Record Number: 6039

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Reading Experience:

Evidence:

'Bernard Kops, the son of an immigrant leather worker, had a special understanding of the transition from from autodidact culture to Bohemia to youth culture, because he experienced all three. He grew up in the ferment of the Jewish East End... read "The Tempest" at school, and cried over "The Forsaken Merman". At fifteen he became a cook at a hotel, where the staff gave him Karl Marx, Henry Miller and "Ten Days that Shook the World". A neighbor presented him with the poems of Rupert Brooke, and "Grantchester" so resonated with the Jewish slum boy that he went to the library to find another volume from the same publisher, Faber and Faber. Thus he stumbled upon T.S. Eliot. "This book changed my life", he remembered. "It struck me straight in the eye like a bolt of lightning... I had no preconceived ideas about poetry and read 'The Waste Land' and 'Prufrock' as if they were the most acceptable and common forms in existence. The poems spoke to me directly, for they were bound up with the wasteland of the East End, and the desolation and lonelines of people and landscape. Accidentally I had entered the mainstream of literature".'

Century:

1900-1945

Date:

unknown

Country:

England

Time

n/a

Place:

city: London, East End

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

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Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

Bernard Kops

Age:

Child (0-17)

Gender:

Male

Date of Birth:

1926

Socio-Economic Group:

Clerk / tradesman / artisan / smallholder

Occupation:

leatherworker's son, later cook

Religion:

Jewish

Country of Origin:

England

Country of Experience:

England

Listeners present if any:
e.g family, servants, friends

n/a

Additional Comments:

n/a

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Text Being Read:

Author:

Rupert Brooke

Title:

Grantchester

Genre:

Poetry

Form of Text:

Print: Book

Publication Details

n/a

Provenance

owned
given by neighbour

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Source Information:

Record ID:

6039

Source:

Print

Author:

Jonathan Rose

Editor:

n/a

Title:

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Place of Publication:

New Haven

Date of Publication:

2001

Vol:

n/a

Page:

458-9

Additional Comments:

n/a

Citation:

Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven, 2001), p. 458-9, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=6039, accessed: 22 November 2024

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Additional Comments:

See Bernard Kops, 'World is a Wedding', various page references.