Emanuel Litvinoff

Emanuel Litvinoff was born in what he called the Jewish ghetto of London’s East End. His parents fled from pogroms in Odessa to England, and Litvinoff grew up in poverty, often sleeping in doorways after leaving home. Although drawn to pacifism, he was persuaded to enlist during World War II after learning the magnitude of Nazi persecution of Jews. He first gained success as a poet, notably confronting the antisemitism of T. S. Eliot. After two poetry collections, he turned to novels and wrote plays for television. Following a visit to the Soviet Union in 1955, he pioneered the campaign for Soviet Jewry.