Anarchism, Litvinoff recalls, in his lovely East End picaresque autobiography Journey Through a Small Planet, was in his blood, was of the very atmosphere in the streets where he lived, in the whole quarter. He never forgot childhood stories of anarchist leaflet campaigns against the imperialist First World War, of followers of Tolstoy and Kropotkin chasing army recruiters away from Bloom’s corner at the end of Brick Lane – men who met to argue about the wisdom of political bombing at the Jubilee Street Arbeter Fraint house, the socialist/anarchist club for Jewish immigrants. In his autobiography he would go on to write marvellous, nostalgic stories about his childhood among Yiddish-speaking immigrant leftists in the broad church of radical East End politics (people like Mendel Shaffer’s atheist father, who joined the Anarchists and the Communists and the Buddhists and the Socialist Zionists); stories of his own youthful scuffles with Oswald Mosley’s fascists on their incursions into the East End in the early Thirties; and about his craving for the ‘female nood’ which took him to the art classes at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute, in company with his vegetarian friend Morry Spitzer, who worked in his his father’s kosher butcher shop (an aesthetic pursuit, says Litvinoff, that was all part of being a ‘boisterous guerilla’), and about his profound distress over the unwanted pregnancy of Fanya Ziegelbaum, lovely seamstress, whom he kissed under the Whitechapel railway arches (dark place of dybbuk talk and rumours about Jack the Ripper): Fanny Ziegelbaum, deserted by Herschel Rosenheim of the New York Yiddish Theatre, who was playing Hamlet at the Whitechapel Pavilion – Rosenheim, red-haired, Chicago-gangster-voiced, his Yiddish Hamlet a far cry from that of Mr Parker, Litvinoff’s English teacher.
From Valentine Cunningham's 'Litvinoff’s Room: East End Anarchism'.
