Vivi Lachs

Vivi Lachs is a historian of London’s Jewish East End, a Yiddishist and performer. Her book Whitechapel Noise (Wayne State University Press, 2018) draws new historical detail from Yiddish poetry and music-hall song of the Jewish East End. London Yiddishtown (Wayne State University Press, 2021) is her translation of selected Yiddish East End stories from the 1930s and 1940s, offering a new history of London’s Yiddish writers of that period. She has also published articles about the Jewish socialist leader Morris Winchevsky. She gives both academic and public talks.

Vivi performs and records with the bands Klezmer Klub and Katsha’nes, co-runs the Yiddish Open Mic Cafe, and the Great Yiddish Parade – a marching band bringing Yiddish songs of protest back onto London's streets. She is vice-chair of the Yiddish Cafe Trust and is co-organising a Yiddish-speaking weekend in June 2022. She also leads East End tours.

For "Making and Re-making the Jewish East End", Vivi is researching fiction published in the London Yiddish press from 1884–1954, including novels and novellas, stories, sketches, scenes and feuilletons. She is translating a selection of these texts for an anthology of British Yiddish fiction. She is also researching local Yiddish plays and theatre sketches.