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Journey through a Small Planet
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.
138 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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December 10, 2019
Highly recommended for those who like books about London, and reading about the interwar years.
Journey Through A Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff is a masterly evocation of a long-vanished world in the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel of London's Jewish East End in the 1920s and 30s. The descriptions bring this distinctive, vibrant community vividly to life. A place awash with wonderful characters and stories amidst the squalor, poverty and daily grind.
Having enjoyed every page, it is no surprise that Penguin books identified Journey Through A Small Planet as a worthy addition to their Penguin Modern Classic imprint. The Penguin Modern Classic edition contains a comprehensive introduction about Emanuel Litvinoff written by Patrick Wright; the original book, first published in 1972, which consists of 12 chapters of reminiscences of Emanuel Litvinoff's childhood and teenage years; plus an appendix of two essays and two poems.
4/5
Journey Through A Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff is a masterly evocation of a long-vanished world in the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel of London's Jewish East End in the 1920s and 30s. The descriptions bring this distinctive, vibrant community vividly to life. A place awash with wonderful characters and stories amidst the squalor, poverty and daily grind.
Having enjoyed every page, it is no surprise that Penguin books identified Journey Through A Small Planet as a worthy addition to their Penguin Modern Classic imprint. The Penguin Modern Classic edition contains a comprehensive introduction about Emanuel Litvinoff written by Patrick Wright; the original book, first published in 1972, which consists of 12 chapters of reminiscences of Emanuel Litvinoff's childhood and teenage years; plus an appendix of two essays and two poems.
4/5
May 20, 2020
this memoir would've been even better if the author hadn't been so insistent on describing the breasts of pretty much every woman that makes an appearance in this story and doing so in the strangest/cringiest way possible lol
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November 22, 2011This most extraordinary book came across my radar after reading a recent obituary of the author, but he was well known in England for having stood up to TS Eliot's anti-semitism, and as a fixture in England's literary scene. The book blew my mind with its window into Brick Lane before Monica Ali's Bengali Brick Lane--this was the Eastern European, shtetl Brick Lane/East End of London replete with all the same overcrowded pathos, pathology, and exploding tenement life of New York's Lower East Side, including Yiddish as the predominant language. An incredible and eye opening memoir--not the England we know, not even through Dickens' eyes..
August 6, 2018
A book I picked up on impulse while noseying through the travel section in the library (not really where it belongs, as it happens). I'd never heard of Emanuel Litvinoff but thought that an account of growing up in the Jewish 'ghetto' of 1920s/30s London (long gone, replaced by a community of more recent migrants, mostly from further east, even when Litvinoff was writing in the early 1970s) might be quite interesting.
The edition I read comes with an extensive introduction written by Patrick Wright, describing a trip that he made around the neighbourhood in the 1990s with Litvinoff, and providing quite detailed background biographical detail about a man who, at the time that edition went to print, was well into his 90s, but still alive. That introduction was rather useful context, which I think added to what I got out of the memoir itself. I'm less less taken with the other 'extras' added to this edition: a previously unpublished short story about a solar eclipse, a handful of poems and - slightly more interestingly - notes for a speech he made in the mid 1960s about what it meant to him to be both English and Jewish.
Though, for the most part, a memoir, it begins with a short story, an account of what drivers a young man not long off the boat in London in 1914 to go back to Russia and throw in his lot with some band or other of would-be revolutionaries, fighting Tsarist oppression. It is, in essence, I think, his imagining of the story of his father, whom he never met and who it is assumed, perished in revolution-era Russia. In marked contrast with the other short story included as an appendix to the book, this left me curious as to what his novels might be like.
There follows a series of shortish vignettes about growing up poor, a recent immigrant in London's East End, one of nine children in (if I was paying attention properly) a two bedroom house. Maybe it is no more than reflection of the fact that growing up in England at that point in history would have certain commonalities regardless of one's place in the social hierarchy, but there were times when it reminded me a little of my now rather hazy memory of reading Roald Dahl's (more child-friendly) account of growing up in much the same time period Boy - although as I read it about 30 years ago, I might be wrong...
