Cang escaped from Poland in 1939 with his wife and son, settling in London – where he continued to play an active role in Jewish and Polish communities. He helped the Polish government-in-exile draft a constitution for a liberated Poland, supporting Jewish rights; and, in 1941, he edited a Who’s Who of Allied Governments – a reference book with information about the Allied Governments, their Forces and Institutions, for the British public and newly arrived Eastern European exiles in London. The Who’s Who initially provided information on the exile governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Free France, but quickly expanded to include other nations, featuring information on communities, functions and contact details of officials and organisations. Also advertised were newspapers of exile governments, own-language publications, and products and services of use to exiles.
Other contributors included Benzion Margulies and Itzik Manger.
Margulies was born in Skalat, Galicia, in 1890, and settled with several of his brothers in Essen post-World War I, where, he was actively involved in the Jewish community. But after the Nazis came to power, he and his family moved to London, where he supported other Jewish artists and writers.
One of those he supported was Manger, a well-known Yiddish poet, who was born in Bukovina in 1901. In the late 1930s, Manger left Poland after facing legal difficulties, first settling in Paris, and then Marseilles, Tunis, Liverpool, and London. Margulies’s daughter,
Alice Shalvi, writes that:
The contributors [of the Polish-Jewish Observer] spent most of their time in the basement coffee shop of Ohel, a clubhouse on Gower street my father and uncle helped establish in the early years of the war.
Circulation & Censorship
The Observer launched in late 1941, as a supplement to the local City and East London Observer, a newspaper covering east London – where many Jewish immigrants had settled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the first reports, in December 1941, was a three-point ‘charter of liberty’ for Jews across the world.