At the Mile End of the rainbow

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John Gross has had a distinguished career as a literary and theatrical critic, author, anthologist and editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

A member of the Beefsteak, educated at public school and Oxford, he could be the product of a certain kind of stereotypical English background. In reality, his father was an immigrant from Eastern Europe who arrived in Britain just before the First World War and settled in the East End, where he spent the rest of his life.

Here, into an intensely Jewish world, John Gross was born in 1935. His father attended a Talmudic college before switching to medicine and becoming a GP in Mile End. John grew up knowing his Jewish liturgy and rituals, in a family that was Orthodox and strictly kosher, but tolerant towards those who weren't.

His memoir, covering the first 17 years of his life, is "the story of the two separate but entwined legacies of being English and being Jewish". Hence the book's title.

He cites two reasons for disqualifying himself as a "true East Ender": he was away from London during the war years and he was the son of a doctor who, at that time and in that predominantly working-class area, was a figure of special status. The history of the East End caught the young boy's imagination, and here Gross recalls the dying days of what is now a vanished world: the old woman in an apron selling bagels on a corner of Petticoat Lane, tailors' workshops, synagogues, the poultry market, Yiddish newspapers and theatre, Yiddish writers and poets ... he resurrects them all with affection but never with schmaltz.

With approaching adulthood his doubts about religion grew, giving way to "token observance and demisemi-belief". Yet he remains grateful to an upbringing that gave him a knowledge of the religion, history and traditions of the Jews. He has a respect for the "realm of religious experience", and believes that terms such as soul, spirit and holiness are not meaningless: "Nobody has yet written an Elegy in a Country Crematorium."

Jews, self-aware outsiders - and I speak as one - have more than their fair share of ambivalence and insecurities. Many remain Jewish culturally and emotionally although divorced from the faith of their fathers. Some, devoid of even a secular Jewish identity, have felt free to let the club membership lapse.

Gross is an intellectual who has managed to integrate the two worlds he grew up in, refusing to abandon either, emerging in the process as a man at ease with his twin pasts, balanced, tolerant, never casting himself in the role of victim, no chip on shoulder. He did not suffer anti-Semitism at school. His years in the East End were similarly unscarred. He had "a happy childhood".

The one place where he did encounter the ugly face of anti-Semitism was on the printed page. When his boyhood appetite for comics progressed to a serious passion for literature, he found the crude caricature of the avaricious Jew portrayed - almost routinely - in the works of many Victorian and Edwardian writers and, in more modern times, in the poetry of TS Eliot, one of his literary idols.

The Final Solution cast a darker shadow: "I grew up during a period in which at every moment the most terrible things were being done to other Jewish children." The thought of it, he says, sometimes makes him feel "numb", yet he refuses to view Jewish history solely in terms of persecution and martyrdom.

Some non-Jewish aspects of his boyhood yield flat passages where his pen fails to elevate the ordinary. Recollections of his wartime years with his mother and siblings in Egham, the Boy Scouts and school cadets, stamp collecting and enthusiasm for cricket remain mundane, yet succeed in presenting part of the other side of his bifurcated life.