Beyond the high wall, Alderney Road Jewish Cemetery
……… And then he gave me the key to his house in Alderney Street…….And I should not omit, he added, to ring the bell at the gateway in the brick wall adjoining his house for behind the wall, although he had never been able to see it from any of his windows, there was a plot where lime trees and lilacs grew and in which members of the Ashkenazi community had been buried, including Rabbi David Tevele Schiff and Rabbi Samuel Falk, the Baal Shem of London. He had discovered the cemetery……only a few days before he left London when the gate in the wall stood open for the first time in all the years he had lived in Alderney Street. Inside, a very small, almost dwarf-like woman of perhaps seventy years old – the cemetery caretaker, as it turned out – was walking along the paths in her slippers. Beside her, almost as tall as she was, walked a Belgian sheepdog now grey with age who answered to the name of Billie and was very timid. In the bright spring light, shining through the newly opened leaves of the lime trees, you might have thought, Austerlitz told me, that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time…..”
A.L.S
- ‘Austerlitz’: W.G.Sebald. Translated from the German by Anthea Bell. Published by Penguin Books 2001 ISBN 0-14-029799-5
- In the book, both the cemetery and the road are called Alderney Street
- United Synagogue Burial Society.
- Susser Archive, Alderney Road Monumental Inscriptions