In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later, was filled with curious artifacts, including a street atlas of the city marked up with routes of unusual walks, mystical tracts, and papers inscribed with many languages, including hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and a “Comparative Table of Greek and Phoenician.” Rodinsky’s Room, by artist Rachel Lichtenstein and writer Iain Sinclair, is a poignant, impossible-to-categorize, brilliantly written collaborative work of historical detection. Lichtenstein and Sinclair, writing in alternate chapters, try to find out what happened to Rodinsky. Treating Rodinsky as a haunting presence, the writers investigate vanished elements of their city.
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