In the description of his time being taught shoe-making at the Cordswainer's School in 1929 there are odd little reminders, for example in the attitudes of the 'Masters' towards their charges that this is period closer chronologically to that of Dickens A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist than to the present day, although I can think of no equivalent in either of those books of Litvinoff's encounter with a young Italian boy convinced that Benito Mussolini was his country's saviour (I wonder whether the young Litvinoff was as horrified as he says he was, or whether this is coloured by the hindsight of a man writing 40 years after the fact - I have to admit to being rather ignorant as to the extent to which anti-semitism was baked in to Mussolini's brand of fascism from the start, or coloured by his later alliance with Hitler.
His tales of frustrated and or aborted attempts to form relationships with girls he met at the Young Communists or who came into his family's social milieu go to show that there are aspects of adolescence that haven't changed a great deal in the last nearly 100 years and he deserves a comic adjectival neologism award for his reference to retreating into "the masturbating dark of the cinema" after the failure of one such relationship. (I also find myself wondering if this is a window into the behaviour of cinema patrons of the era.) An interesting read about a time now largely slipping out of living memory.
The edition I read comes with an extensive introduction written by Patrick Wright, describing a trip that he made around the neighbourhood in the 1990s with Litvinoff, and providing quite detailed background biographical detail about a man who, at the time that edition went to print, was well into his 90s, but still alive. That introduction was rather useful context, which I think added to what I got out of the memoir itself. I'm less less taken with the other 'extras' added to this edition: a previously unpublished short story about a solar eclipse, a handful of poems and - slightly more interestingly - notes for a speech he made in the mid 1960s about what it meant to him to be both English and Jewish.
Though, for the most part, a memoir, it begins with a short story, an account of what drivers a young man not long off the boat in London in 1914 to go back to Russia and throw in his lot with some band or other of would-be revolutionaries, fighting Tsarist oppression. It is, in essence, I think, his imagining of the story of his father, whom he never met and who it is assumed, perished in revolution-era Russia. In marked contrast with the other short story included as an appendix to the book, this left me curious as to what his novels might be like.
There follows a series of shortish vignettes about growing up poor, a recent immigrant in London's East End, one of nine children in (if I was paying attention properly) a two bedroom house. Maybe it is no more than reflection of the fact that growing up in England at that point in history would have certain commonalities regardless of one's place in the social hierarchy, but there were times when it reminded me a little of my now rather hazy memory of reading Roald Dahl's (more child-friendly) account of growing up in much the same time period Boy - although as I read it about 30 years ago, I might be wrong...
In the description of his time being taught shoe-making at the Cordswainer's School in 1929 there are odd little reminders, for example in the attitudes of the 'Masters' towards their charges that this is period closer chronologically to that of Dickens A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist than to the present day, although I can think of no equivalent in either of those books of Litvinoff's encounter with a young Italian boy convinced that Benito Mussolini was his country's saviour (I wonder whether the young Litvinoff was as horrified as he says he was, or whether this is coloured by the hindsight of a man writing 40 years after the fact - I have to admit to being rather ignorant as to the extent to which anti-semitism was baked in to Mussolini's brand of fascism from the start, or coloured by his later alliance with Hitler.
His tales of frustrated and or aborted attempts to form relationships with girls he met at the Young Communists or who came into his family's social milieu go to show that there are aspects of adolescence that haven't changed a great deal in the last nearly 100 years and he deserves a comic adjectival neologism award for his reference to retreating into "the masturbating dark of the cinema" after the failure of one such relationship. (I also find myself wondering if this is a window into the behaviour of cinema patrons of the era.) An interesting read about a time now largely slipping out of living memory.
November 29, 2014
If you've ever wandered through the back streets, alleyways, and courtyards of old Spitalfields and Whitechapel in London's East End; sensing the dim and now somewhat distant presence of a bygone era and an old world Jewish culture now all but vanished from its precincts, and wondered what life would really have been like for the working class immigrant families who lived and worked there - this book will draw you as vivid a picture as any other book or film I've yet encountered.
Emanuel Litvinoff was born and raised in the heart of that London - when the community there was at its inter-war period 'zenith' (if such a word were appropriate) of the 1920s and '30s. His stories convey wonderfully, with vigour and laconic humour the sights and sounds and smells of that lost world. Having grown up and served in the army during the Second World War, he moved out of the neighbourhood he'd grown up in. Across the decades following the war so too would most of the other Jewish neighbours - Londoners established enough by then to move away from the grotty tenements and filthy market streets, out to the suburbs and beyond.
