Emanuel Litvinoff
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Emanuel Litvinoff (born 1915) is a British writer and human rights activist, and is one of the most well-known and regarded figures in post-war Anglo-Jewish literature.
Known for novels and short stories, and as a poet and playwright, his early years in a mainly Jewish area 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”, which has become somewhat of a modern classic.
He was 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". The work praises Eliot's reputation as a poet, but expresses outrage at some of his language.
In the 1950s, on a rare Western visit to Cold War 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. 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.
[edit] 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)
