To T. S. Eliot

Litvinoff was one of the first to raise publicly the implications of T. S. Eliot's negative references to Jews in a number of his poems, in his own poem "To T. S. Eliot". Litvinoff, an admirer of Eliot, was appalled to find Eliot republishing lines he had written in the 1920s about "money in furs" and the "protozoic slime" of Bleistein's "lustreless, protrusive eye" only a few years after the Holocaust, in his Selected Poems of 1948. When Litvinoff got up to announce the poem at a poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951 the event's host, Sir Herbert Read, declared, "Oh Good, Tom's just come in," referring to Eliot. Despite feeling "nervous",^[5] Litvinoff decided that "the poem was entitled to be read" and proceeded to recite it to the packed but silent room:

So shall I say it is not eminence chills
but the snigger from behind the covers of history,
the sly words and the cold heart
and footprints made with blood upon a continent?
Let your words
tread lightly on this earth of Europe

lest my people’s bones protest.^[6]

In the pandemonium after Litvinoff read the poem Eliot reportedly stated, "It's a good poem, it's a very good poem."^[7]

Struma

Litvinoff is also known for his poem "Struma", written after the Struma disaster. Volunteering for military service in January 1940, Litvinoff saw his membership of the British Army as a straightforward matter of combating Nazi evil, but the sinking of the Struma in February 1942 complicated this. An old schooner with an unreliable second-hand engine, the Struma had left Romania in December 1941 crowded with nearly 800 Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis. After engine failure on the Black Sea she was towed into Istanbul harbour. Her passengers hoped to travel overland to Palestine, but Turkey forbade them to disembark unless Britain allowed them to settle in Palestine. British authorities rejected the refugees' request, and after weeks of deadlock Turkish authorities towed the Struma back into the Black Sea and set her adrift. The next day, 24 February 1942, she exploded and sank, leaving an estimated 791 dead and only one survivor. It emerged years later that the Struma had been torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. This was unknown at the time, and Litvinoff believed that the British were responsible. The disaster "blurred the frontiers of evil" in a way that left him reluctant to describe himself as "English" or to seek the kind of assimilation achieved by other Jewish writers in Britain.^[8]

The poem contains the lines:

Today my khaki is a badge of shame,
Its duty meaningless; my name
Is Moses and I summon plague to Pharaoh.
Today my mantle is Sorrow and O
My crown is Thorn. I sit darkly with the years

And centuries of years, bowed by my heritage of tears.

The Lost Europeans

Ten years after the war Litvinoff went to live in Berlin. He described it as "a strangely exhilarating experience, like being under fire".^[9] The Lost Europeans (1960) was Litvinoff's first novel and was born out of this experience. Set in post-war Berlin, it follows the return of two Jews to Berlin after the Holocaust. One returns for both symbolic and material restitution, the other for revenge on the man who betrayed him.

The Man Next Door

The Man Next Door (1968), described by The New York Times as "the British answer to Portnoy's Complaint", tackles British suburban anti-Semitism. Set in the fictional Home Counties town of Maidenford, it features a despondent middle-aged vacuum cleaner salesman who sees his new neighbours, wealthy self-made Jews, as the root of his problems and wages an escalating campaign of hatred against them.

Journey Through A Small Planet

Litvinoff's best-known work is probably Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), in which he chronicled his working-class Jewish childhood and early adult years in the East End, a small cluster of streets that was right next to the City of London, but had more in common with the cities of Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa. Litvinoff describes the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel, the smells 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.

The Faces of Terror Trilogy

The trilogy Faces of Terror follows a pair of young revolutionaries from the streets of the East End and their political passage over the years to Stalinist Russia. The first novel, A Death Out of Season (1973), is set around the Siege of Sidney Street and the fermenting anarchism of East London. The novel describes youth seduced by revolution through the characters Peter the Painter and Lydia Alexandrova, a young aristocrat who rebels against her class. Blood on the Snow (1975), the sequel, finds Lydia and Peter now committed Bolsheviks, in the chaos of famine and civil war in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The final instalment of the trilogy, The Face of Terror (1978), is set under the regime of Stalin, where revolution has turned into repression, and the ideals of freedom that Peter and Lydia once had have crumbled under the weight of guilt and disillusion.

Falls the Shadow

Falls the Shadow (1983) was a controversial novel, written because Litvinoff had become concerned at how he considered Israel to be invoking the memory of the Holocaust to justify its own outrages. Its narrative concerns an apparently distinguished and benign Israeli citizen who is assassinated in the street, then found to have been a concentration camp officer who had escaped using the identity of one of his victims.