In the opening pages' "Author's Note" Litvinoff explains how early in the 1970s he found himself revisiting the old streets again with a friend. The cover photo above was taken at that time:
"...In Old Montague Street, the very heart of the original Jewish quarter, nothing was left of the synagogue but a broken wooden door carved with the Lion of Judah.
The tenement I grew up in had somehow survived shrunken by time but otherwise unchanged - the same broken tiles in the passage, the same rickety stairs, the pervasive smell of cats. I took my friend up to the first floor landing window to show him the small yard with its overflowing dustbin. That, too, had not changed. Quite suddenly, a vivid memory returned. I was twelve years old: the news had come that once again I had failed the scholarship. Outside it was raining. I sat on the window ledge and carved my initials in the wood. When I looked they were still there, jagged and irregular, 'E.L.'
The door of my old apartment opened and for one moment I expected to see that same unhappy, resentful boy emerge to wander disconsolately into the street. A shabby, elderly man came out carrying a bucket full of refuse. He stared at us mistrustfully.
'Are you gennelmen from the Sanit'ry Department of the Tahn 'All?' he asked.
I felt indescribably bereaved, a ghost haunting the irrecoverable past. That evening, when I returned to Hertfordshire I began a memoir, 'My East End Tenement'. This book has grown out of that beginning."
With chapters such as "Uncle Solly's Sporting Life", "The God I Failed", and "A Charity Pair of Boots", Litvinoff charmingly weaves his coming-of-age tale amid the poverty and the 'sweating shops', and the ever-present fug of stale cigarette smoke and the smell of pickled herrings and frying onions.
"The tenement was a village in miniature, a place of ingathered exiles who supplemented their Jewish speech with phrases in Russian, Polish or Lithuanian. We sang songs of the ghettoes or folk-tunes of the old Russian Empire and ate the traditional dishes of its countryside. The news came to us in Yiddish newspapers and was usually bad..."
The tales of Emanuel's childhood pass and he soon must join the working masses, and make a contribution to the household. He finds employment at Dorfmann's "rat-infested fur workshop":
"'Don't you want to improve yourself anymore?' my mother said in her suffering voice.
She stood at the stove ladling soup into my plate, the latest baby squirming in the crook of her arm. A man's cardigan hung shapelessly on her body, but her belly was seen to be big again. We were ten already, the largest family in the buildings, and nothing helped - not whispered conferences with neighbours, nor the tubes and syringes concealed among the underwear at the botttom of the wardrobe, and certainly not Fat Yetta, who sometimes lifted the curse of fertility from other women but only left my mother haggard with pain and exhaustion.
'Manny,' she said, 'I'm talking to you!'"
I loved this book, and the imagery that was brought to my mind by Litvinoff's atmospheric writing. This is the real world that existed behind such stories as Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid For Two Farthings, and the tales of characters who my grandparents probably knew. It was a pleasure to visit this particular small planet.
Emanuel Litvinoff was born and raised in the heart of that London - when the community there was at its inter-war period 'zenith' (if such a word were appropriate) of the 1920s and '30s. His stories convey wonderfully, with vigour and laconic humour the sights and sounds and smells of that lost world. Having grown up and served in the army during the Second World War, he moved out of the neighbourhood he'd grown up in. Across the decades following the war so too would most of the other Jewish neighbours - Londoners established enough by then to move away from the grotty tenements and filthy market streets, out to the suburbs and beyond.
In the opening pages' "Author's Note" Litvinoff explains how early in the 1970s he found himself revisiting the old streets again with a friend. The cover photo above was taken at that time:
"...In Old Montague Street, the very heart of the original Jewish quarter, nothing was left of the synagogue but a broken wooden door carved with the Lion of Judah.
The tenement I grew up in had somehow survived shrunken by time but otherwise unchanged - the same broken tiles in the passage, the same rickety stairs, the pervasive smell of cats. I took my friend up to the first floor landing window to show him the small yard with its overflowing dustbin. That, too, had not changed. Quite suddenly, a vivid memory returned. I was twelve years old: the news had come that once again I had failed the scholarship. Outside it was raining. I sat on the window ledge and carved my initials in the wood. When I looked they were still there, jagged and irregular, 'E.L.'
The door of my old apartment opened and for one moment I expected to see that same unhappy, resentful boy emerge to wander disconsolately into the street. A shabby, elderly man came out carrying a bucket full of refuse. He stared at us mistrustfully.
'Are you gennelmen from the Sanit'ry Department of the Tahn 'All?' he asked.
