In The Teeth of Beasts, Sam Velludo regularly visits an East End location to meet the old gangster Rotti Michaels. The rendezvous place is described in the book:
The 'caff' consisted of a single nicotine-stained room at the entrance to a cabinet-maker’s yard behind the stalls and boxes of Wentworth Street. The window looking onto the road appeared to be smeared with palmfuls of fat. Beneath the flaking yellow ceiling within, stood two lino-topped tables decorated with cigarette burns. A tailor’s workshop audibly hummed away on the first floor. In the attic, a nightshift cutter slept by day, and Harry Velivovsky, proprietor of The Atlantic Ocean Café, by night.
'The Atlantic' wasn't designed to resemble a particular real-life place. Harry Velivosky's back-street greasy spoon is just supposed to be Rotti's home turf, where Rotti has Sam where he wants him. Probably in his wildest dreams, Rotti didn't imagine that Sam would embrace the place; it is cheap, dirty and alien. Perhaps Rotti grows to understand Sam better as time goes on. But regardless of subconscious motivation, for Sam The Atlantic is somewhere he can safely pay up his blackmail money outside the view of his family and his Hampstead and Bayswater friends.
Admittedly, when writing about The Atlantic I did slightly have in mind 'The Warsaw Hotel' at 32 Osborn Street, round the corner from Wentworth Street. This was the (real life) kind of place that gets called 'an establishment' in the papers, the same way that men whom everyone knows are crooks and extortionists, are called 'local businessmen'. We all know the sort. Probably some of our ancestors were these people! Maybe you are, I don't know.
I have no pictures of The Warsaw Hotel, nor do I know its date of foundation or disappearance. The building itself has gone, possibly because of the bomb and parachute mine which the London Bomb Census indicate fell on Osborn Street at the peak of the Blitz (1940-41). All I have is vague proof that it was converted into a simcha hall by 1938...
I have no pictures of The Warsaw Hotel, nor do I know its date of foundation or disappearance. The building itself has gone, possibly because of the bomb and parachute mine which the London Bomb Census indicate fell on Osborn Street at the peak of the Blitz (1940-41). All I have is vague proof that it was converted into a simcha hall by 1938...
Perhaps someone remembers The Central Ballrooms? Or even Snevlar selling up to Folman?
For certain though, The Warsaw seems to have been a less savoury 'establishment' than The Atlantic. Rachel Lichtenstein, East End historian, states in her book 'On Brick Lane' that The Warsaw Hotel (or Restaurant) existed at 32 Osborn Street at least until the 1930s. She quotes an old East-Ender who says so. The dining place was known, according to Lichtenstein's old-timer, as "Snelvar's" and according to Lichtenstein the place was kosher. I can't find proof of kashrus. Nor can I find a Snevlar in The Jewish Chronicle archives, nor anyone called Snevlar, Shnevlar or even Sniveller, in The London Gazette.
The Spectator did mention The Warsaw, albeit not by name, in 1922, reviewing a murder trial from eleven years before:
A Jew named Leon Beron had been found murdered in the bushes on the loneliest part of Clapham Common. It was said that his face bore marks resembling large S'a cut into the flesh with a sharp knife. These S's may have been signs that Beron had been removed because he was a spy, a man who had acted treacherously towards some secret foreign fraternity in London. The witnesses who crowded the court nearly all belonged to the East End and revealed such exotic ways of life and ways of thinking that the honest British jury must have been bewildered... Leon Beron himself had an income of about 10s. a week, derived from house property. He allowed himself Is. 3d. a day for living expenses, and instead of trying to earn more he used to spend all his time in a Kosher Jewish eating-house which he used as a kind of club. Some of the customers of the eating-house used to stay there daily from breakfast till midnight.
That's the kind of place The Warsaw was before The Great War; it doesn't sound like any kosher place I've ever been to. After all, why would such men as Beron be worried about rabbinical supervision? As Lichtenstein's old-timer says: "...that place called the Warsaw Hotel or Snelvar's Restaurant [was] where all the Jewish gangsters used to hang out and a lot of communists went there." No frummes mentioned!
