An unassuming cul-de-sac in the heart of London’s former Jewish East End, Hare Marsh largely comprises one single building: a former dairy warehouse turned vintage shop which, after lengthy renovations, now houses flats, a bar, and an on-site yoga studio. This familiar story of so-called regeneration has one crucial difference: the owners of the new business have decided to decorate the side of their building with an enormous spray-painted portrait of the writer Emanuel Litvinoff (1915-2011). Long since out of print, his work has much to teach us about the complicated politics of Anglo-Jewish history. This task is all the more important when the late writer risks being transformed into a part of the East End heritage trail himself.
Though best known today for his 1972 memoir Journey Through a Small Planet – reissued by Penguin in 2008 – Litvinoff made his living as a writer of fiction. The author of six novels, his most important work was the epic Faces of Terror trilogy, which cast a jaundiced eye over the revolutionary years of the early twentieth century. The books’ covers testify to the pulpy contents within. It is little surprise to know that the series grew out of Litvinoff’s attempt to write for the screen. Hidden amongst this historical fiction, though, lurks a surprisingly subtle message about memory, ambition, and political desperation.
The first book in the series, A Death Out of Season (1973), fictionalises the infamous anarchist ‘expropriations’ that took place in London in the years immediately preceding World War I. The most famous of these robberies led to the death of three policemen outside an East End jewellers; the dramatic Siege of Sidney Street was the result. Litvinoff’s novel repurposes a number of historical characters: a handful of obscure Latvian anarchists, then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill, and the mysterious Peter the Painter, the alleged leader of the expropriators. Alongside these real-life figures comes the fictional Lydia Alexandrova, a Russian aristocrat turned international revolutionary.
This was a world Litvinoff knew well. His parents were amongst the 150,000 Eastern European Jews who fled to the United Kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century. As Litvinoff recalled, these Yiddish-speaking refugees ‘spoke of Warsaw, Kishinev, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa as if they were neighbouring suburbs’. Though desperately poor, the streets of Whitechapel were imbued with a shared set of cultural reference points. Socialism and anarchism were commonplace. Largely self-educated, Litvinoff was himself briefly a member of the Young Communist League. Faced with a choice of conscription or deportation, his father meanwhile returned to Russia to be ‘swallowed up enigmatically by the revolution’. Litvinoff never saw him again.
Despite his youthful flirtation with the Party, Litvinoff was far from a committed Communist. The Party recruited heavily in the East End, offering members one potential route out of the ghetto. However, in the words of the scholar Valentine Cunningham, ‘a shifting leftist kaleidoscope’ made it difficult for would-be organic intellectuals to get their political bearings. As Litvinoff recalled, the Battle of Cable Street – when thousands of East Enders fended off the police to block the progress of Mosley’s fascists – gave the budding writer ‘a rather apocalyptic notion of political salvation’. Poetry became a refuge. In particular, T.S. Eliot’s writing – its attraction to and revulsion from the power of the masses – haunted Litvinoff. In 1951, he nevertheless ventured a public critique of his hero’s anti-semitism. The resulting scandal catapulted Litvinoff to fame, though he continued to revere Eliot.
By the early 1950s Litvinoff was working as a ghostwriter, a role which fuelled his interest in double identities. These themes emerged in full force in Blood on the Snow (1975), the second part of Faces of Terror. The novel finds the survivors of A Death Out of Season several years after the Sidney Street debacle. The 1917 Revolution has nearly won out. Rumours persist that the Tsar’s daughter Anastasia has somehow survived execution. Lydia has become a feared guerrilla leader, while Peter the Painter deploys another identity: Shtern, Bolshevik secret agent. ‘Fugitives from reality’ – political prisoners – dream up utopian solutions even grander than the one under which they suffer.
Litvinoff was acutely interested in the crisis of Jewish identity at midcentury, all too aware of how the horrors of the past were made to serve the present. The records of Vanguard Press, his American publisher, show that Litvinoffworked to produce a major compendium of essays on contemporary Jewish identity, to which he hoped to attract the likes of the dramatist Arthur Miller and the philosopher Martin Buber (and to which David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, strongly considered contributing). The project was too overwhelming for Litvinoff to complete.
