Chicken Soup with Barley

Arnold Wesker was born in Stepney, in London’s East End, to a working-class leftist family, an upbringing that provided the background for many of his works. The trilogy that first raised him to prominence, Chicken Soup with Barley (1956), Roots (1958), and I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1960), brought the postwar style of “kitchen sink realism” to bear on the lives of Jewish socialists in Britain. A prolific writer across many genres, Wesker wrote fifty plays, which have been translated into more than twenty languages, as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poetry, and an autobiography. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985 and was knighted in 2006.