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John Gross was theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph and a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement. For a number of years he was also a staff writer for the New York Times, in New York. His other works include the classic study The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, and the widely acclaimed Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend and he edited several anthologies, among them The Oxford Book of Essays and The Oxford Book of English Prose. He died in 2011.
An elegy for the vanished world of East End Jewry, and, more unconventionally, for that of the literary essay - because, at its best, A Double Thread is less a book than an extended essay of the kind that has all but disappeared from English letters New Statesman Gross's nostalgia for the Jewish East End -- the Yiddish newspapers that his father read but he could not, the synagogue that, on a recent visit, he discovers is a Sikh temple -- is interwoven with a nuanced evocation of England in the era of rationing and bomb shelters New Yorker Intelligent, humane, highly civilized... the voice we hear not only holds our attention but also wins our affection and respect Los Angeles Times John Gross's ambition is to evoke the lost world of Anglo-Yiddishkeit, the matrix of modern Anglo-Jewishness. This he has done lucidly, tenderly, and with good humor. Gross has succeeded in writing an essential book, which, much more than merely loving and nostalgic, is analytically sophisticated with an unerring eye for telling detail -- Anthony Rudolph Jewish Chronicle John Gross has woven a tapestry of subtle contrasts and quiet charm. Relishing his 'mixed inheritance', he draws the best from each of his two worlds, doubly enriched. Reading his memoir, I recalled the words of the Jewish poet Paul Celan: 'I drink wine from two glasses -- Theo Richmond Evening Standard
