From Berlin to Finchleystrasse: the Jews who redefined the Finchley Road

Walking today along the dusty dual carriageway – replete with its McDonald’s, KFC and slot machine casino – it is a challenge to feel much affection towards Finchley Road. Yet my heartstrings still manage to be tugged every time I amble down the A41.

For I am transported back to the middle of the last century, when the stretch north of Swiss Cottage was a tree-lined boulevard of dreams. This is where a vanished world was reborn in the shadow of a cataclysm on the continent.

By 1940, there were about 14,000 mostly Jewish exiles in the area. So many German speakers, in fact, that wartime bus conductors would call out “Finchleystrasse – passports please!” as they drew up. The department store John Barnes became known as Johann Barnes and one refugee tells me of the story that went around of passengers alighting at Swiss Cottage hearing the cry: “This is the little Schweizer Haus, where Deutsche Juden steigen aus.”

Much has been written about the VIPs who fled to this patch – psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud, Nobel-winning writer Elias Canetti, artist Oskar Kokoschka – but far less about the ordinary people whose cafes, restaurants, bookshops, cabarets, songs, jokes and traditions were all given a second chance along a bustling foreign highway. Finchleystrasse was the street that saved a world.

It was also the street that saved my family. My grandmother, Ilse Manasse, arrived from Berlin in March 1939, yet to meet my grandfather, Suesskind (Sigi) Balsam, who made it to Britain a week before war broke out and the exits were sealed. He had been beaten up by the Gestapo and told one evening: “You bloody Jew will be shot the next day at ten o’clock in the morning.”

Ilse and Sigi Balsam[Missing Credit]

The district around Hampstead had a small German-Jewish presence dating back to the 18th century. In the 20th, the disappearance of families with large staffs made way for imposing houses to be broken up into affordable flats and bedsits. In turn, Britain’s shortage of cooks and maids meant many Jews (whose only experience of cleaning was instructing their own servants) could get visas as “domestics”. The faded grandeur of the architecture might also have appealed, reminding arrivals of their old homes in Vienna or Frankfurt.

My grandparents all died before I was born. But from a folder of papers they left behind, I learnt that in Berlin, Sigi had managed one of the city’s most august restaurants, the Uhlandeck, which featured – according to newspaper cuttings he managed to bring out – “the finest food provided by Viennese chefs”, “the famous gypsy singer Gracunescu” and an “intimate bar” where “beautiful palm trees invite you to dance”.

In NW3, he quickly became manager of the Burlington, which offered both a set menu of “Soup, Joint, Veg. and Sweet” and “well-known Continental atmosphere”, before he turned it into Cafe Balsam, a favourite haunt of the legendary Amadeus Quartet. Its basement bar would become the first home of the Blue Danube Club. It had been formed as a “Barbed-Wire Cabaret” by Peter Herz on the Isle of Man where “enemy aliens” had been interned by Churchill amid fears of fifth columnists sabotaging Britain’s war effort. The club would later take over No.153, where it sold out every revue for 15 years, offering what Herz said was “an unrelenting war against Hitlerism”.

Sigi Balsam outside Cafe Balsam[Missing Credit]Advert for the Blue Danube Club it appeared in the Association of of Jewish Refugees Journal[Missing Credit][Missing Credit]

provided such a launchpad for my grandparents that, just a decade after their arrival, they were able to relocate their restaurant to Mayfair (where a young Alma Cogan would perform and – Sigi would kvell – Princess Margaret once dined). In their place, Doris Balacs, an émigré from Essen, Germany, who had come as a “domestic” with half a crown in her pocket, established the more enduring Dorice. History hung heavy over the cafe even into the 1980s, when one man complained to The Observer that the other patrons “can’t forget the past. In this place, Hitler is still alive.”

But the Mitteleuropean mothership of Finchley Road was the Cosmo – a haunt for bohemians, intellectuals and eccentrics from 1933 to 1998.

Cosmo's logo[Missing Credit]

No one seems to quite agree on whether it was the Cosmo or the Dorice that was more German or Austrian, or which was superior. Each was perfectly placed to look down on the other – Cosmoites regarding themselves as the milieu of poets and philosophers and Dorice denizens priding themselves on wearing finer clothes and eating finer food. My grandfather’s only relative in Britain, his niece Betty Cohn, was a Dorice loyalist but referred to herself and her fellow diners as the “oberflächlich” (superficial). Former 1950s Dorice waitress Fay Weldon said she always felt on the “wrong side of the road”. Still, she waxed lyrical to me about “the cigarette smoke and exotic people in dark coats and hats speaking foreign languages”.

