Journey Through a Small Planet

In Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), the writer Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his working class Jewish childhood in the East End of London, a small cluster of streets right next to the City, but worlds apart in culture and spirit. With vivid intensity Litvinoff describes the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel, the smell of pickled herring and onion bread, the rattle of sewing machines and chatter in Tiddish. He also relates stories of his parents, who fled Russia in 1914, his experiences at school and a brief flirtation with Communism.

Unsentimental, vital and almost dreamlike, this is a masterly evocation of a long-vanished world.

With a new introduction by Patrick Wright

‘Litvinoff has long had an eye for the glowing Whitechapel fragment that lights up a wider history’ - Patrick Wright