I felt indescribably bereaved, a ghost haunting the irrecoverable past. That evening, when I returned to Hertfordshire I began a memoir, 'My East End Tenement'. This book has grown out of that beginning."
With chapters such as "Uncle Solly's Sporting Life", "The God I Failed", and "A Charity Pair of Boots", Litvinoff charmingly weaves his coming-of-age tale amid the poverty and the 'sweating shops', and the ever-present fug of stale cigarette smoke and the smell of pickled herrings and frying onions.
"The tenement was a village in miniature, a place of ingathered exiles who supplemented their Jewish speech with phrases in Russian, Polish or Lithuanian. We sang songs of the ghettoes or folk-tunes of the old Russian Empire and ate the traditional dishes of its countryside. The news came to us in Yiddish newspapers and was usually bad..."
The tales of Emanuel's childhood pass and he soon must join the working masses, and make a contribution to the household. He finds employment at Dorfmann's "rat-infested fur workshop":
"'Don't you want to improve yourself anymore?' my mother said in her suffering voice.
She stood at the stove ladling soup into my plate, the latest baby squirming in the crook of her arm. A man's cardigan hung shapelessly on her body, but her belly was seen to be big again. We were ten already, the largest family in the buildings, and nothing helped - not whispered conferences with neighbours, nor the tubes and syringes concealed among the underwear at the botttom of the wardrobe, and certainly not Fat Yetta, who sometimes lifted the curse of fertility from other women but only left my mother haggard with pain and exhaustion.
'Manny,' she said, 'I'm talking to you!'"
I loved this book, and the imagery that was brought to my mind by Litvinoff's atmospheric writing. This is the real world that existed behind such stories as Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid For Two Farthings, and the tales of characters who my grandparents probably knew. It was a pleasure to visit this particular small planet.
December 8, 2014
Another exploration of the East End, and so much a better one. This is beautifully written, candid, and by one of the young men who for Harkness probably 'looked as most young men of his class look, until one has time to recognise their individuality’ (39). Written about a period a just a little later than Harkness to be sure, this opens a window onto the thoughts and dreams and intense individuality seething behind what to middle class eyes apparently looks all the same. How could we all look the same?
He returns to it as a much older man, finds it completely changed, can no longer see himself in the tenement room he grew up in. Who cannot identify with his sense of loss?
and so he began writing this...
So much resonated, it is a wonderful coming of age story of a smart kid facing a very hard life -- and facing the blossoming panic in his stomach that he is trapped in a working poverty for the rest of it. There is love and friendship and violence, along with a couple of evocative sections on what it means to live in a packed tenement block full of Jewish immigrant families, the closeness of the world:
And I loved this passage so evocative of the streets -- and one of the things that changes over time as customs and culture and people change, one of the things that is lost forever once it is lost, and that we can only find again through the pages of books:
I'm looking forward to his fiction.
Until I was sixteen I lived in the East London borough of Bethnal Green, in a small street that is now just a name on a map. Almost every house in it has gone and it exists, if at all, only in the pages of this book. It was a part of a district populated by persecuted Jews from the Russian empire and transformed into a crowded East European ghetto full of synagogues, backroom factories and little grocery stores reeking of pickled herring, garlic sausage and onion bread. The vitality compressed into that one square mile of overcrowded slums generated explosive tensions. We were all dreamers, each convinced it was his destiny to grow rich, or famous, or change the world into a marvellous place of freedom and justice. No wonder so many of us were haunted by bitterness, failure, despair (9).
He returns to it as a much older man, finds it completely changed, can no longer see himself in the tenement room he grew up in. Who cannot identify with his sense of loss?
I felt indescribably bereaved, a ghost haunting the irrecoverable past (10).
and so he began writing this...
So much resonated, it is a wonderful coming of age story of a smart kid facing a very hard life -- and facing the blossoming panic in his stomach that he is trapped in a working poverty for the rest of it. There is love and friendship and violence, along with a couple of evocative sections on what it means to live in a packed tenement block full of Jewish immigrant families, the closeness of the world:
In as close a community as ours, each newcomer added a new complexity, changing us all a little and sometimes even influencing the whole pattern of our fate. For Mendel Shaffer, the arrival of Kramer's sister, Freda, was momentous (52).
