What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  Yet when Dad’s parents moved there, all this was in the future and such Russian connections as Highgate possessed were fading. They were mostly Leftist, drawn by the proximity to Karl Marx’s tomb, which was still on the original shabby family plot in Highgate Cemetery, watched over by an old gravedigger who could remember the day the great man had been buried. Before the First World War a few elderly survivors of that era were still around, like the eighty-year-old revolutionary Karl Blind, and Fanny Stepniak, the widow of a Russian friend of Friedrich Engels. Another Russian, Old Zund—Aaron Zundelevich, a living link to the Vilna socialists of the 1870s—spent his final years near the Heath in a tiny flat overflowing with rare revolutionary pamphlets. And the great anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had first settled in London in 1876, lived for a time with his family in a neat Edwardian terraced house on Muswell Hill Road.

  By the early 1920s, they were all gone. Old Zund had died and so had Blind. Kropotkin had returned to Russia where he died in poverty. Bolsheviks like Maxim Litvinov and Samuel Rothstein had gone back to serve the revolution. The flotsam of the Romanov ancien régime mostly preferred other parts of London. The Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, a notoriously stupid grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, had rented Kenwood in the last years before it was opened to the public, but by the end of the First World War he had left too and in the 1920s Kenwood opened its grounds to the hoi polloi.

  Thus when they moved across the Heath from South Hill Park to the Holly Lodge Estate, a new development on Highgate West Hill, Max and Frouma saw around them not Little Moscow but a London developer’s dream of an English garden village. In 1925, the estate was still being built street by street and nothing could have seemed further from the Bolshevik revolution than the mock-Tudor half-timber houses, epitomes of affordable bourgeois comfort, which were slowly spreading across the hilly flanks of what had only a few years earlier been the Burdett-Coutts estate, attracting doctors, newspapermen, and theater impresarios who were drawn by the views, the quiet of the Heath, the old trees, and easy access to work. Its lime-shaded verges suggest suburbia, but the estate forms part of the city that surrounds it, and residents with their panoramic vista of the West End beneath them have only a brief stroll down to the grime and bustle of Gospel Oak. As the London property market was sluggish after the First World War, a resourceful immigrant from Russia with a little capital could even afford to commission a new building off-plan, which was what Max did. Number 1 Makepeace Avenue was the address, its very name a declaration of hope after years of bloodletting, a benediction for a newborn son in a new country.

  It was one August evening, in the warm, rainy summer of 1925, on the eve of their life together in Highgate, that Max wrote a few lines in Russian to his new wife. Frouma had left him to go for some days of rest—to the coast, I expect—with Ira and Dad, then barely two months old. André was on holiday in Paris, bathing in the Seine: In those days, he was still sending news back to his father. Max was alone, shuttling between their South Hill Park lodgings and the builders on West Hill. It is the only letter of his that has survived, the only time we catch the sound of his voice in an intimate moment. So all-embracing is the silence that surrounds him across most of his life that it comes as a shock to see this resourceful, cautious man throwing himself without reserve into the fitting out of their home, the warmth of his embrace of a new familial domesticity, and its trivia.

  My dear Frumochka

  Today, I’ve spent almost the entire day dealing with fireplaces. I looked at some additional ones and came to the conclusion that those I had previously chosen were the most suitable. I eliminated the mahogany one you had doubts about. It is very difficult to judge them by looking at drawings. The drawing-room [in English in the original] fireplace is not flat but concave, which also corresponds to your wishes. I think you will be pleased with them when you see them.

  As for Frouma, he leaves her—and us—in no doubt about the strength of his affections:

  Somehow, I don’t want to see anyone and keep thinking about how you are spending your time without me. My room is absolutely silent; I feel sad and lonely. However, I do not have to wait long. I’ll soon embrace you and look with love into your sweet eyes. How is Bill? How are you managing Ira? I kiss you all warmly and with love, Your Max.

  These lines, the first time I read them, seemed almost shocking, so firmly had I come to see in Max the epitome of a kind of political commitment and of masculinity that consigned personal feelings to silence. The man speaking here is a romantic. He will put the solitary life of the revolutionary behind him; he is done with lodgings and landladies and the provisionality of all that; Max cherishes his wife and now devotes himself to making in Highgate for her and the children the kind of home that he had lacked when he was a boy. His love: it is real, something to offset the anguish that beset her in those first months in a new country.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Sheltering Word

  “She was a very loving mother.” I was asking Dad about Frouma. “She was a very gregarious and friendly woman. She had lots of friends among the Russian Jewish diaspora, as it were. There were an awful lot of people who managed to get out of Russia after the revolution. Most of our circle of friends were people like my mother. They mostly settled in Highgate, Golders Green, Willesden, and that sort of thing.” As anyone who knew Dad well could testify, he could shift from the personal to the sociological at the speed of light; it was getting him back that was the hard part.

