is said to have an extraordinary and
mysterious atmosphere. The famous Gralton photograph of the
interior shows a large wardrobe spilling old clothes outwards while
at the same time collapsing the space of the room into its mirror.
The wardrobe is an entry to a hidden place, more mad than Alice's
looking-glass. Lichtenstein spent days in the tiny room from which
Rodinsky vanished, constructing an archaeology of the squalor that
fleshes out the myth of the impoverished scholar driven beyond his
limits in equal parts by hunger and the pursuit of arcane
knowledge. Her project is a cultural one, a literal embalming of
the arcana into art objects that help to stabilize the troublesome
past of Spitalfields. Spitalfields is a mythic territory, and
Sinclair is an obsessive cartographer. His dialogue with
Lichtenstein is founded on the names of streets bound by historical
webs of poverty and privations, echoing the madness and malignancy
of this century's Jewish history. The presence of the past is as
hard to see as smoke at dusk, yet Rodinsky is still here. Present,
not just in the account of Lichtenstein and Sinclair, but between
the words, a certain tempo, a measure of obsessive and arcane
pursuits. (Kirkus UK)
Rodinsky's world was that of the East European Jewry, cabbalistic
speculation, an obsession with language as code and terrible loss.
He touched the imagination of artist Rachel Lichtenstein, whose
grandparents had left Poland in the 1930s. This text weaves
together Lichtenstein's quest for Rodinsky - which took her to
Poland, to Israel and around Jewish London - with Iain Sinclair's
meditations on her journey into her own past and on the Whitechapel
he has reinvented in his own writing. Rodinsky's Room is a
testament to a world that has all but vanished, a homage to a
unique culture and way of life.
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