Morry Levitas and the Battle of Cable Street
Given the escapes and tight corners that marked his life, it was a miracle that Morry Levitas, who died last month at the age of 84, made it to the new millennium at all.
His was an extraordinary life, yet at the same time an exact mirror of the histories and battles of so many Jewish East Enders in the 20th century.
Maurice Levitas wasn’t born here at all.
His parents had fled the Tsar’s pogroms in Lithuania and Latvia at the turn of the 1900s. They first settled in Dublin, where Morry was born on February 1, 1917, and where his father and uncles became key figures in the local tailor’s union – known to one and all as the Jewish Union.
But crippling unemployment in the Irish capital forced the family first to move to Glasgow, and then to the East End of London.
The young Morry started working on building sites, though he wasn’t your average labourer. Already he’d known life in three distinct cultures, as well as the Jewish culture the family carried with them. Along with his sister and three brothers, he learned to argue and debate in Hebrew, as well as learning Yiddish songs.
His experiences as an immigrant in a period of economic depression also had a profound political effect.
Like many other cockneys of the time, he joined the Communist Party and took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, blocking the marching along East End streets Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
And, like many other cockneys, he took the fight against fascism to its heart, signing up in 1936 to fight with the International Brigades against General Franco in Spain.
Dig his own grave
He was captured in 1938, and he and his company were ordered at gunpoint to dig their own graves.
His story should have ended then and there, like many other prisoners of war. But, unaccountably, the Spanish troops relented at the last moment, and Morry instead spent a year in a prisoner of war camp.
Again, it was a miracle he survived. He was often beaten and, as a Jew, had to undergo pseudo-scientific eugenics experi- ments, as invited Nazi doctors collected information about the anatomies of their captives.
But Levitas survived to fight another war. In World War II, he signed up with the British Army and served in India and Burma with the Royal Army Medical Corps, returning to London to work as a plumber after he was demobbed.
In the late forties he retrained as a teacher and taught in London schools from 1949 until 1963.
All the time he was studying and graduated as an external student from London Univer-sity, with a degree in sociology. He began lecturing in the sociology of education at Durham University in 1964 and produced his keynote work, Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education.
Despite severe tests, his faith in the Communist Party, and in Soviet communism, persisted. He opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which put a brutal end to the Prague Spring of 1968, but after retiring from his university post, went to teach English in an East German school.
And, for his last book, he edited and translated the words of the fallen and discredited East German leader Erich Honnecker – a brief which many would have avoided like the plague.
Towards the end of his life, this man of many countries and many campaigns was awarded Spanish citizenship in recognition of his status as a veteran International Brigadier.
And Morry, or Moisheben Hillel to use the Hebrew name he attached to much of his writing, died on February 14, 2001 – an Irishman, Scot, Spaniard and East Ender.