Bloomsday

My dad wasn't one for sentimental Jewishery and he passed almost his entire life avoiding any contact with manifestaions of the culture he had so specifically left behind. It wasn't that he was in any way ashamed or embarassed by his roots, he wasn't. And, despite being born before the holocaust and being old enough to watch it transpire, he didn't seem to have any fear of exposing his jewishness. He did work for his entire career in a Fleet Street that wasn't particularly friendly to jews and where it was worth keeping your head down, but then most of his colleagues were also jewish, so it was hardly a secret. I think he was just uninterested in most facets of his culture, no doubt regarding them as prosaic and mundane. He would call on a regular basis for gefilte fish from my mother. She swore she had made it once for him and he'd not even bothered to eat it.
He took me to Blooms on the Whitechapel Road, I remember it well, a pilgrimage to the heart of jewish dining. It must have been sometime in the late eighties I would guess, I don't have any real memory of when or why, how we came to be in the east end at the same time. He would have been retired by then with no reason to travel to London, whereas I had moved to the city and was making my way through art college. Come, let's eat at Blooms, he would have said. It's a great Jewish institution. He would have liked the idea of it more than the reality. When I was younger and I visited him at his office, he would offer to take me for any lunch I wanted, but we invariably ended up at Mr Natural, a faux Californian burger joint under the now long dismantled Holborn Viaduct at the bottom of Fleet Street.
Blooms has been gone for fourteen years now. I remember when it closed down: I had a fancy for a while to somehow steal the huge neon sign that stood above the entrance canopy. Of course I didn't in much the same way that I didn't follow through on any of the grandiose plans that I no doubt outlined to my dad during our lunch that day. I can't remember any of it, just that it was a dull and lugubrious place and the waiters were slow ('the rudest in London', it was said). My dad talked about the food he remembered. He never really talked about his youth and he didn't explain how he came to leave all that behind.
Now the premises are a Burger King, non kosher I presume, and the last of jewish Brick Lane is rapidly being expunged. The jews left a long time ago but buildings and businesses take longer to remove.