Rachel Lichtenstein & Iain Sinclair: Rodinsky's Whitechapel

2 - 30 June 1999
Whitechapel, London E1

Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein's guided walks through London's East End revealed the roles history and place have played in creating the bizarre and compelling mythology of the Jewish recluse named David Rodinsky.

In 1969, he mysteriously disappeared from his attic room above the synagogue in Princelet Street, in the heart of the old Jewish East End. A decade later his room was reopened and its mess of papers, notebooks, writings in several languages and cabalistic diagrams began to capture the imagination of local people. Eventually, Rodinsky and his chambers came to assume mythical proportions.

As the granddaughter of Polish immigrants who settled in Princelet Street in the 1930s, writer and artist Rachel Lichtenstein was immediately intrigued when, in 1990, she first heard of the synagogue. She secured a residency in the building and took over Rodinsky's role as self-appointed caretaker. She began to catalogue the objects left in his room, and she also started searching for people who had known him. Granta Books commissioned her to collaborate on a book about her findings with Iain Sinclair. It was titled Rodinsky's Room.

Working on this publication and walking the streets of Whitechapel, Lichtenstein built up a wealth of information about the area, and gradually the story of David Rodinsky began to interweave with her own history, her knowledge of this neighbourhood they had both inhabited. With Artangel, Sinclair and Lichtenstein wrote an artist's guidebook Rodinsky's Whitechapel which takes the reader on a walking tour, past sites and buildings that played an important role not only in Rodinsky's life, but also in Lichtenstein's own. The walk also highlights the last remnants of many important locations of the once vibrant, but now quickly vanishing Jewish East End.

Sinclair also took the Geographer's A to Z Atlas of London and Suburbs, an item found by Lichtenstein in Rodinsky's attic, and created walks interpreted from the markings and embellishments within the guide. These trails were filmed and relayed on strategically placed video monitors in and around Whitechapel forming the backdrop to a series of events devised by Sinclair throughout June 1999.

The final stop on Lichtenstein's walk is a stonemason on Osborn Street, A.Elfes Ltd. This is where a headstone was carved for the previously unmarked grave of David Rodinsky. Set and consecrated later in 1999, the stone was an unusual curiosity: the only permanent work ever commissioned by Artangel.

Rodinsky’s Whitechapel was an Artangel commission and part of INNERcity, a series exploring the interface of the city and the word in its many forms. INNERcity encouraged writers and artists to excavate a range of urban environments and to contemplate the chnaging nature of the city and the counterpoint between narrative and place, between language and location. Produced with assistance from the National Lottery through the A4E scheme administered by the Arts Council of England, and the support of Harry Handelsman.

This project was supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels

Funders and Collaborators