Arthur Harding, a gangster who flourished either side of The Great War, wrote on the Russian anarchists who murdered London policemen in what became known as The Sidney Street Siege:
"We young men who were always to be found in Brick Lane knew all these aliens and their girl friends better than the police. For one thing, we knew they were not Jews. We were told they were on the run from the Russian secret police; that fact alone gained them our sympathy... In Sclater Street, Brick Lane, there was a Jewish restaurant [nb: not 'kosher'!] which they [the anarchists] frequently used. This restaurant was near Clarks coffee shop where I and my friends would meet, so we had many opportunities of becoming acquainted with them. Sometimes they dined at "The Warsaw" restaurant in Osborne [sic] Street, which was a continuation of Brick Lane... During these early years of the century, thousands of these refugees came to London from Russia and Poland, most of them Yiddish. These Bessarabians mixed with the newcomers using the same kosher restaurants and spielers in the Commercial Road and Stepney area. By these means they avoided suspicion."
Arthur Harding, a gangster who flourished either side of The Great War, wrote on the Russian anarchists who murdered London policemen in what became known as The Sidney Street Siege:
"We young men who were always to be found in Brick Lane knew all these aliens and their girl friends better than the police. For one thing, we knew they were not Jews. We were told they were on the run from the Russian secret police; that fact alone gained them our sympathy... In Sclater Street, Brick Lane, there was a Jewish restaurant [nb: not 'kosher'!] which they [the anarchists] frequently used. This restaurant was near Clarks coffee shop where I and my friends would meet, so we had many opportunities of becoming acquainted with them. Sometimes they dined at "The Warsaw" restaurant in Osborne [sic] Street, which was a continuation of Brick Lane... During these early years of the century, thousands of these refugees came to London from Russia and Poland, most of them Yiddish. These Bessarabians mixed with the newcomers using the same kosher restaurants and spielers in the Commercial Road and Stepney area. By these means they avoided suspicion."
Probably Snevlar's was a colloquially Jewish restaurant, but no more under the supervision of the Chief Rabbi, or the Federation, than 'The Atlantic Ocean' is in The Teeth of Beasts. Snevlar himself, if a man he was, has proved elusive.
'Elusive' is also how I would describe Harry Velivovsky, proprietor of The Atlantic. He doesn't have much to say in the book I've written which features him, but I know quite a lot about him which I didn't put in... I like to think that Harry's only brush with officialdom was registration with the Russian army, way back in the past - and probably the first British census he would have been caught by, would be 1951, if he were still alive and hadn't moved to Florida! My feeling is that Harry learned to fight in the Russo-Japanese War, and that he had some fairly un-Christmassy experiences.
'Elusive' is also how I would describe Harry Velivovsky, proprietor of The Atlantic. He doesn't have much to say in the book I've written which features him, but I know quite a lot about him which I didn't put in... I like to think that Harry's only brush with officialdom was registration with the Russian army, way back in the past - and probably the first British census he would have been caught by, would be 1951, if he were still alive and hadn't moved to Florida! My feeling is that Harry learned to fight in the Russo-Japanese War, and that he had some fairly un-Christmassy experiences.
So, a trek across Europe or a boat to California, I don't know, but Harry is a hard nut. And a lot of people, I think, died at his hands before he got to Wentworth Street. If he hadn't killed, he wouldn't be running a greasy spoon, there is that compensation... There's a lot of stories he could tell, but doesn't. Perhaps Harry's being 'alive against the odds' appeals to Sam's sense of romance. It can't be Sam's love of modernity which draws him to The Atlantic, certainly!
To me, Sam's instinct for the slightly dangerous, inscrutable 'East', even when manifested in a Wentworth Street cafe, seems to be the same instinct which led me to make The Atlantic Ocean up in the first place. Let's not kid ourselves that we're any more sophisticated, or less naive.
To me, Sam's instinct for the slightly dangerous, inscrutable 'East', even when manifested in a Wentworth Street cafe, seems to be the same instinct which led me to make The Atlantic Ocean up in the first place. Let's not kid ourselves that we're any more sophisticated, or less naive.