Emanuel Litvinoff > Quotes

“Perhaps I should go back a few years earlier. My parents, who travelled from Odessa, the Russian city on the Black Sea, shortly before the 1914 war, were part of a vast migration of Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression to the dream of America that obsessed poor men all over Europe. The tailors thought of it as a place where people had, maybe, three, four different suits to wear. Glaziers grew dizzy with excitement reckoning up the number of windows in even one little skyscraper. Cobblers counted twelve million feet, a shoe on each. There was gold in the streets for all trades; a meat dinner every single day. And Freedom. That was not something to be sneezed at, either.

But my parents never got to America.”
― Emanuel Litvinoff, Journey through a Small Planet

“One thought of the past as a collection of dusty photos in the attic of the mind, a bundle of old letters, a grief that the years had dulled. But the past was never over. It was here in the room with them. It was the enemy on the other side of the city.”
― Emanuel Litvinoff, Ett rum i Berlin