The taste was intoxicating, transporting him to his grandmother’s Friday-night table with its speckless white cloth, sparkling candlesticks and endless parade of delicacies. The peppery jelly, or ptchah, smacked his head like a shot of heroin – yes, he had tried some in the club – and sent him reeling on to the street, giddy with gourmet thrill and painful memory. He took another look at his watch. He could afford to miss the next bus and catch the one after; he no longer needed lunch.

He veered off the busy stretch of shops and took a left, or perhaps a right, then another left, reaching the dead end of a railway embankment with no living soul in sight. The afternoon had turned warm and still. He strode ahead, turned another corner, then another, searching for a way back. There were no cars on the road, no pedestrians on the pavement. If this were not London, it could have been siesta hour in Santa Cruz.

Quickening his pace, he spotted a store shield on the corner ahead: a grocery shop, Frumkin’s. He entered to seek directions. Hunks of cheese and butter crowded the marble counter, half covered by fly-paper. The shelves were sparsely filled and there was no civilised hum of refrigeration; a cellar light spurted through gaps in the floorboards. Frumkin, a tubular man in soiled apron and curly sidelocks, was busy with a customer, a black-bearded giant in a frayed greatcoat that kissed his dusty shoes. From what he could gather from their Yiddish burr, Dovidl decided that they were not buying or selling comestibles but discussing a fine point of Torah commentary, the illuminations of some eleventh-century Tosafist on the weekly reading.

‘Excuse me,’ he coughed.

They ignored him. He peered through the grimy window in search of passers-by, but the street was tropically deserted. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said, slightly louder, ‘but could you direct me to the seventy-three bus-stop? I seem to have lost my bearings.’

Neither man looked up. They had to be either deaf, rude or so immersed in their study that the prophet Elijah could ride by on his white donkey without disturbing their concentration. What was he to do? Dovidl was an artist. He knew all a man needed to know about magnetising public attention.

‘Sholom aleikhem! ’ he declared. The Hebrew salutation did the trick, coming as it did from a smart young man in a three-piece suit, silk tie, cocky hat – the trappings of gentility, of the hostile, gentile world.

The tall man swerved around and surveyed him with a black-eyed glare. Dovidl returned his stare unblinkingly, pride for pride.

‘Fin voh kimt a yid? ’ demanded the shopkeeper, conventionally enough – where does a Jew come from?

‘Fin Varsheh,’ said Dovidl, denoting his birthplace.

‘Und vus mit die mishpocheh? ’ came the inevitable corollary: and what’s with your family? A family is what people lost, over there.