  “She had a very rich Russian accent,” he continued. “She never really mastered English as my father had done. My father was the opposite. He could pass for an Englishman.”

  “He had no accent?”

  “He had no accent. Unfortunately we have no recordings of him. My mother wasn’t what you’d call a well-educated woman. Her education had been rather interrupted … We shared much the same tastes in reading. We’d go to the public library together and often would read the same books.”

  “So she would read in English?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Russian as well?”

  “Yes. In those days, you could—in the early years after the Soviet regime, they didn’t export a lot of books. Later, they saw this as a way of earning foreign currency and you could buy Soviet editions of Russian classics and so on. When I was a child, as far as I know, in the West, you had to rely on stuff that had been published before the first war or they were émigré publishers who printed. But those were mainly political works or works by anti-Soviet authors. For a long time all the stuff printed in the West was in the old spelling, which was a bit tedious. There were newspapers published in the West, especially in Paris.”

  “I am interested in your mother, Dad, rather than publishing.”

  He laughed. “Right.”

  Deracination: The word scarcely begins to convey the psychological and emotional strains that exile and emigration impose on those who have undergone it. In Max’s case, he responded with businesslike activity on the one hand and silence on the other, a silence so pervasive that even his wife, to whom he was close, knew next to nothing about his past. For Frouma, who toyed with the idea of returning to Moscow, making England her home depended upon preserving and nurturing her ties with her homeland and her loved ones rather than allowing them to dwindle. Two of her younger siblings also left the USSR and settled in France, but her yearning for the country she had grown up in remained powerful for years. Her strong Russian accent, which never left her, was thus a clue, a significant contrast to her husband’s impeccably accented English.

  We used to pride ourselves on the fact that we were the only Mazowers, that there were no others in the London phone book, or anywhere in England, we supposed. When odd bearers of the name cropped up in Israel or Argentina they were treated as a curiosity, as likely to prove an annoyance as anything else. Because of the iron wall of Max’s silence, his brothers and their families did not seem real to us. But it was different with Frouma’s brothers
and sisters, the Toumarkines: Although we did not know the ones who had stayed in Moscow, Frouma made sure her children got to know their uncle and aunt, Niura and Vitalie, the siblings who had settled in Paris, and as a result we did too. France became more than another country for us; it became almost part of home and a way station to a certain inchoate sense of attachment to Russia itself.

  What I did not discover until very much later was why we felt this way: The very fact that Niura and Vitalie had managed to follow Frouma out of Russia was thanks to her. Any enthusiasm the Toumarkine family had felt after the February revolution had worn off once the Bolsheviks came to power, and when Frouma and Max, now safely in England, offered to support the two youngest of her siblings abroad, her parents were glad. Over the decades that followed, she became a kind of surrogate mother for them, their adviser, consoler, sanctuary.

  From the mid-1920s, travel to and from Russia was first hard and then more or less impossible. Occasionally a business friend would go to Moscow, or a student whose parents Frouma and Max knew from Tsarist days would come over to study—such things were still possible before the war—but there were no visits within the family between the one brief trip Frouma’s mother somehow managed to make to London in 1929 and Frouma’s own visit to Moscow thirty years later. In the interim the way she nurtured a sense of closeness to her family was principally through writing letters.

  What a burden those dozens if not hundreds of tiny, fragile sheets carried over the years. The Soviet Union seemed to most people in Western Europe like a world apart, and it was for long stretches of time. Nevertheless when I look at the fading blue ink on the frail envelopes that crisscrossed Europe from the early 1930s onwards, each carefully written in the educated hand the Toumarkine children had learned in Smolensk before the revolution, what strikes me now is how much they were able to communicate to one another and how vital this communication was to their happiness. There were silences of course and sometimes entire sections of family remained invisible or unmentioned, but more important were the things that kept the siblings together—accounts of illnesses and recoveries, deaths or disappearances in Moscow mourned in London, a wedding into the haute bourgeoisie of the Third Republic celebrated in a telegram from Russia. Between Paris, Moscow, and London flowed a stream of news, endearments, condolences, and questions and at the heart of this was Frouma, passing things on, asking for more, sending letter after letter for decades.

  Technological progress can also bring emotional impoverishment. What is certain is that no other technology in those days was felt to offer the same register of communication as the letter. Telegrams were reserved for only the most important of occasions. A telephone was installed in the Oakeshott Avenue house from the time they moved in, and very occasionally a call came through the exchange from abroad. But the difficulties with long-distance conversations were more than just logistical; the phone brought one too close, and the sound of the voice was too immediate, and conversations were over so abruptly that Frouma found them distressing. The first calls she received from France and Moscow after the war had her in tears for hours afterwards. “I am so sorry for my silliness,” she wrote Vitalie. “Normally I don’t break into tears easily at all, but only when I will finally see you and really feel you are alive will I be able to speak calmly to you all.”

