Steven Berkoff marks The Battle of Cable Street

Steven Berkoff’s seminal film They Shall Not Pass: The Battle of Cable Street was screened as one of the events marking the 90th anniversary of that remarkable day in London, when the city’s Jews, supported by other communities, defied Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

One of the country’s most influential writers of recent decades, Berkoff’s 40-minute film is spoken entirely to camera, the monologue only occasionally interspersed with newsreel clips and cuttings. Originally conceived as a play in 2019, the text when delivered by the sublimely venomous Berkoff, comes alive on the big screen.

Berkoff’s powers of description are sensational, his words painting a rich tapestry of London’s Jewish East End, from the culinary delights of beigels, pickles and herrings, through to the sense of community that emerged from this impoverished section of the capital. It is against this backdrop that his words go on to describe the poisonous rise of Moseley and his fascists.

As the film progresses and Berkoff describes the joining of the Irish dockers to stand with the Jews against the fascists, the history lesson that he delivers is compelling.

Not only describing the events of Cable Street in October 1936, Berkoff goes further, using his script as a platform to showcase other famous occurrences of the Jewish people fighting back during the last century.

He spotlights Herschel Grynzspan’s Paris shooting of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, in November 1938, born out of Grynzspan’s despair at the already-growing persecution of Europe’s Jews under the Nazis. Tragically, the shooting was to give Hitler the excuse and the catalyst he needed to order the immediate destruction of all German synagogues, in the nationwide Kristallnacht pogrom. Berkoff’s narrative also speaks movingly about the Warsaw Ghetto, paying tribute to its heroic uprising of April 1943.

A post-show Q&A with Berkoff chaired by Brigit Grant offered a rare glimpse into the man behind the performance. Now 89 and still living in the East End, Berkoff spoke not only of his childhood and development of his career but of the value he sees in the depths of the Jewish experience and the enormous contribution his Jewishness has made to inspiring much of his work over the years. A remarkable man!