Emanuel Litvinoff's Journey Through A Small Planet

The portrayal of childhood within literature comes in many forms. In his autobiographical novel, ‘Journey Through a Small Planet’, Anglo-Jewish author Emanuel Litvinoff (1979) recalls his childhood in what he refers to as a ‘Jewish ghetto’; an area of the East End of London. Litvinoff (1979) recounts his upbringing in the impoverished tenements of Whitechapel with his Mother and a seemingly never-ending number of siblings. The novel reveals how the central character, ‘Manny’, shows contempt towards fathers and, in particular, towards his own father, of whom he has never met. Despite living in relative squalor and being the constant target for school bullies, as well as teachers, Litvinoff (1979) retells his childhood as being a time of wonder

According to Bronfenbrenner (1979), the environment in which an individual resides plays a significant role in determining how they develop as a person. In the case of Manny, the environment comprises of depleted tenement dwellings within a predominantly Yiddish speaking 1920s Jewish community in Whitechapel, East London. Bronfenbrenner (1979) likened the environment systems that influence the development of a person to that of a set of Russian Dolls; each structure occupying the space within that of another structure. It is a common assumption that each of these structures interacts with one another and thus the development of the individual is able to ensue (Kipp and Shaffer, 2010). The innermost of Brenfenbrenner’s (1979) environmental layers is known as the microsystem and concerns the interactions that take place within an individual’s immediate community which, for the majority of young children, is primarily, although not limited to, the family. For a child in Manny’s position, of which many children were during the 1920s, the microsystem in which he was a part at the beginning of the novel consisted of his “strong, clever and beautiful mother,” who was pregnant, and his older brother Abraham (Litvinoff,