Emanuel Litvinoff, who died on September 24 aged 96, made his name as a poet in the Second World War and was the author of an acclaimed memoir of growing up in the East End of London, Journey Through a Small Planet (1972); to many people, however, he will best be remembered for a devastating public attack on TS Eliot.
Emanuel Litvinoff
During the 1920s, at a time of high literary anti-Semitism, Eliot had written several strongly anti-Semitic poems, including Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, in which “Burbank” is described as a “Chicago Semite Viennese” whose “lustreless protrusive eye, stares from the protozoic slime”. The poem continues: “On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles/The Jew is underneath the lot./Money in furs.” Eliot included the poem in his 1948 Selected Poems, published by Penguin as a first popular edition of his works.
Litvinoff admired Eliot and was inclined to forgive him for his fashionable pre-war anti-Semitism, but was horrified that he was prepared to celebrate such sentiments after the Holocaust. In 1952 Litvinoff wrote a poem entitled To TS Eliot in which he angrily proclaimed: “I share the protozoic slime of Shylock”. He was scheduled to read it at the inaugural poetry reading of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; then, just before the start of the event, the ICA’s chairman Sir Herbert Read, thinking that the poem was meant as a tribute to Eliot, informed him that “Tom” had just arrived with an entourage.
Nervous but undaunted, Litvinoff launched into his poem, which at first produced a shocked silence, and then pandemonium. Stephen Spender rose indignantly to declare: “As a poet as Jewish as Litvinoff, I deeply resent this slanderous attack on a great poet and a good friend.”
Herbert Read expressed himself scandalised by Litvinoff’s “bad form” and told him that if he had known in advance what the poem was about, he would not have allowed it to be read. Amid the general denunciation, only one member of the audience seemed to have a good word for Litvinoff: Eliot was overheard to mutter to his friends: “It’s a good poem.” Of all the poems which Litvinoff wrote, To TS Eliot was the one which appeared time and time again in anthologies.
The second of four children and an older brother of the Zionist writer Barnet Litvinoff, Emanuel Litvinoff was born on May 5 1915 in a tenement at Whitechapel, where his parents had moved from Odessa, fleeing tsarist oppression, two years earlier. In 1917 his father joined the Russian army, never to return, and Emanuel’s mother later remarried and had five more children. She was the main breadwinner as a dressmaker, and brought up her nine children in two small rooms — one of which served as her workplace.
Emanuel was a bookish child in a bookless household and, like his brothers and sisters, treated the local library as his second home. Yet he failed to win a place at the local grammar school because he was so nervous during the 11-plus exam that he could not control his hands to hold a pencil. Instead he won a trade scholarship to Cordwainer’s Technical College in Smithfield Market, a training college for the footwear industry.
He was the only Jewish boy in the school and experienced violent anti-Semitism. He walked out aged 14 after being picked on to fight a much stronger older boy in front of a crowd of pupils and teachers in the school gymnasium. He later wrote a story based on his experiences there entitled Enemy Territory.
After leaving school, Litvinoff went into the fur trade as a “fur nailer’s apprentice” at £1 a week and joined the Young Communist League, becoming a leading figure in his local branch until he was expelled for Trotskyism. Later he briefly became involved in an extreme Zionist organisation founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky and tried to form a youth wing, to which he succeeded in recruiting only his younger brother.
When war broke out, Litvinoff considered becoming a conscientious objector until he realised what a German invasion would mean for his family; so he wrote a letter to the War Office, demanding to be called up forthwith. His letter appeared as a paragraph in the newspapers under the headline “Litvinoff joins up, but not the Commissar” (at that time Maxim Litvinoff was Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union).
Prevented from joining an active military unit by his poor eyesight, he was posted to the Pioneer Corps and sent to Glasgow and then Northern Ireland, where he worked in the cookhouse and in his spare time wrote poetry, some of which was published in a collection entitled Poems from the Forces and read on the BBC. In 1942 another collection, The Untried Soldier, was published by Routledge to critical acclaim.
One day the local area commander, a brigadier, arrived on a tour of inspection and visited the cookhouse where Litvinoff was working. “Is this the man who writes?” asked the brigadier. On being told that it was, he exclaimed: “We can’t have educated men doing cookery, we’re desperately short of officers.” Rather against his will, Litvinoff was sent to the OTC and later saw service in North Africa and the Middle East, before being demobbed in the rank of major.