In 1956, a thwarted attempt to visit the rabbi of Moscow alerted Litvinoff to the suppression of Jewish life in the USSR. As Litvinoff recalled in an unpublished memoir, he spent the trip ‘hearing voices from the house of the dead’. He returned to the UK determined to fight for the rights of ‘Soviet Jewry’, a campaign which saw Litvinoff develop connections with the Mossad. This expedient relationship no doubt informed the espionage stories on which the author was working.
Despite these connections, Litvinoff was no Zionist. Falls the Shadow (1983), his last novel, offered a particularly bitter critique of Israeli society. In a touch of dark humour, the book was named for a line in Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’. In truth, Litvinoff abhorred nationalism in all its forms. His disillusionment with Britain dated back to 1942, when a cargo ship filled with Jewish refugees was prevented from docking in Palestine. A combination of British and Turkish bureaucracy saw the Struma stranded in the Black Sea. The vessel was eventually torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, killing all but one of the 790 people on board.
Litvinoff later stated that the disaster ‘blurred the frontiers of evil’ as the official enemies of Nazism combined to betray its victims. The power of unknown decision-makers became the subject of The Face of Terror (1978), the final book of the eponymous series. Peter the Painter, scourge of Sidney Street, has by now risen up the ranks of the Soviet secret police. The idea wasn’t entirely fanciful: Jacob Peters, another Sidney Street hanger-on, really did go on to forge a career in Soviet intelligence. Meanwhile ‘rehearsals for the big one’ have begun to take place. As World War II draws closer, a new generation of Party loyalists start to push out the older revolutionaries.
On a rare foray out of the USSR, Lydia travels to Paris for the International Congress for the Defense of Culture, a real-life event. Litvinoff places her in the company of numerous real fellow travellers, including Aldous Huxley and a number of dissident Surrealists. For many Soviet sympathisers, the Congress represented hope. For Lydia it was punctuated by absences and missed opportunities, ‘the doubters silenced by rhetoric’. Considering defection, she is pursued by a suspiciously earnest American journalist. He considers Lydia ‘a bright thread in the tapestry of Russia’s revolutionary history’. Such vibrancy will not shelter her from the purges to come.
Taken together, these novels make two points. First, that Western leftists should be wary of the Soviet account of revolutionary history. Well-meaning skeptics could in fact honour the Revolution’s commitment to truth and justice by not kowtowing to the official Party line. This was a common enough viewpoint in the anti-Soviet West. There is, however, a second, more important takeaway. Litvinoff’s novels are a testament to the value of creatively analysing revolutionary history. Where ideologies claim to offer clear answers, novels are well-suited to examining complicated questions of loyalty, personal responsibility, and collective integrity. Scholarly examination and fictional reimagination need not in turn be rival visions of historical reflection.
Litvinoff at times got this balance wrong. Though Lydia emerges as the series’ protagonist, Litvinoff often struggled to flesh out his female characters. Lydia is sexualised by her peers and also by her author, likely seeking to satisfy the expectations of would-be thriller readers. In his efforts to critique the squalor of revolution — including the domestic and sexual violence that accompanied it — Litvinoff nonetheless sometimes verged into sensationalism.
This pulpy quality often saw Litvinoff compared to his contemporary Alexander Baron, whose novel The Lowlife (1963) was recently reissued by Faber to great acclaim. Baron contributed to the legend of British anarchism, helping to pen the screenplay for the 1960 film The Siege of Sidney Street. As it happens, Baron’s novel King Dido (1969) is set on the same street now graced with Litvinoff’s portrait. But while it is Litvinoff’s face which looms over Hare Marsh, it is Baron’s work which remains in print.
While Journey Through a Small Planet is surely Litvinoff’s masterpiece, the book’s enduring success has seen Litvinoff pigeonholed as an archetypal London writer. By contrast, his novels demand a high level of what we might call diasporic literacy: an awareness of what the social historian Patrick Wright dubbed ‘the glowing Whitechapel fragment’ of world history, wherein local stories stretch out to encompass impossibly large events. At the same time, Litvinoff’s decidedly non-academic work relies on a level of shared historical knowledge alien to much mass-market fiction today. He was in this sense a distinctive product of the Jewish East End and an uncommon populariser of radical history. As communal organisations continue to struggle to account for the political diversity of British Jews, Litvinoff’s novels speak to the long history of Jewish radicalism in Britain, one in which commitment and ambivalence thrived in equal measure.