He's not a writer I would usually read - in fact, I will go out of my way to avoid him at the best of times - but there was an interesting piece in yesterday's Guardian from Jonathan Freedland where an excerpt is reproduced from his latest book, Jacob's Gift - A Journey Into the Heart of Belonging.
Though I'm sure that the book touches on larger themes - I'm speaking blind of course - the excerpt reproduced is dealing with the subject of the Jewish East End in the interwar years when the Communist Party was a mass movement in the area. The article is no great shakes in itself but can serve as a companion piece to such memoirs/histories as Joe Jacobs 'Out of the Ghetto', Phil Piratin's 'Our Flag Stays Red' and the Wesker Trilogy.
The other book that should be mentioned and which I have always considered a minor classic is Emmanuel Litvinoff's 'Journey Through A Small Planet' which tells us of him growing up in Whitechapel during the same period. A truly wonderful and funny book that was reprinted a few years back and has a section devoted to his brief flirtation with the Communist Party in a chapter entitled 'The God I Failed'.
I remember reading a pre-online Guardian interview with him - probably around the time of the reprinting of 'Journey Through A Small Planet' - where he recollected his early steps as a young poet and novelist in post-war London and where it nearly came abruptly to a halt when he challenged T.S Eliot for his perceived anti-semitism. I've had a look through google and there is is headline reference to it, unfortunately there is no in depth reference to the incident on the web. I can hazily recollect that, according to Litvinoff, it did very much halt his career in his tracks but from reading his memoir I cant help feeling that it very much was part of what made him.
A sadness when thinking of Litvinoff, and when reading through Freedland's piec,e is that so much faith and hope was set in the Communist Party of the time. They were the ones leading the way in mobilising the opposition to Mosley's Blackshirts in the East End during this period, especially in those areas such as Shoreditch and Stepney where the BUF had real local support (with, of course, Piratin being one of only two Communist Party candidates elected to Parliament in the 1945 election in Mile End), and yet Litvinoff spent nearly twenty years of his life aiding and publicising the Refusenik campaign in the Soviet Union.
This is a blog entry of fragmented recollections, and I must end it with one. I remember reading in Robert Barltrop's 'The Monument' the conversation that he had with an old political friend, where the friend, when explaining his 'down days', explains that he had set so much hope and optimism in the Russian Revolution - a whole generation had. And staring into the fire in his living room, he explained to Barltrop that this supreme dissapointment of his life had had to be locked away from friends and family. They couldn't and wouldn't understand why he felt so bad about matters.
I wonder if our generation will even have something like that to look back on with regrets?
3 comments:
No-one, absolutely no-one, should ever have regrets about what should or should not have happened in another country. Those regrets are for the people who lived in those states.
It's our country that's the issue for us. We have never had a revolution - well, not in the modern era. And we're not close to it now (or so I think). What we can do is give solidarity to others overseas, but, for fuck sake, whatever we think of the Soviet Union, China, etc etc etc, surely must be irrelevant other than for pub talk?? Let's first of all defend our own limited democracy, and then try to build some kind of socialist democracy!
Sorry mate, I have to disagree with your viewpoint here.
My post wasn't to have a pot shot at 'official communism' - that is nothing more than a handful of dust and memories now - but just to acknowledge the hope, faith and trust that was placed on the October Revolution and what flowed from it by workers all round the world. That faith was misplaced, and none more so than by those workers who on the one hand could fight the class struggle so passionately at home whilst being the dupes of a regime and a politics that oppressed the working class and class struggle in the name of 'socialism in one country'.
You're right in a sense that it is pub talk, and lefties never seem to get as het up when discussing that other famous bourgeois revolution, France 1789, but I still believe that there are lessons to be learned and it is only in dealing with the legacy of labourism and leninism and its effect on the labour movement that perhaps, just perhaps, a socialism from below will come to the fore. And I'm not kidding myself on that the SPGB is necessarily the key to that.
I don't think that struggle or that discussion should be limited to the country of your birth or your residence, and however stale it may sound today I still stand by the position that the working class have no country.
I better stop now before I start reciting the lyrics to 'Imagine'. ;-)
I was rather over-exaggerating my point - which is? Fuck knows!
On your last point - no I don't mean Imagine - this is, to say the least, very debatable. The working class may not OWN advanced capitalist countries, but they still live and work in them.
I'm all for changing the world, but I do think the logical first step is changing for the better the country you live in!
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