And I loved this passage so evocative of the streets -- and one of the things that changes over time as customs and culture and people change, one of the things that is lost forever once it is lost, and that we can only find again through the pages of books:
A further disagreeable surprise awaited. The Welfare Officer chose to deliver me to my new lodgings in person. Even blindfolded, I'd have known where we were by the smell of the different streets -- reek of rotten fruit: Spitalfields; scent of tobacco warehouses: Commercial Street; the suffocating airless stench of the Cambridge Picture Palace; Hanbury Street and the pungency of beer from Charrington's brewery. Then Brick Lane with half the women from our street jostling among the market stalls (115).
I'm looking forward to his fiction.
February 21, 2016
Quite brilliant. A beautifully written memoir of growing up in the Jewish East End of London in the 1920s and 30s. Each chapter is a vignette. Most involve his travails at school -- which he left at 14 -- work and at home, and describe the saturating poverty, and the resulting politics, of the time. Litvinoff had a wonderful, elegant writing style.
On leaving work at a meat market: "night was dispersing like smoke when I left Spitalfield and walked aimlessly through the blue dusk of the morning". His friend's 20-something aunt "had the sadness of small Jewish towns hemmed in by ancient curses".
His street was "disorderly with light, colour, texture, posture, movement, noise and silence" but "in the verminous night our lungs sucked at the used air as we struggled in a collective dream of suffocation." And at home, with his large family, "you even had to fight for a corner of the kitchen table" where his stepfather, when not betting at the track, "stirred his vermicelli and read 'the Freethinker' with the credulous fascination of a believer."
The chapter titled 'The battle for Mendel Shaffer' was particularly touching, telling the story of he struggle for a young boy's soul waged by the devout grandmother who raised him and his free-thinking father who suddenly returns like a godless messiah. He writes a lot about adolescent yearning for girls, including one, for a Hannah Fishbein, which results in his expulsion from the Young Communist League at the hands of another boy who likes her, on the grounds that he is a Trotskyist. "I didn't know what Trotskyism was exactly," he writes, "but someone said they were shooting people in Russia for it."
On leaving work at a meat market: "night was dispersing like smoke when I left Spitalfield and walked aimlessly through the blue dusk of the morning". His friend's 20-something aunt "had the sadness of small Jewish towns hemmed in by ancient curses".
His street was "disorderly with light, colour, texture, posture, movement, noise and silence" but "in the verminous night our lungs sucked at the used air as we struggled in a collective dream of suffocation." And at home, with his large family, "you even had to fight for a corner of the kitchen table" where his stepfather, when not betting at the track, "stirred his vermicelli and read 'the Freethinker' with the credulous fascination of a believer."
The chapter titled 'The battle for Mendel Shaffer' was particularly touching, telling the story of he struggle for a young boy's soul waged by the devout grandmother who raised him and his free-thinking father who suddenly returns like a godless messiah. He writes a lot about adolescent yearning for girls, including one, for a Hannah Fishbein, which results in his expulsion from the Young Communist League at the hands of another boy who likes her, on the grounds that he is a Trotskyist. "I didn't know what Trotskyism was exactly," he writes, "but someone said they were shooting people in Russia for it."
February 15, 2015
Enjoyable coming-of-age memoir of 20s and 30s Jewish Whitechapel. Think of it as the non-fiction partner of Roland Camberton's 'Rain on Pavements', with which it has quite a lot in common (revolutionary politics everywhere - fascists, Communists, Zionists - and lots of pubescent yearnings. And everyone's short of a pair of boots).
The appendices in this edition are a little odd. The short story is, well, fine, but a little out of place. The thoughts on Israeli/Hebrew v Diaspora/English identity interesting, though a bit shoehorned in.
One for the London bookshelf. There's a map in the edition too, which is handy for the Londonist explorer.
NB I didn't know that what is known today as the (historic) Truman brewery - with a pang of nostalgia - was actually the Charrington brewery before that. Nu.
The appendices in this edition are a little odd. The short story is, well, fine, but a little out of place. The thoughts on Israeli/Hebrew v Diaspora/English identity interesting, though a bit shoehorned in.
One for the London bookshelf. There's a map in the edition too, which is handy for the Londonist explorer.
NB I didn't know that what is known today as the (historic) Truman brewery - with a pang of nostalgia - was actually the Charrington brewery before that. Nu.
