Precarious fringes of an uncertain world: To the Quayside and Emanuel Litvinoff's European Jew

Abstract

In his introduction to Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland, Bryan Cheyette places Emanuel Litvinoff alongside English Jewish writers 'located at the center of English national culture', like Harold Pinter. 1 But unlike Pinter, who 'had to leave out a great deal in order to enter the pantheon of English literature' -namely, his Jewish upbringing and his coming-of-age in the social and cultural milieu of Jewish east London -Litvinoff takes himself and his characters out of England in order to stimulate and orient his postwar writing.By learning from Anglo-Jewish bestseller Louis Golding -for whom he was a ghost writer -and inverting the 'apologist' tradition from within which Golding wrote, Emanuel Litvinoff was able to produce novels that offer testimony to the great losses experienced by European Jews throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Litvinoff, Jews born in London, the generations before them that fled Russia and those established across other regions of Europe were part of one Jewish European story and it is this story that he sought to tell.Although decidedly 'not English', Litvinoff chose early on not to 'willingly emigrate from the English language spoken in English ways by mild, tolerant English people'. 2 Instead, he would use his literature to travel beyond the domestic confines of that English world and to investigate the European Jewish community of which he felt a part -a community burdened by a history of persecution and a relentlessly uncertain diasporic existence.As one contemporary critic wrote, 'Litvinoff was wholly concerned with the destruction of European Jewry'. 3 Yet it wasn't destruction, as such, that captivated Litvinoff. Rather, it was the potential for destruction that seemed embedded in each Jewish European generation -from medieval Spain to twentieth-century Germany. 'I am a Jew of the dispersion,' he would later write: 'who is heir not to the biblical inheritance but to that long 2,000 years of living inside a language and culture, on the precarious fringes of an uncertain world.' 4 This