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Litvinoff in his younger days in the East End |
Life in the East End of a small planet
Emanuel Litvinoff, whose memoir is republished this week, tells Dan Carrier about life as a Jew in the East End during the last war Order this book
WHEN the air raid siren sounded, the sensible response would be to find the nearest available public shelter and stay in it until the all clear.
But for Emanuel Litvinoff, the bombers heading over to attack the East End angered him on two fronts. Not only did he shake his fist at the pilots above, but he battled against the wardens on the street who ordered him to get indoors and under cover.
“The important thing to me was to have a sense of being an individual,” he said. “There were air raid wardens who would walk the streets, telling people to get in as soon as possible, and shouting at you – ‘What are you doing out?’
“I used to carry around an exercise book and I would pretend to be on a government assignment so I would not be pushed down into the shelters.”
It was a trick he repeated when he had joined the army. Stationed in Belfast, he took to wandering around his army base clutching a bucket.
“Officers would see me with this bucket, striding purposefully about, and they’d think I was going to do a chore. It helped give me a feeling of freedom.”
It is a recurrent theme through his life – a deep dislike of authority, and his independent streak comes through in his memoir, Journey Through A Small Planet, which is republished this week as in the Penguin Modern Classics series.
Born in 1915, Emanuel was the second of nine children in a dirt poor Jewish family in Whitechapel. His memoir tells of a long-gone East End that once mimicked an east European village, a London borough whose lingua franca was Yiddish.
It is evocative of times past; he writes of “slums boiling with humanity”, a sound track of sewing machines, the barrels of pickled cucumbers and the smell of herrings.
He writes that it was similar to the “small Jewish towns scattered across the lands of eastern Europe” and had more in common with the Polish town of Krakow or the Ukrainian city of Odessa than the English capital.
As Emanuel points out: “We shared the same Sabbaths and festivals, we sang traditional songs in the same minor key, laughed at the same Jewish jokes.”
Café gossips discussed the news from the east, and argued loudly over the attractions of Communism and Anarchism.
Litvinoff himself was drawn to Communism. His dalliance with the Left led him to try to read Marx, but concepts such as dialectical materialism “made my head swim,” he admits.
He was drawn to the young Communists by a girl he fancied. When the head of the group found out, he accused Emanuel of being a “Trotskyite”, a label that meant nothing to him – it transpired poor Emanuel had fallen for a girl who the branch secretary also had taken a shine to.
Emanuel left school when he was 14 and after a brief stint at a technical college where he faced daily anti-semitism and bullying, he staggered from one wage-slave position to another. These included unloading carcasses from lorries into Spitalfields market and stapling lengths of fur collars to coats. He hated them all, and became a tramp, cadging tea from West End cafés and drifting at night from doss houses to doorways.
His salvation came with the outbreak of war.
He had been persuaded by the pacifist movement’s argument in the 1930s that he should become a conscientious objector. But Mosley’s Blackshirts were marching down his street. An invasion of England by Germany would mean the death of Anglo-Jewry.
“It suddenly hit me that this was ridiculous,” he says.
“We are fighting the Nazis. I got in touch with the authorities and asked them when they were going to call me up.”
Due to his surname, the decision to join the army made the newspapers.
“There was a paragraph that read: ‘Litvinoff Signs Up! But Not The Russian Commissar...’”
Emanuel shared his surname with a high-ranking Soviet official, which was enough for reporters to deem it worthy of a few words.
“It was the first time I saw my name in print,” he chuckles.
And the army gave Emanuel a new start in life. As well as giving him the peace of mind that he was doing his bit, it had more practical benefits.
“For the first time in my life I was given three square meals a day, clothing, and pocket money,” he recalls. “It was heaven.”
And it gave Emanuel the spur to start writing. He had been scribbling poetry while living as a down and out. As a soldier, with his conditions improved, he set about writing in earnest. Two collections of his work were published by the army in 1941, and a further edition appeared in 1942.
When he returned to the East End recently he looked for snippets of his childhood: much of the old Jewish community is long gone, but he found ghosts remained. His old tenement block has survived and, incredibly, the initials he scratched into the wooden window frames are still there.
Although many of the synagogues have closed and the Yiddish shop signs have been taken down, the East End now has a vibrant Bangladeshi community who find themselves in a similar situation as that which faced the Jewish community of the last century.
“There was a strong sense of social mobility that helped lead to the demise of the Jewish East End,” he said.
“People were settling in London and then their children were having careers, professions, and could afford to move out of that environment. It will undoubtedly happen to the Bangladeshi community, who are now in Whitechapel, too.”
To Berlin after Hitler fell
EMANUEL Litvinoff travelled to Berlin straight after the war – a strange destination for a Jewish writer, he admits. But he wanted to see first-hand the capital of the country that perpetrated unimaginable crimes, and collect experiences for a book which would eventually become the novel The Lost Europeans.
This thriller, published in 1960, tells the story of a Jew who returns to Berlin seeking compensation for what his family lost in the war.
He found the city fascinating, and spent so long there that it took a desperate letter from his wife to bring him home – she wondered in the letter whether he would ever return.
A Death Out of Season, published in 1973, tells the story of the siege of Sidney Street in 1911, where soldiers fought a pitched battle in Stepney against a gang of revolutionary anarchists from Latvia. The novel paints the East End as an entry point for international revolutionaries and underlines the role the Jewish community played in progressive political movements. |
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