It was perfectly normal to find ham omelettes and Eisbein (pork knuckle) on Finchleystrasse menus. As this newspaper reported in 1998, although most of their émigré diners were Jews, the Cosmo and Co “never exactly flew the flag for kashrut”.

So do not be surprised that a company founded by a Jewish refugee at No. 122A became the biggest manufacturer of continental pork sausages in Britain. Richard Mattes was from a Rhineland wurst-making family who arrived in the UK in 1936. By 1968, the continental sausage market was growing by 20 per cent a year, Mattessons was processing hundreds of tons of pork a month and Woolworths was the biggest stockist of its 40 varieties – including Bierwurst, Extrawurst and Knackwurst. The Marylebone Mercury called Mattes “the man who changed the eating habits of a nation” and his logo is still to be found on supermarket shelves.

Ackerman’s Chocolate – which opened on Goldhurst Terrace, just off Finchleystrasse, in 1956 – purveyed the most exquisite sweet treats but was born out of bitter necessity.

Ackermans in Goldhurst Terrace in the 1970s (Photo: Nicholas Rose)[Missing Credit][Missing Credit]

Werner Ackerman was a lawyer from Berlin, who learnt how to make Baumkuchen as part of the training for the catering job that secured his British visa. His wife, Lotte, was a conservatoire-trained pianist who started making wartime chocolates with other refugees on her kitchen table, using ingredients sourced on the black market.

They helped popularise the dark stuff in Britain as well as gooey centres of marzipan and liqueur. Princess Alexandra walked down from Kensington Palace to Ackerman’s first shop on Kensington Church Street and became a regular before the Queen Mother started also buying products manufactured in the Finchley Road basement – making Ackerman’s surely the first store on the strasse to boast a Royal Warrant.

For delicacies of the mind, you would only need to take a right off Finchleystrasse and walk down Boundary Road. There, at Libris books, Dr Joseph Suschitzky plied – as per his advertising – “German Books in Seven Rooms”.

Suschitzky had survived a year in Dachau and Buchenwald before making it to London where he followed in the footsteps of his father and uncle, who had founded the Brüder Suschitzky Bookshop in Vienna in 1901.

At Libris, he furnished the libraries of film director Sir Alexander Korda and Margaret Thatcher’s favourite economist Friedrich Hayek. As his Times obituary said: “It sometimes seemed that everybody with a lively interest in German literature could be found there browsing.” A map of Finchleystrasse produced by Dr Anthony Grenville of the Association of Jewish Refugees for a Jewish Museum exhibition in 2002 features 48 red dots marking out the establishments that provided the backbone of the colony along Finchley Road.

Finchleystrasse map created by Dr Anthony Grenville for Association of Jewish Refugees (Photo: Justin Piper)[Missing Credit]

You could remodel, dye and clean your furs with D. Silberman, repair your upholstery “the continental way” with Herbert Zwillenberg, have your toes seen to by the qualified chiropodist Mr I Warner (originally Wurmbrand), discuss culture and politics at Club 1943 and worship at Belsize Square Synagogue.

Sigi Balsam and staff outside Cafe Balsam[Missing Credit]

More recently, the nickname has become synonymous with the entire wave of Jewish migration from Nazi Europe – just as one shipload in 1948 came to define the “Windrush Generation”.

When Berlin’s embassy in London held an exhibition on German artists in exile across the UK in 2018, it titled it simply Finchleystrasse.

The settlement has been immortalised in literature (by Anita Brookner, Dannie Abse and Eva Ibbotson), paintings (including Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s Finchley Road at Night) and even a musical (Pamela Howard’s The Ballad of the Cosmo Café, commissioned by the Insiders/Outsiders festival celebrating refugees from the Nazis). However, by the 21st century, barely a physical trace remained. That was until JW3 arrived in 2013, two streets from where my mother was born, to quite literally put Jewish NW3 back on the map.

Then exactly a year ago, artist Leon Fenster’s nine-storey mural of Jewish London was unveiled on the side of the cultural centre. It features vignettes of the Cosmo, Freud – and Cafe Balsam. Gazing up at the sign that once took pride of place outside my grandparents’ sanctuary of strudel and sauerkraut, I appeared to have something in my eye. This was the first time that the frontage of 169A – advertising a three-course menu for 1’6 – had been up on Finchley Road for three-quarters of a century.

There may no longer be bus conductors to remember the generation of continentals that reshaped Britain, but the legacy of Finchleystrasse still echoes along the thoroughfare they made their own.

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Etan Smallman will be delivering a talk, Next Stop, Finchleystrasse!, at JW3 on July9. Tickets available at jw3.org.uk and at JW3. Email your memories to finchleystrasse@gmail.com