January 15, 2020
While not a book I would normally be drawn to, my daughter bought this for me at a used bookstore in London. My relatives lived in Boston rather than London, but they were also Jews that escaped from Russia around the same time as the author's parents so there was likely a similarity in their stories. Sadly, I found the introduction completely off-putting, but luckily didn't give up as I really enjoyed reading the stories of what it was like to grow up in the East End of London.
October 20, 2021
'That summer I was sixteen there were no sparrows in the streets, and the sun never shone, and the laughter of distant voices mocked my despair. All day I inhaled the hairs of dead foxes, skunks and rabbits in Dorfmann's rat-infested fur workshop, and would do so, it seemed until my lungs were stuffed as full as a feather pillow. At night I slept amid the debris of failure - God had torn up my dreams like an impatient schoolmaster.'
This was a really excellent memoir which brings to life the Jewish East End in a way that I have never truly read before. His portrayal of his own plight (he battles poor conditions, family troubles, homelessness, assault and discrimination) and that of his fellow Jewish locals is intense and unerring in its pursuit of realism. It asks what it means to be born in a place that you are still considered a foreigner (even if you consider yourself to be local) and how things began to get worse not better in the interwar period. It makes it a book well worth your while. However, I would say there are a few parts haven't aged well, not least his obsession with describing breasts which is creepy to say the least. The descriptions are however beautiful and it is brilliantly written.
'The moon rode in an empty sky. It looked down at the street as if it was a stranger.'
This was a really excellent memoir which brings to life the Jewish East End in a way that I have never truly read before. His portrayal of his own plight (he battles poor conditions, family troubles, homelessness, assault and discrimination) and that of his fellow Jewish locals is intense and unerring in its pursuit of realism. It asks what it means to be born in a place that you are still considered a foreigner (even if you consider yourself to be local) and how things began to get worse not better in the interwar period. It makes it a book well worth your while. However, I would say there are a few parts haven't aged well, not least his obsession with describing breasts which is creepy to say the least. The descriptions are however beautiful and it is brilliantly written.
'The moon rode in an empty sky. It looked down at the street as if it was a stranger.'
August 11, 2021
This is less a traditional memoir than a series of vignettes showing Litvonoff’s life growing up in the Jewish community surrounding Brick Lane in London’s East End between the wars. Alongside his look at the everyday lives of his family and neighbours there is also quite a focus on his political awakening - specifically with communism as was fairly common among many of the working classes of the time. Highly evocative of a time and lifestyle that has long disappeared as well as a thoughtful analysis of the position on immigrants in society and how this impacts on a boy as he grows up and gains awareness that he is seen as different.
May 28, 2023
"It was part of a district populated by persecuted Jews; A crowded East European ghetto full of synagogues, backroom factories and little grocery stores reeking of pickled herring, garlic sausage and onion bread."
In his autobiographical novel, based on the life of my friends uncle, Emmanuel Litvinoff recreates his poverty-stricken and turbulent childhood in the Jewish East End. Litvinoff recalls his battle for individuality both at school and within the home - An overcrowding Whitechapel tenement network of emigres, where the rattle of the sewing machine belonging to his dressmaker mother permeates with the chatter of old country Yiddish and neighbourly gossip.
In his autobiographical novel, based on the life of my friends uncle, Emmanuel Litvinoff recreates his poverty-stricken and turbulent childhood in the Jewish East End. Litvinoff recalls his battle for individuality both at school and within the home - An overcrowding Whitechapel tenement network of emigres, where the rattle of the sewing machine belonging to his dressmaker mother permeates with the chatter of old country Yiddish and neighbourly gossip.
December 28, 2017
Litvinoff is no Chaim Potok.
November 3, 2018
Memories from an upbringing of a jewish boy in London in the 30's, in the poor East End, London.
Which gives a fantastic insight of Life as it was then for the less fortunate.
Which gives a fantastic insight of Life as it was then for the less fortunate.
November 14, 2023
3.5 stars.
January 16, 2024
I can relate. We are from the same shtetl, Litvinoff & I. Decades apart, yet sentiment the same. I enjoyed this read. It was like coming home.
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February 13, 2024An insight, a glimpse into a lost London.
June 24, 2020
I absolutely loved his writing style. And the stories in the appendix were brilliant. But the main story didn´t quite go as far into his life as I would have liked. And at moments it seemed downright boring.
October 27, 2016
I thought it was quite well written but it didn't really finish - would have liked to have known what he did next (work? leave the area? study?)
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews