East End To Essex
Jewish Migration Routes
Joe Kraven
"My mother had a confectionary shop, which was a confectionary, tobacconist and newsagent...in Columbia Road. Ninety four Columbia Road. And my dad, he did hand carved furniture"
"In August 2006 my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Fortunately, she didn’t suffer very long. Within a month, she died… I said to the hospital could you not send me my wife’s x-rays. Please dispose of them in a dignified manner, but don’t send them to me. Anyway, so six months went by, nothing came. And then, about March or April, following year, a big envelope arrived… I thought, I’ll open it, I’ll have a cup of tea before I go to bed, I’ll open it, and the first thing I took out was hers."
"...I’ll mix up the families, a red husband with a green wife, and a blue daughter and a pink son. Mix them all up, to show that we are really all the same"
"He said, all you’ve got to do now is find the right headlines. The right captions. I said well, God doesn’t have favourites. How’s that sound to you?
And he said, sounds good to me. I said, and I’ll follow that, put a line at the bottom, says tolerance is the vaccine against racism."
"I went in to the, er, guy who did the x-rays... And I said I’m only doing this for something to do. I’m making this multi-racial x-rays. So he said, well, what would you like? I said well, if I said, if I did one and put them in, have you got a side picture of someone’s skull, someone’s head. And then I can say, it’s all in the mind. Put the little people in it, and I’ll, he said... let’s have a look at it. So I did it, gave it back next day, and he said, oh, that’s pretty good."