Emanuel Litvinoff(1915-2011)

Emanuel Litvinoff, born in London, England was a British poet, novelist and writer who explored the experiences of being Jewish in 20th-century Europe in numerous verse collections and novels; he was best known for the poem "To T.S. Eliot" (1951), in which he castigated the Nobel Prize winner for having expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in his poetry. In his memoir "Journey Through a Small Planet" (1972), Litvinoff described how he grew up in London's East End slums after his father, a Ukrainian refugee from Odessa, returned to Russia in 1917 to fight with the Bolsheviks in the Revolution. During the 1960s and 1970s Litvinoff wrote plays prolifically for television, in particular Armchair Theatre. His play "The World in a Room" (1969) tackled the subject of interracial marriage. Emanuel Litvinoff died in London on September 24, 2011.