Emanuel Litvinoff
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Emanuel Litvinoff | |
| Born | Bethnal Green, London, England |
|---|---|
| Residence | London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Known for | Autobiography, Poetry, Plays, Human Rights |
| Website http://www.emanuel-litvinoff.com |
|
Emanuel Litvinoff (born May 5, 1915) is a British writer and human rights campaigner, and is one of the best known and highly regarded figures in post-war Anglo-Jewish literature.
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[edit] Background
He is known for novels and short stories, and as a poet and playwright. His early years in what he frequently describes as a Jewish ghetto[1] in the East End of London made him very conscious of his Jewish identity. Litvinoff chronicled these early years in what is perhaps his best-known work, Journey Through a Small Planet.
[edit] T. S. Eliot confrontation
Litvinoff is also well known for being one of the first to raise publicly the implications of T. S. Eliot's negative references to Jews in a number of poems, a controversy that continues, in his famous poem To T. S. Eliot. This protest against T. S. Eliot on the subject of anti-Semitism took place at an inaugural poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951. Litvinoff, an admirer of Eliot, was appalled to find Eliot republishing lines he had written in the 1920s about 'money in furs' and the 'protozoic slime' of Bleistein's 'lustreless, protrusive eye' only a few years after the Holocaust, in his Selected Poems of 1948. When Litvinoff got up to announce the poem at the ICA reading, the event's host, Sir Herbert Read, declared 'Oh Good, Tom's just come in.' Despite feeling ‘nervous’,[2] Litvinoff decided that 'the poem was entitled to be read’ and proceeded to evoke it to the packed but silent room:
(excerpt)
'So shall I say it is not eminence chills
but the snigger from behind the covers of history,
the sly words and the cold heart
and footprints made with blood upon a continent?
Let your words
tread lightly on this earth of Europe
lest my people’s bones protest.' [3]
In the ensuing pandemonium after the poem had been read, T. S. Eliot was heard to mutter 'It's a good poem, it's a very good poem'.[4]
[edit] Human rights campaigning
In the 1950s, on a rare Western visit to Russia with his wife Cherry Marshall and her fashion show, Litvinoff became aware of the plight of persecuted Soviet Jews, and started a world campaign against this persecution. One of his methods was editing the newsletter Jews in Eastern Europe[5] and also lobbying eminent figures of the twentieth century such as Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre and others to join the campaign. Due to Litvinoff's efforts, prominent Jewish groups in the United States became aware of the issue, and the well-being of Soviet Jews became a world-wide campaign.[6]
[edit] Literary works
- Conscripts (1941)
- The Untried Soldier (1942)
- A Crown for Cain (1948) poems
- The Lost Europeans (1960)
- The Man Next Door (1968)
- Journey Through a Small Planet (1972)
- A Death Out of Season (1973)
- Notes for a Survivor (1973)
- Soviet Anti-Semitism: The Paris Trial (1974)
- Blood on the Snow (1975)
- The Face of Terror (1978)
- The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories (1979) editor
- Falls the Shadow (1983)
[edit] External links
- Official Website
- [1]: Citations in printed materials as listed by Google Books
- [2]: Interview by the Museum of London, covers life up to the 1950s
- [3]: Interviewed by Melvyn Bragg, alongside Harold Pinter, Bernard Kops, and Arnold Wesker. Includes full transcript and audio recording.
- [4]: 1946 article from Tribune on housing demolished in East London's slum clearance
- [5]: Filmography from the British Film Institute (BFI)
- [6]: Partial credits for Thames Television plays
[edit] Notes
- ^ Jewish Book Week | The Roots of Jewish Writing
- ^ Museum of London - London's Voices
- ^ 'To T. S. Eliot' is collected in Emanuel Litvinoff, Notes for a Survivor, Northern House, 1973.
- ^ Dannie Abse, A Poet in the Family, London: Hutchinson, 1974, p. 203
- ^ http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=riEgj4OJvhAC&pg=PA75&dq=%22emanuel+litvinoff%22+exodus&sig=GNme9aSpoI9ED8Wzuv46qrH91HE
- ^ http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vvfIq0aJ_1oC&pg=PA122&dq=%22emanuel+litvinoff%22&lr=&sig=Y2d9Ku__u2LyU4oOo00YpvS25xU
