'A Deconstructed Shrine': Locating Absence and Relocating Identity In

Stephan Laqué ‘A deconstructed shrine’: Locating Absence and Relocating Identity in Rodinsky’s Room (2000) This essay considers the post-Freudian concept of the crypt as a spatial frame for the construction of hybrid identities. It traces the topography of the crypt in the Museum of Immigration and Diversity at 19 Princelet Street and in Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein’s Rodinsky’s Room, which is based on the disappearance of David Rodinsky from his room above the synagogue at 19 Princelet Street. While Lichtenstein seeks to uncover and document the history of Rodinsky in order to construct a Jewish identity for herself, Sinclair’s narrative respects the elusive nature of Rodinsky and ensures the room remains ‘empty’ and unfixed. Even as it elicits widely heterogeneous readings and approaches, the crypt emerges as a structure which resists appropriation and preserves the alterity of the other within the self, a structure which is pertinent not only to buildings and texts, but also to societies and cultures. 1. A Museum of Immigration and Diversity? The backdrop for this essay is Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End. For centuries immigrants on their way from the docks of London into the centre of the city have settled in this area. In the late 17th century, Huguenots fleeing religious persecution at the hands of Louis XIV came. King Charles II offered sanctuary to the French protestants and Spitalfields came to be known as ‘Petty France’. During the 18th century, Catholics from Ireland arrived and were followed in the latter half of the 19th century by Jewish immigrants from all parts of Eastern Europe driven by pogroms in their home countries. The area around Brick Lane and Wentworth Street changed into ‘Little Jerusalem’ and in 1900, 95 per cent of the population in that part of Whitechapel was Jewish. During the 20th century, people from further afield arrived – first from the Carribean, then from Bangladesh and most recently from Somalia. The face of Spitalfields, or ‘Banglatown’ as it is now often called, changed again to accomodate the newcomers as buildings that had been Huguenot weavers’ shops and kosher butchers were turned into curry houses. In Spitalfields, wave upon wave of immigrants has found both an accessible community and affordable housing – although now that the nouveau riche of the capital along with artists like Gilbert and George have discovered the charm of the area, rents are soaring. When getting off the tube at Liverpool Street Station, one is greeted by the shiny new facade of the redeveloped western end of old Spitalfields Market. Continuing east down Fournier Street, the smells and bustle of Brick Lane 370 Stephan Laqué begin to be felt. Turning left into a small sidestreet off Brick Lane, the atmosphere changes drastically as one steps into the quiet of Princelet Street. An uninterrupted row of elegant Georgian houses on either side of the road offers a perfect film-set for adaptations of Charles Dickens novels. Right in the middle of this terrace, No. 19 – no more conspicuous than the dark facades surrounding it – is home to, or rather represents the ‘London Museum for Immigration and Diversity’; the first museum of its kind in Britain. In the 1980s the house was acquired by a charity which has been trying to preserve the fragile building exactly as it stands and has opened it as a museum to general acclaim – a museum of rooms and spaces without display cabinets and polished exhibits. How can this largely empty place, which refuses to display or expose anything, function as a museum? And why, I venture to ask, is this unspectacular Georgian house perceived as a special place, as a place that can stand for and spark meditation on immigration and diversity? I want to argue that 19 Princelet Street is indeed special: the house is special because of its unique topography, a topography which captures the structure governing processes of cultural contact, integration and exchange. 2. A Haunted Place Spitalfields is an obvious choice for a museum dedicated to immigration and ethnic variety. It is what Patrick Wright has termed ‘a classic inner-city “zone of transition”’.1 It is an unusually rich and fascinating palimpsest of diverse ethnic groups that have left their mark on British culture. But what is so special about the delapidated Grade II listed house at No.19 Princelet Street? In 1719, the house was first occupied by the family of an affluent Huguenot master silk weaver2 and saw major restructuring in 1869, when a synagogue was attached to it in the space behind the house where originally a garden had been. Though various groups of immigrants have shaped the house and left their traces, 19 Princelet Street is a relatively modest example of cultural layering when compared to other buildings in the area. A far more striking example would be the building at the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, which was originally built as L’Èglise Neuve by Huguenots in the 18th century and was later turned first into a Methodist chapel, then into a Synagogue and most recently into the Jamme Masjid mosque. Houses which bear witness to the complex multicultural heritage of immigrants abound in the area, but the fascination of 19 Princelet Street lies elsewhere. I want to 1 Patrick Wright, ‘Rodinsky’s Place’, London Review of Books, 29 October 1987, 3-5 (p.3). 2 On French immigration in Spitalfields see Chris Thomas, Life and Death in London’s East End: 2000 Years at Spitalfields (London: Museum of London, 2004), pp.91-93. .

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