Litvinoff, Emanuel: Notes for a Survivor.

Nothern House, 1973. Poems. A selection depicting the transition from war to peace and the founding of Israel. 1st Ed. Oblong 8vo. 24pp. P/b in laminated pictorial wrappers. Ex libris Hamish Henderson bearing his signature on the ffep. F. (Book ref. 5681) £10.00


T.S. Eliot confrontation

Litvinoff is also well known for being one of the first to raise publicly the implications of T.S. Eliot's negative references to Jews in a number of poems, a controversy that continues, in his famous poem "To T.S. Eliot". This most famous protest against TS Eliot on the subject of his anti-Semitism took place at an inaugural poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951. Litvinoff, a longstanding 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 the ICA reading, the event’s host, Sir Herbert Read, declared 'Oh Good, Tom's just come in.' Despite feeling ‘nervous’, [2] Litvinoff decided that 'the poem was entitled to be read’ and proceeded to evoke it to the packed but silent room:
In the ensuing pandemonium after the poem had been read, T.S. Eliot was heard to mutter 'It's a good poem, it's a very good poem'. [4]