The heyday of Anglo-Jewish writing receded just as quickly. Writers like Alec Baron, Gerda Charles, Wolf Mankowitz and Bernard Kops are little known today. Brian Glanville is best known as a football writer, not as a novelist. Apart from Frederic Raphael, only Howard Jacobson and the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had major careers in the late 20th century. The two great exceptions in British theatre were Pinter and Stoppard, Jewish by birth but not Jewish writers in their themes or rhythms. Unlike Wesker, they were “Jewish Lite”, in Steven Berkoff’s memorable phrase. 

Again, it was partly a matter of class. Many of the best Jewish writers of the 1950s had grown up, like Wesker, in poor neighbourhoods like the East End and that gave a tension, an energy, to their writing, between immigrant, working-class, often Yiddish-speaking parents and their children, moving away. That was a world in flux as the old immigrant, Yiddish East End passed away and Jewish families moved out to Essex and the suburbs. The Fifties saw the heyday of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal in Stratford. They too never reached those heights again.

There was another factor which proved difficult for the careers of so many Anglo-Jewish writers like Wesker. Britain never had the same number of Jewish literary editors and critics as America, figures comparable to Irving Howe or Lionel Trilling, or Adam Kirsch today — with the notable exception of John Gross, another East End boy, who went on to edit the Times Literary Supplement — or magazines with the reputation of Partisan Review and Commentary. It never had the sheer number of Jewish readers that would buy books by Bellow and Roth in such huge numbers.

But how Jewish was Wesker? He came from an intensely Jewish background in the East End, the son of immigrants, but only one of his best-known plays, Chicken Soup with Barley, was as Jewish as the great works of his Jewish-American contemporaries, Bellow's Herzog with its Yiddishisms or Roth brooding over Israel, the Holocaust and Anne Frank.  

Wesker did not belong to movements or groups, whether of the Left or Jewish. This takes us to a central point about his career. Towards the end of his passionate autobiography As Much as I Dare (1994) he quotes an angry letter he wrote in 1959 to the New Statesman in response to T.C. Worsley’s review of the transfer of A Taste of Honey to the West End. “Here we are,” he writes about the young playwrights of the late Fifties, “having just started, most of us with only one play performed, we are just getting into our stride and beginning to learn about it all, and now some ‘fashion-conscious’ young smoothy comes along and declares with a bored yawn that ‘We’ve really had enough darling!’”