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Product Description
In Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), the writer Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his working-class Jewish childhood in the East End of London: a small cluster of streets right next to the city, but worlds apart in culture and spirit. With vivid intensity Litvinoff describes the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel, the smell of pickled herring and onion bread, the rattle of sewing machines and chatter in Yiddish. He also relates stories of his parents, who fled from Russia in 1914, his experiences at school and a brief flirtation with Communism. Unsentimental, vital and almost dream like, this is a masterly evocation of a long-vanished world.
About the Author
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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a re-issue, as a Penguin Modern Classic, of a book first published in 1972. In twelve short chapters Litvinoff wonderfully evokes his childhood and adolescence in the crowded inter-war Jewish East End. While bringing out the poverty, squalor and stench in which the immigrants from Eastern Europe lived, there is a rich and vibrant community life, and his observations of characters and situations are mostly humorous - though the chapter on his experience of coarse antisemitism from staff and fellow-pupils at a trade school for shoe-makers is too grim for humour. He did not seem to show much promise as a youngster and had a series of dreary and humdrum jobs. At the very end of this memoir, when he was 19, a poem suddenly came to him, and "things would never be the same again."
He would of course not be the only upwardly mobile Jew coming from that unpromising setting, but, as in all these cases, each such ascent seems like a small miracle.
There follows an appendix of two essays and two poems. The first essay, here published for the first time, was originally written just after the War. It is a powerful, slightly over-written story about a solar eclipse; but it shows the progress he had made as a writer in the dozen years since that first literary effort. The memoir itself, written a quarter of a century later still, is not over-written at all: by that time his style had become worthy of being a classic.
The second essay, originally published in 1967, sets out his views of what it has meant to him to be `A Jew in England'. That theme is further elaborated by the 35 page introduction to the book. Written by Patrick Wright, it sets Litvinoff's memoir into the context of his whole remarkable life, and is a small masterpiece in itself. Litvinoff's reflections on his experiences as a Jew have varied over a long life-time: how he relates and has related to his background, to his Englishness, to Communism, to the Soviet Union, to Zionism and to Israel.
His last book was published a quarter of a century ago, and none of his novels are currently in print. See my Amazon reviews of The Faces of Terror; Blood on the Snow; The Face of Terror; The Man Next Door). He is now 92; and it must be gratifying for him that this memoir at least has been re-issued, and as a classic at that.
He would of course not be the only upwardly mobile Jew coming from that unpromising setting, but, as in all these cases, each such ascent seems like a small miracle.
There follows an appendix of two essays and two poems. The first essay, here published for the first time, was originally written just after the War. It is a powerful, slightly over-written story about a solar eclipse; but it shows the progress he had made as a writer in the dozen years since that first literary effort. The memoir itself, written a quarter of a century later still, is not over-written at all: by that time his style had become worthy of being a classic.
The second essay, originally published in 1967, sets out his views of what it has meant to him to be `A Jew in England'. That theme is further elaborated by the 35 page introduction to the book. Written by Patrick Wright, it sets Litvinoff's memoir into the context of his whole remarkable life, and is a small masterpiece in itself. Litvinoff's reflections on his experiences as a Jew have varied over a long life-time: how he relates and has related to his background, to his Englishness, to Communism, to the Soviet Union, to Zionism and to Israel.
His last book was published a quarter of a century ago, and none of his novels are currently in print. See my Amazon reviews of The Faces of Terror; Blood on the Snow; The Face of Terror; The Man Next Door). He is now 92; and it must be gratifying for him that this memoir at least has been re-issued, and as a classic at that.
Format:Paperback
Interesting.an almost unusual book.
I would recommend it as an insight into inter war
Britain and london in particular.
The authors comments on the severe social
costs of ww2 are a rarity.
communities were destroyed and forgotten about except by those
Whose lives were destroyed by the disruption.
Worthy of five stars.best book I've read in a long
time.
I would recommend it as an insight into inter war
Britain and london in particular.
The authors comments on the severe social
costs of ww2 are a rarity.
communities were destroyed and forgotten about except by those
Whose lives were destroyed by the disruption.
Worthy of five stars.best book I've read in a long
time.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Wonderfully evocative of the inter-war East End of London
18 Jan 2009
Format:Hardcover
This book was first published in 1972. In twelve short chapters Litvinoff wonderfully evokes his childhood and adolescence in the crowded inter-war Jewish East End of London. While bringing out the poverty, squalor and stench in which the immigrants from Eastern Europe lived, there is a rich and vibrant community life, and his observations of characters and situations are mostly humorous - though the chapter on his experience of coarse antisemitism from staff and fellow-pupils at a trade school for shoe-makers is too grim for humour. He did not seem to show much promise as a youngster and had a series of dreary and humdrum jobs. At the very end of this memoir, when he was 19, a poem suddenly came to him, and "things would never be the same again."
He would of course not be the only upwardly mobile Jew coming from that unpromising setting, but, as in all these cases, each such ascent seems like a small miracle.
On www.amazon.co.uk I have reviewed the 2008 reissue of this book in England as a Penguin Modern Classic. That edition also includes a 35 page introduction to Litvinoff's life by Patrick Wright (a small masterpiece in itself), two essays(one on a solar eclipse, and one on what it has meant to him to be `A Jew in England'), and two poems.
Litvinoff's last book was published a quarter of a century ago, and none of his novels are currently in print. (See my Amazon reviews of The Faces of Terror; Blood on the Snow; The Face of Terror; The Man Next Door). He is now 92; and it must be gratifying for him that this memoir at least has been re-issued in England, and as a Classic at that.
He would of course not be the only upwardly mobile Jew coming from that unpromising setting, but, as in all these cases, each such ascent seems like a small miracle.
On www.amazon.co.uk I have reviewed the 2008 reissue of this book in England as a Penguin Modern Classic. That edition also includes a 35 page introduction to Litvinoff's life by Patrick Wright (a small masterpiece in itself), two essays(one on a solar eclipse, and one on what it has meant to him to be `A Jew in England'), and two poems.
Litvinoff's last book was published a quarter of a century ago, and none of his novels are currently in print. (See my Amazon reviews of The Faces of Terror; Blood on the Snow; The Face of Terror; The Man Next Door). He is now 92; and it must be gratifying for him that this memoir at least has been re-issued in England, and as a Classic at that.
0 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Coming of age in a Jewish immigrant neighbourhood, nothing new...
15 May 2011
Another in an endless line of perfectly respectable coming-of-age memoirs covering Jewish immigrant neighbourhoods. Litvinoff himself returns to the East End in his mind after many years; he announces in the preface that he had once been told to bury any literary pretension regarding the past as "an unhealthy preoccupation with sex and squalor". He obeyed the suggestion and burnt the manuscript, but here he tries to reconstruct the vanished world of his own adolescence and the East End. As Britain's Jews finally move beyond shame and name-changing mimesis, the book may be of interest, but there are countless other novels and memoirs covering the same dingy cabbage-smelling world of filthy stockings, furtive couplings, gaslit Yiddish theater and so on. Only for scholars of the East End and those interested in Litvinoff himself, and, of course, those with an unhealthy preoccupation with sex and squalor.
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