The Frummer in the Attic: Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair's Rodinsky's Room and Jewish Memory

David frummer in attic in Rodinsky's Room, was an Orthodox Jew who lived above synagogue in Princelet Street, in old Jewish East End of London. (1) In late 1960s he disappeared but his absence went unnoticed for more than decade. In fact, Rodinsky's room was locked and remained untouched until it was opened in 1980s. Everything appeared to be as had left it: piles of esoteric books, calendar dated January 1963, an eccentrically annotated London A-Z, half-eaten bowl of porridge, imprint of his head left on pillow, and rumors of mummified cat found sleeping in his bed. In Rodinsky's Room (1999), and Iain Sinclair ask questions about David Rodinsky's enigmatic life and strange disappearance, and they scrutinize notions of memory, myth, and self-definition for contemporary British Jews. The text is coauthored, but is primarily that of Lichtenstein, young British artist who investigates mysterious disappearance of David in order to explore her own Jewish history and identity. In so doing she takes on role of detective, archivist, and questing heroine. Lichtenstein's quest to unravel mystery at heart of Rodinsky's life and disappearance is sometimes frustrating, often painful, and ultimately anticlimactic. At points in narrative her absorption into appears to be extreme and self-destructive. Nevertheless, it is Lichtenstein's intense identification that generates an intriguing tension within text. This tension and excesses that text both produces and represses are focus of discussion. At centre of Rodinsky's Room is David character who is only ever glimpsed in reconstructed remnants of his life. He is an absent presence whose embodies an ambivalent identification what Jack Kugelmass has termed ethnic memory culture. (2) This complex tension between remembering and forgetting is key to text's exploration of British Jewish identity at close of twentieth century. For Iain Sinclair, mysterious figure of typifies ambiguity. Rodinsky, he writes, was a shape whose only definition was its shapelessness (3-4). He was man that nobody seems to have really known. There are no photos of him and no single or clear version of who he was. As Sinclair suggests, has been defined in some ways by this essential unknown quality. He could have been anything: Meshuganer, cabbalist, spook. Inspirer of fictions. Retro-golem (6). Most importantly, Rodinsky was an empty space (63). Even Sinclair acknowledges tendency toward exploitive emptiness at heart of his own and others' metaphorization of Rodinsky's life. And he announces that the true biography, its weight and significance, was waiting for true biographer, Lichtenstein (86). If, as Sinclair asserts from outset, Rachel is story in Rodinsky's Room, then how do stories of vanished eccentric and young artist meet? What binds these figures together? Lichtenstein's can be described in David Roskies's terms as a dialectic of loss and retrieval. Roskies argues that a memory-site ... is fashioned from prior awareness of loss. (3) Lichtenstein's journey in Rodinsky's Room is predicated on such dialectic. Her begins by her connecting to past through memories of her Polish Jewish grandparents. presents her grandfather's death when she was seventeen as profound moment of rupture and dislocation. She describes sense of urgency and panic that this loss generated, because with him was buried key to heritage (19), and in response she recounts an immediate concern reconnecting my past and present (19). She starts by reclaiming her name from anglicized Laurence that her father had adopted and reverting to Jewish family name, Lichtenstein. …

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