Letter: Chaim Neslen obituaary

When Chaim Neslen chaired the Friends of Yiddish he always made a point of including my mother, who was developing dementia. She sang her childhood repertoire of Yiddish songs – eventually just two of them – to Chaim’s accompaniment on the guitar. He put an enormous amount of effort into producing folders of different songs for each meeting, in order to pass on the rich tradition of Yiddish song and literature that the Holocaust had failed to obliterate.When the east London gro