15th November 2013

THE title of Dan Burt’s memoirs of a tough upbringing in south Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s is certainly apt.

His 120-page book, You Think It Strange (Notting Hill Editions, £12), provides a detailed insight into a different time for Jews in America.

During the interview, Dan revealed he doesn’t communicate with anyone before midday, is on his fourth wife and admitted his work is “extremely terse”.

Born in south Philadelphia in 1942, he attended a series of state schools before making it to St John’s College, Cambridge, to read English.

A life in law followed where he set up shop in America, Saudi Arabia and Britain before becoming a British citizen.

Later in life he turned towards poetry and his work has appeared in the Financial Times and New Statesman.

“I certainly have a different view of things,” he said. “I’m an atheist at heart, although I am ethnically and culturally Jewish.”

The book reveals that Dan took his first steps out of his “ancestral world in Philadelphia’s poorer neighbourhoods” at the age of 12.

“I didn’t fit in America,” he insisted. “I couldn’t maintain my integrity in what is a highly conformist society and various portions of it.

“It was a pretty rough area in south Philly in which I grew up and we knew how to look after ourselves. My father, Joe, was a semi-professional boxer.”

Dan’s jobs have included a butcher and lawyer.

“My father was born in Boston in 1916,” he recalled. “Almost nine months to the day after his mother arrived there from a shtetl near Kiev. Alongside her was Eva, her first born, and Bernie, her second.”

The book details how his grandfather, Louis, had been forced into the Russian army just before the First World War after Russia imposed a quota of men for the army from each shtetl.

His grandfather escaped from Russia to Boston.

“Mum and dad moved the family in 1917 to a small row house at Fourth and Daly in south Philadelphia,” Dan said.

“It is the city where my father grew up, worked, married and, in 1995, died.

“Dad was a carpenter, mum, a seamstress, both socialists at least, if not communists, and Yiddish was the household tongue.”

The book also recalled the family’s daily Yiddish newspaper, Forverts.

“Forverts published lists of those killed in pogroms when they occurred,” Dan explained.

“That is how my grandfather learned that his family, all 18 of them, his father, mother, sisters, brothers and their children, had all been killed.

“He had become an orphan and never went to shul again.”

Jason Stein