London Jewish ... and Working-Class? Social Mobility and Boundary-Crossing in Simon Blumenfeld and Alexander Baron

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This chapter examines modifications, multiplicitiesand mobilities of social class in the work of two novelists associated withLondon and with London Jewish identities who were active between the 1930s andthe 1960s. These were the later decades of the period stretching back to the1880s in which British social history has been understood as dominated by a‘mature’ working class, when ‘about 75 per cent of the population weremanual-working wage-earners or people who depended on them’ (McKibbin 2000:vii). In the period between the 1930s and the 1960s it was widely expected thatnovels, alongside films, stage plays and documenting activities such as thework of Mass Observation, would indicate and provide guides to the way in whichsociety was changing. Also, for a young working-class writer then, to publishthe sort of novel that would be reviewed in ‘serious’ newspapers was in itself potentiallya class-changing act, an upward social move that was also an act  of bringing into the mainstream the sorts ofscenes and voices described in ‘working-class writing’.