Review by New York Times Review
This beautiful book by Mazower, a historian at Columbia University, revolves around his grandfather Max's enigmatic postwar silences. Max had been a brilliant and leading organizer of the Yiddish Bund, a humane form of non-Communist leftism that attracted tens of thousands of adherents in prerevolutionary Russia, Lithuania and Poland. Hunted by czarist police, the Bundists would be crushed not by their enemies but by the far smaller band of jealous, self-interested Bolsheviks, who had other ideas about how to pursue a revolution. An organizer in Vilna and Lodz, Max renounced his activism and settled in a quiet suburb of London. There he raised a family and provided sanctuary for often traumatized emigrants. Soon, however, Mazower's narrative opens out onto an expansive, branching cast of characters that includes family members as well as numerous icons of 20th-century Jewish history (from Emma Goldman to Walter Benjamin). These stories are remarkable, if often devastating. Max's Bundist associate Shmuel Zygielboym persuades the BBC to report on the gassings of Polish Jewry, only to commit suicide in guilt over having left his wife and child behind in the Warsaw Ghetto. Max's long-ago lover is a Menshevik firebrand named Sofia Krylenko, the sister of Lenin's much-feared people's commissar for justice, while the siblings and cousins of Max's deeply adored wife, Frouma, later became ensnared in Stalin's Terror. Mazower's family saga may begin as an effort to recover a way of being Jewish that is often now lost from memory. Yet it is imbued throughout with perceptive asides about what we can learn from "history's losers," about solidarity across political divisions and about the tremendous tolls taken by the destabilizing uncertainty of not knowing, under repressive regimes, whether and how loved ones have died. "What You Did Not Tell" is, in the end, a profound testament to the saving grace of a sense of rootedness in place and home. Dagmar HERZOG'S latest book is "Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 8, 2018]
Review by Library Journal Review
Mazower (history, Columbia Univ.; The Balkans: A Short History) illuminates Russian revolutionary politics and émigré life in Britain in this fascinating family history. Max Mazower, the author's Russian grandfather, was of the same generation as Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, but as a Bundist (member of the secular Jewish socialist movement Bundism) was a revolutionary of a different stripe. Remarkable twists and turns sent Max to interwar England, where he brought his wife, Frouma, and her daughter from Russia and became a businessman. The family also included Max's son from a previous relationship, and William, the author's father, who was born in England. Delving into these lives, Mazower shows how his father absorbed his unique background and became a quintessential Englishman. As with David Laskin's The Family, entire family branches disappear in the chaos of war and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, and famous Chekists and anarchists make surprising appearances. Mazower lovingly explores how his father, the youngest in a family marked by upheaval, found comfort living in a close radius of his childhood home for most of his life. VERDICT Readers of family histories and those with an interest in the Jewish Labour Bund will appreciate this book.-Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A family's complicated past recounted in exacting detail.Beginning with a long interview with his aging father, Mazower (History/Columbia Univ.; Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 2012, etc.) launched an investigation into his family's history, mining letters, diaries, photographs, extensive archival material, and memoirs by some of the many individuals who touched his family's life. Central to the story is the author's paternal grandfather, Max, who had been a militant activist in pre-revolutionary Russia. As a member of the leftist Bund, Max strived for nothing less than "political transformation," and he suffered the consequences of his beliefs: police surveillance, imprisonment in Siberia, and exile in Switzerland and Germany. "He had been on the run, arrested, and questioned many times over," Mazower discovered, "and he had sacrificed the prospect of domesticity for the cause of socialism." In 1909, however, he fled from persecution to seek a job in England as a salesman for a typewriter company. Although he traveled back to Russia in that capacity, he made a permanent home in London, where he married and where his childrenincluding Mazower's fatherwere born. Max and his wife were members of the "the turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish intelligentsia," who welcomed those who shared their "consuming interest in public questions and public activities." No longer an activist, Max remained "still engaged, highly informed, and faithful" to socialist values. Mazower's father also "found political engagement invigorating," and his friends "tended to be joined under the banner of a higher purpose" even though he spent his career "as a middle manager in one sector of a vast multinational company." His life, concludes the author, was marked by pragmatism, resilience, and "the pursuit of contentment and well-being." Through dogged research, Mazower uncovered details about his father's half brother and half sister, myriad other relatives, teachers, friends, acquaintances, classmates, and a host of individuals whose capsule biographies he duly reports. Although someT.S. Eliot and Emma Goldman, for exampleare well-known and many interesting, the sheer number becomes overwhelming. A simultaneously sweeping and intimate family portrait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
