Rodinsky's world was that of the East European Jewry, cabbalistic speculation, an obsession with language as code and terrible loss. He touched the imagination of artist Rachel Lichtenstein, whose grandparents had left Poland in the thirties. This text weaves together Lichtenstein's quest for Rodinsky — which took her to Poland, to Israel and around Jewish London — with Iain Sinclair's meditations on her journey into her own past, and on the Whitechapel he has reinvented.