Emanuel Litvinoff - 1915-2011

I was sorry to hear of the death of Emanuel Litvinoff, who has died peacefully at the age of 96. He was a novelist, an editor, a poet. I particularly admired his Journey Through a Small Planet, his memoir of the Jewish East End. Emanuel Litvinoff was one of twenty poets included in the Five Leaves' anthology Passionate Renewal: Jewish poetry in Britain since 1945. At the launch, a decade ago, by then an old man, Litvinoff described, to a new generation of readers, how in 1952 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts he read his poem "To TS Eliot". He had written it following buying Eliot's Penguin Selected Poems, finding that Eliot's anti-Semitic poems from the 1920s were still included; poems like "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar". Litvinoff's poem is a blistering attack on Eliot:
"I am not one accepted in your parish. / Bleistein is my relative..." and, after describing the horrors of "walking with Cohen" at Treblinka he finishes one stanza "I thought what an angry poem / you would have made of it, given the pity."
Just as Litvinoff was about to begin, in walked TS Eliot with his entourage. Litvinoff said "I nearly died", but he read the poem "and it absolutely stunned everybody". There was uproar. To his credit - reported by another Jewish poet, Dannie Abse, sitting close, Eliot put his head down and muttered "It's a good poem; it's a very good poem."
One poem in the anthology "Earth and Eden", includes the lines "When time and memory intersect the sun / there is happiness..." I hope there will be a memorial gathering and reading from Emanuel Litvinoff's work.

Camden news

The Camden New Journal is always worth reading, regardless of where you live, having unusually good coverage for a free newspaper, and an excellent Review section. When in London I usually nip across from St Pancras station to Judd Street where there is a box of them. The current issue features two literary articles of note. The first is the big debate on the future of libraries in Camden, where the nice American company LSSI is offering to take over the library service. Of course they promise that there will be no closures, the improved service will be run more economically for the tax-payer and everyone will walk off hand in hand to a glorious future. And who could doubt them?

Elsewhere in the paper there is another story of the Con-Dem elysium in which we are living. The writer Emanuel Litvinoff (many of whose poems appear in Five Leaves' Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945) has fallen on hard times and the local Council has withdrawn his carer. He can't afford the £150 a week to keep the service he had. He was told he should sign on and claim Job Seekers Allowance. Emanuel is 97. His partner can't sign on as she is unavailable for work as she has to look after him. As well as being a great poet, Emanuel wrote one of the best books of life in the East End in the 1930s when he was fed by the Sally Army and was given old boots by the Jewish Board of Guardians. His Journey Through a Small Planet is still available from Penguin. As he said in the paper "It seems the same as 1931 all over again. This is a depression caused by financiars and bankers, but it is the poorest who are paying for it."