Journey Through a Small Planet

In a series of vivid autobiographical sketches, Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his turbulent and poverty-stricken childhood in London's East End. His family were part of the close-knit community persecuted Jews from the Russian Empire living in Bethnal green in the 1920's 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 in that one square mile of overcrowded slums generated explosive tensions. Litvinoff remembers the departure of his anarcho-communist father for Russia, and the coming of a stepfather... the battles for is individuality in street and tenement...schooldays and first jobs in the fur trade or as a meat porter...joining the communist Party at the age of eleven...choosing between the doss house and the Jewish Board of Guardians when homeless...and adolescent exuberance for sex... and dreams of writing. He brings to life and extraordinary array of Dickensian characters, and portrays a society rooted in its past, its customs and its rituals.