In 1942, after a six-week courtship, he married Irene Pearson, a young ATS girl whom he had met at a dance. After the war, as he struggled to make a living as a freelance writer, she launched a career as a fashion model and, as Cherry Marshall, became a leading model agent. Litvinoff had another collection of poems published and was extensively featured in magazines and anthologies. His first novel, The Lost European, set in post-war Berlin, was widely translated and he went on to become the author of some 21 books and plays for television and radio. He also worked as deputy editor on The Jewish Observer and Middle East Review.
In later life Litvinoff returned to his old haunts in Whitechapel to find the area transformed beyond all recognition: “Clumps of Muslim men stood aimlessly on corners and there was a curious absence of women. Shrill eerie music wailed in the heat of the afternoon.” He felt “indescribably bereaved, a ghost haunting the irrecoverable past”.
That evening he began a memoir that would be published as Journey Through a Small Planet, in which he evoked a district populated by persecuted Jews from the Russian empire and transformed into an East End ghetto full of synagogues, backroom factories and little grocery stores reeking of pickled herring, garlic sausage and onion bread.
Emanuel Litvinoff’s marriage to Cherry Marshall was dissolved in 1970, though they remained good friends until her death in 2006. He is survived by his second wife, Mary McClory, by their son and by a son and daughter of his first marriage.
He was the only Jewish boy in the school and experienced violent anti-Semitism. He walked out aged 14 after being picked on to fight a much stronger older boy in front of a crowd of pupils and teachers in the school gymnasium. He later wrote a story based on his experiences there entitled Enemy Territory.
After leaving school, Litvinoff went into the fur trade as a “fur nailer’s apprentice” at £1 a week and joined the Young Communist League, becoming a leading figure in his local branch until he was expelled for Trotskyism. Later he briefly became involved in an extreme Zionist organisation founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky and tried to form a youth wing, to which he succeeded in recruiting only his younger brother.
When war broke out, Litvinoff considered becoming a conscientious objector until he realised what a German invasion would mean for his family; so he wrote a letter to the War Office, demanding to be called up forthwith. His letter appeared as a paragraph in the newspapers under the headline “Litvinoff joins up, but not the Commissar” (at that time Maxim Litvinoff was Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union).
Prevented from joining an active military unit by his poor eyesight, he was posted to the Pioneer Corps and sent to Glasgow and then Northern Ireland, where he worked in the cookhouse and in his spare time wrote poetry, some of which was published in a collection entitled Poems from the Forces and read on the BBC. In 1942 another collection, The Untried Soldier, was published by Routledge to critical acclaim.
One day the local area commander, a brigadier, arrived on a tour of inspection and visited the cookhouse where Litvinoff was working. “Is this the man who writes?” asked the brigadier. On being told that it was, he exclaimed: “We can’t have educated men doing cookery, we’re desperately short of officers.” Rather against his will, Litvinoff was sent to the OTC and later saw service in North Africa and the Middle East, before being demobbed in the rank of major.
In 1942, after a six-week courtship, he married Irene Pearson, a young ATS girl whom he had met at a dance. After the war, as he struggled to make a living as a freelance writer, she launched a career as a fashion model and, as Cherry Marshall, became a leading model agent. Litvinoff had another collection of poems published and was extensively featured in magazines and anthologies. His first novel, The Lost European, set in post-war Berlin, was widely translated and he went on to become the author of some 21 books and plays for television and radio. He also worked as deputy editor on The Jewish Observer and Middle East Review.
In later life Litvinoff returned to his old haunts in Whitechapel to find the area transformed beyond all recognition: “Clumps of Muslim men stood aimlessly on corners and there was a curious absence of women. Shrill eerie music wailed in the heat of the afternoon.” He felt “indescribably bereaved, a ghost haunting the irrecoverable past”.
That evening he began a memoir that would be published as Journey Through a Small Planet, in which he evoked a district populated by persecuted Jews from the Russian empire and transformed into an East End ghetto full of synagogues, backroom factories and little grocery stores reeking of pickled herring, garlic sausage and onion bread.
Emanuel Litvinoff’s marriage to Cherry Marshall was dissolved in 1970, though they remained good friends until her death in 2006. He is survived by his second wife, Mary McClory, by their son and by a son and daughter of his first marriage.
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