Photo de l'auteur

Emanuel Litvinoff (1915–2011)

Auteur de The Penguin book of Jewish short stories

26 oeuvres 378 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Crédit image: Facebook tribute page

Œuvres de Emanuel Litvinoff

The Penguin book of Jewish short stories (1979) — Directeur de publication — 121 exemplaires
Journey Through a Small Planet (1972) 87 exemplaires
The Lost Europeans (1958) 50 exemplaires
A Death Out of Season (1973) 33 exemplaires
Falls the Shadow (1983) 22 exemplaires
The Face of Terror (1978) 19 exemplaires
Blood on the Snow (1975) 18 exemplaires
The untried soldier 3 exemplaires
Notes for a survivor (1973) 3 exemplaires
A crown for Cain (1948) 3 exemplaires
Lost Europeans 1 exemplaire

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Date de naissance
1915-05-05
Date de décès
2011-09-24
Sexe
male
Nationalité
England
UK
Lieu de naissance
Bethnal Green, London, England, UK
Lieu du décès
London, England, UK
Lieux de résidence
London, England, UK
Berlin, Germany
Professions
novelist
poet
playwright
short story writer
humanitarian
Relations
Litvinoff, Barnet (brother)
Courte biographie
Emanuel Litvinoff was born to a Jewish family in London, England. His parents were Russian Jews who had fled czarist pogroms in Odessa in 1914. His father was repatriated to Russia when Emanuel was two years old, and never returned; he is thought to have been killed in the Russian Revolution. His mother supported herself and her four children as a seamstress. She eventually remarried and had five more children. They all grew up together in two tiny rooms in the East End. One of his brothers was the historian Barnet Litvinoff. Litvinoff was sent to trade school and trained as a shoemaker. As the only Jewish boy there, he endured anti-Semitic taunts and beatings at the hands of his schoolmates. He left school at age 14 and worked in a number of unskilled factory jobs, and was often homeless. In 1940, at the start of World War II, he volunteered for the British Army. Serving in the Pioneer Corps in Northern Ireland, West Africa and the Middle East, he rose quickly through the ranks, and was promoted to major by the age of 27. He became known as a war poet during this time. The anthology Poems from the Forces, published in 1941, included some of his works, as did the BBC Radio feature of the same name. His first collection, The Untried Soldier, was published in 1942. Over the years, he contributed to many anthologies and periodicals, including The Terrible Rain: War Poets 1939–1945 and Stand, a magazine edited by poet Jon Silkin. Litvinoff was a friend and mentor to many younger poets. His 1951 poem "To T.S. Eliot" was a response to unapologetic anti-Semitic elements in Eliot's poems, which he debuted at a public poetry evening in Eliot's presence. Litvinoff also wrote well-received novels centering on the struggles of Jews in the European Diaspora. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote plays prolifically for television, in particular Armchair Theatre. Although he was a successful writer, the majority of Litvinoff's time after WWII was spent spearheading a worldwide campaign for the freedom of Soviet Jews. He founded and edited the newsletter "Jews in Eastern Europe" from the 1950s to the 1980s, and lobbied prominent figures such as Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to help the cause. Due to his efforts, the cause of Soviet Jews became a worldwide campaign, eventually leading to the mass migration of Jews from the USSR. In 1942, Litvinoff married fashion model Cherry Marshall (Irene Maud Pearson), with whom he had three children; they divorced in 1970. He remarried to Mary McClory, with whom he had one child. Litvinoff wrote his memoirs, Journey Through a Small Planet, published in 1972. His collected poems appeared in Notes for a Survivor (1973).

Membres

Critiques

If you've ever wandered through the back streets, alleyways, and courtyards of old Spitalfields and Whitechapel in London's East End; sensing the dim and now somewhat distant presence of a bygone era and an old world Jewish culture now all but vanished from its precincts, and wondered what life would really have been like for the working class immigrant families who lived and worked there - this book will draw you as vivid a picture as any other book or film I've yet encountered.

Emanuel Litvinoff was born and raised in the heart of that London - when the community there was at its inter-war period 'zenith' (if such a word were appropriate) of the 1920s and '30s. His stories convey wonderfully, with vigour and laconic humour the sights and sounds and smells of that lost world. Having grown up and served in the army during the Second World War, he moved out of the neighbourhood he'd grown up in. Across the decades following the war so too would most of the other Jewish neighbours - Londoners established enough by then to move away from the grotty tenements and filthy market streets, out to the suburbs and beyond.

In the opening pages' "Author's Note" Litvinoff explains how early in the 1970s he found himself revisiting the old streets again with a friend. The cover photo above was taken at that time:

"...In Old Montague Street, the very heart of the original Jewish quarter, nothing was left of the synagogue but a broken wooden door carved with the Lion of Judah.

The tenement I grew up in had somehow survived shrunken by time but otherwise unchanged - the same broken tiles in the passage, the same rickety stairs, the pervasive smell of cats. I took my friend up to the first floor landing window to show him the small yard with its overflowing dustbin. That, too, had not changed. Quite suddenly, a vivid memory returned. I was twelve years old: the news had come that once again I had failed the scholarship. Outside it was raining. I sat on the window ledge and carved my initials in the wood. When I looked they were still there, jagged and irregular, 'E.L.'

The door of my old apartment opened and for one moment I expected to see that same unhappy, resentful boy emerge to wander disconsolately into the street. A shabby, elderly man came out carrying a bucket full of refuse. He stared at us mistrustfully.

'Are you gennelmen from the Sanit'ry Department of the Tahn 'All?' he asked.

I felt indescribably bereaved, a ghost haunting the irrecoverable past. That evening, when I returned to Hertfordshire I began a memoir, 'My East End Tenement'. This book has grown out of that beginning."

With chapters such as "Uncle Solly's Sporting Life", "The God I Failed", and "A Charity Pair of Boots", Litvinoff charmingly weaves his coming-of-age tale amid the poverty and the 'sweating shops', and the ever-present fug of stale cigarette smoke and the smell of pickled herrings and frying onions.

"The tenement was a village in miniature, a place of ingathered exiles who supplemented their Jewish speech with phrases in Russian, Polish or Lithuanian. We sang songs of the ghettoes or folk-tunes of the old Russian Empire and ate the traditional dishes of its countryside. The news came to us in Yiddish newspapers and was usually bad..."

The tales of Emanuel's childhood pass and he soon must join the working masses, and make a contribution to the household. He finds employment at Dorfmann's "rat-infested fur workshop":

"'Don't you want to improve yourself anymore?' my mother said in her suffering voice.

She stood at the stove ladling soup into my plate, the latest baby squirming in the crook of her arm. A man's cardigan hung shapelessly on her body, but her belly was seen to be big again. We were ten already, the largest family in the buildings, and nothing helped - not whispered conferences with neighbours, nor the tubes and syringes concealed among the underwear at the botttom of the wardrobe, and certainly not Fat Yetta, who sometimes lifted the curse of fertility from other women but only left my mother haggard with pain and exhaustion.

'Manny,' she said, 'I'm talking to you!'"

I loved this book, and the imagery that was brought to my mind by Litvinoff's atmospheric writing. This is the real world that existed behind such stories as Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid For Two Farthings, and the tales of characters who my grandparents would've known. It was a pleasure to visit this particular small planet.
… (plus d'informations)
1 voter
Signalé
Polaris- | Nov 25, 2014 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
26
Membres
378
Popularité
#63,851
Évaluation
½ 3.7
Critiques
1
ISBN
31
Langues
1

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