Emanuel Litvinoff was born in the East End of London in 1915, his parents having left the Ukraine to escape the persecution of Jewish people. He served during the Second World War.


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]



: Did you see any fighting?

A: I didn't see any fighting at all during the war. We were torpedoed, our convoy was torpedoed going out to West Africa and the ship next to ours, the troop ship next to ours was sunk. But the nearest I got to any real danger from firearms was actually when I took a unit from West Africa on a firing range and I had to be in front of them with a pistol and they were firing over my head and I was by no means sure that I wouldn't get hit. No, I saw no fighting at all.