TRIP DOWN (BRICK) MEMORY LANE

Los Angeles

Diana Abu-Jaber's review of Monica Ali's Brick Lane ["London Kills Me," Oct. 20], took me back to my early childhood in and around that very same Brick Lane, in the heart of London's East End. Before the area became "Bangla Town," it was haven to immigrant Jews escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Today's mosques were yesterday's synagogues, and Blooms drew lines of customers for its salt-beef sandwiches. When I visited recently, I was stunned to find the building that once housed the soup kitchen being converted to high-priced condos, tureen and ladle and Hebrew lettering still carved in stone over the portal! Back then, just before World War II, it wasn't drugs that parents feared. Young rebels turned their energies against Oswald Mosley and his black-shirted fascists--and my grandmother locked her sons in the bathroom to keep them out of danger. The story goes that they climbed out the window and joined the fight anyway.

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