Jewish culture bloomed in the deprived north London of the 1930s. Jane Wright gets a taste of the tense times from a writer who was there

DESPITE being 79 and in poor health, novelist and former Jewish child refugee from Hitler, Eva Ibbotson, remembers Hampstead in the 1930s as if it were yesterday.
In the introduction two years ago to the re-published novel Manja, written by her mother Anna Gmeyner in 1938, when the family lived in Belsize Park, Mrs Ibbotson said: “Its streets abounded with Jewish doctors and lawyers and schoolchildren; with communists and social democrats, with actors and writers and bankers of no particular political persuasion who had spoken out about the Nazis.
“This band of exiles had been deprived in a few years of the certainty of centuries.
“The war had not yet come, but these refugees saw its necessity as the British could not yet do. They used their humour to keep the terror and desolation at bay but it was always there.”
The new edition of Manja, the story of a Jewish girl and four other German children during the rise of Nazism, was published by Nicola Beauman, who lives in Hampstead and whose company Persephone Books of Lamb’s Conduit Street, Bloomsbury, specialises in forgotten classics. Now Persephone is set to re-publish Mrs Ibbotson’s own 1993 novel The Morning Gift, which tells of émigré life in 1930s’ Hampstead and is currently out of print, although copies routinely change hands over the internet for £120 a piece.
Ms Beauman said: “I’ve been trying to get the rights to The Morning Gift for a while. Now we hope to re-publish it next June, as Eva Ibbotson is going to be 80 next year and it will also be 60 years since the end of the Second World War.”
Mrs Ibbotson calls Persephone “a publishing house dedicated to finding what was valuable and lost”.
She married outside the Jewish community and now lives in Tyneside, where she is still writing – mainly award-winning books for children, the latest of which, historical novel The Star of Kazan, was published last month by Macmillan.
After her family fled from their native Austria, they arrived in Belsize Park in 1935, when Eva was nine.
Her father was a noted biologist and her mother a left-wing writer who had worked with Bertholt Brecht in Berlin and travelled to Russia to make a film with the legendary director of Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, although their joint project hit the rocks when he fell out of favour with Stalin.
Eva Ibbotson says now of her Belsize Park childhood: “I remember our nice, quiet flat in Belsize Park Gardens, where we moved from Belsize Grove. My mother had been in England for about a year and I recall her religiously writing Manja.”
She continues: “In The Morning Gift I described how a lot of sad refugees would be constantly walking up and down Haverstock Hill to Hampstead Town Hall, looking for their relatives and greeting each other with ‘Good morning, Herr Doktor’.
“I learned stiff upper lip English in Belsize Library in Antrim Road, where I read all the schoolgirl stories of Angela Brazil.
“And the Willow Café in The Morning Gift was actually Cosmo’s in Finchley Road, which was colonised by the refugees. The artist Felix Topolski did the murals and it served central European food and smelled of red cabbage.”
Mrs Ibbotson adds: “I think the Jews arrived in Hampstead following one or two seminal families. Kilburn was more artisan and Golders Green more expensive, but they saw Hampstead as an upmarket place for intellectuals.
“And they collected mushrooms on Hampstead Heath as if it were the Vienna Woods, which amazed the locals, who all thought the mushrooms were terribly dangerous.
“An English butcher on Haverstock Hill had to adapt to a lot of old ladies suddenly looking for Wiener schnitzel.
“It’s not at all the same as veal steak, but the butcher did his best, beating the steak constantly to get it thinner and thinner. The local shops were also slowly colonised by pickles and gherkins.”
According to the writer today, young Eva wasn’t homesick in Hampstead.
She explains, like other Jewish refugees, she was simply “very glad” to get away from Hitler. But he cast a long shadow.
Mrs Ibbotson recalls: “My memories of the period are not entirely happy. My mother’s sister committed suicide by jumping out of a second floor window, after her fiancé broke off their engagement when he discovered she was Jewish.”
By the same token, Eva’s mother published Manja under the pseudonym Anna Reiner, to protect her own mother, who was still in Austria.
Mrs Ibbotson says: “My ancestors were rearranged so that my grandmother emerged as only a quarter Jewish and was able to live unmolested in Vienna throughout the war.”
Eva lived in Belsize Park for five years, until the war broke out and she moved with Anna and her new husband to the Berkshire countryside. She says: “The refugees were almost sorry about Britain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler, because they knew him and what he was up to.
“But when war broke a lot of poor refugees who had already fled the Nazis were then scooped up off the streets of London as enemy aliens and taken off to be interned on the Isle of Man.”
After she left, Mrs Ibbotson herself didn’t set foot in Belsize Park for decades. She considered it “shabby” in the 1930s. “Now I’m amazed how elegant it’s become.”