Emanuel Litvinoff (5 May 1915 – 24 September 2011)[1] was a Jewish writer and well-known figure in Anglo-Jewish literature, known for novels, short stories, poetry, plays and human rights campaigning.

Over the years, he contributed poems to many anthologies and periodicals, including The Terrible Rain: War Poets 1939–1945 and Stand, a magazine edited by Jon Silkin.

Despite feeling "nervous",[5] Litvinoff decided that "the poem was entitled to be read" and proceeded to recite it to the packed but silent room: So shall I say it is not eminence chills but the snigger from behind the covers of history, the sly words and the cold heart and footprints made with blood upon a continent?

Volunteering for military service in January 1940, Litvinoff saw his membership of the British Army as a straightforward matter of combating Nazi evil, but the sinking of the Struma in February 1942 complicated this.

The disaster "blurred the frontiers of evil" in a way that left him reluctant to describe himself as "English" or to seek the kind of assimilation achieved by other Jewish writers in Britain.

Litvinoff's novels explore the issue of Jewish identity across decades and in a variety of geographical contexts; Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union and Israel.

Set in the fictional Home Counties town of Maidenford, it features a despondent middle-aged vacuum cleaner salesman who sees his new neighbours, wealthy self-made Jews, as the root of his problems and wages an escalating campaign of hatred against them.

Litvinoff describes the overcrowded tenements of Brick Lane and Whitechapel, the smells of pickled herring and onion bread, the rattle of sewing machines, and chatter in Yiddish.

The trilogy Faces of Terror follows a pair of young revolutionaries from the streets of the East End and their political passage over the years to Stalinist Russia.

Blood on the Snow (1975), the sequel, finds Lydia and Peter now committed Bolsheviks, in the chaos of famine and civil war in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

The final instalment of the trilogy, The Face of Terror (1978), is set under the regime of Stalin, where revolution has turned into repression, and the ideals of freedom that Peter and Lydia once had have crumbled under the weight of guilt and disillusion.

Its narrative concerns an apparently distinguished and benign Israeli citizen who is assassinated in the street, then found to have been a concentration camp officer who had escaped using the identity of one of his victims.

One of his methods was editing the newsletter Jews in Eastern Europe[10] and also lobbying eminent figures of the twentieth century such as Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others to join the campaign.