  Letters were different. They were heaven-sent, the lifeblood of the family’s continued existence after it had been sundered, and to write was, in the first place, an obligation. The sound of the letterbox was always a cause for celebration and letters were copied and circulated. Frouma would sometimes write two or three times a day to keep the news flowing to and from her mother in Moscow and then on to her brother and sister in Paris. Her mother wrote her in December 1936, “your letter, Frumushenka, I read with joy.” When Frouma received this, she sent it on to Niura in Paris “to reassure you about Mum” even though she wanted to keep it a little longer to reread it. Her mother would pass on the latest about illnesses, summer travels, children’s examinations, and chance meetings with old friends, and each time the news brought a sense of relief. “Vita dear,” she wrote her brother in Paris, “today I got a letter from Mum and Dad. Thank God they are alive and well.” Her sister Nata, who was studying to be a doctor in Moscow, told Frouma that she should not try to send them clothes in the post but rather “write more frequently, and tell this to Niura and Vita as well, because Mum can’t sleep for several nights in a row for lack of letters.” Their father, Moise, now retired, reminded his daughters “to write us more often because this is our only pleasure: your every letter is an event, not only for us but also for the whole family.” Dad, then eleven, was now old enough, her father reminded Frouma in 1936, to write to them too, but like most of the other men in the family, Dad was not much of a letter writer. “Don’t be worried if I do not write to you,” ran a youthful postcard he sent Frouma from the Norfolk Broads.

  In fact, as he knew well, in Oakeshott Avenue lack of letters always made her anxious. “Not a word from Moscow,” she wrote in early 1939 around the time of her mother’s last illness. “I asked my acquaintance to find out from her sister, who lives in Moscow, whether our mum and dad are still alive … My God, what hard times we are living in!” She got similarly worried when she had not heard anything out of France and the lack of letters from Niura in particular was often taken as a sign of unhappiness. The war years were an agony of suspense, although the resourceful Vitalie did manage to send a couple of precious postcards from Vichy France. After liberation, the letters could begin again. The first from France arrived in Highgate in October 1944. “It was,” Frouma wrote, “the happiest moment for me since the beginning of the war.” “Mummy went around holding [your letter] for days,” Ira wrote to her aunt in Paris. A year later came a brief telegram from Russia saying everyone was well, which was not entirely true. In fact, after the war communication with Moscow was much harder and more dangerous than it had been before, and the letters dwindled, although they never dried up completely.

  The biggest source of anxiety was the well-being of relatives, especially Frouma’s parents, and the missives coming out of Moscow in the 1930s were often health bulletins, more or less reassuring. After a bad fall, her mother provided long self-deprecating descriptions of the luxurious linen and nickel-plated furniture in the hospital (“there were desk lamps by each bed, nurses in white aprons and caps, and it looked like a health resort”) and plentiful food, including apples, tangerines, candy (“I would eat five oranges at a time”). There were trips to their country dacha and “thank God, every one is alive and well fed.” She reported on her husband, still taking the stairs at the age of eighty-three, making himself pancakes for breakfast, and playing chess, while she tries to screen out the noise of radios in their apartment on downtown Myasnitskaya Street by knitting scarves and reading. “For me there is no greater pleasure than books.” Both parents made light of their infirmities and their minds were clear and playful to the end. They dreamed of having their children come to visit, and every so often they walked with their youngest daughter, Nata, to the post office to book time for a brief call to France, reassuring their children that “you can’t imagine how little it costs; it is not like your country at all. Thank God, everything here is cheap and available. God willing, we shall live the rest of our days like this; we have no debts and will not have any, thank God.”

  Frouma was equally self-deprecating, although she was less concerned to reassure or to hide her anxieties. But the intensity of her letter-writing evidently derived from the example set by her mother, who continued to write right up to the very end of her life. In February 1939, when news of Maria Toumarkine’s death arrived at Oakeshott Avenue, the envelope that brought the letter with the details also contained her last letter, her farewell blessing to her children abroad:

  My dear children,

  I bless you all, my children, to live to a ripe old age in full health and happiness, to live in friendship and love. My hea
lth is deteriorating, but I am surrounded by much love and care from my children and family. I have lived for long enough, so now I am fine with whatever length of time God has in store for me. My dear children, be healthy and happy, my kisses to all of you.

  Your mother and grandmother

  She had signed off in Yiddish, one of the few times in the entire correspondence that she did not use Russian. Frouma lit a candle every year to commemorate the day of her mother’s passing. And she always kept the picture of her mother surrounded by her husband and children, laid out on her bier.

  Frouma’s father, who was to die at nearly ninety on the eve of the German invasion, kept up the tradition. He felt he needed to tell the children where his wife’s grave was—a vital piece of information—and he also, as always, dispensed advice: eat healthily, try to move to the countryside. “Tell Ira it is time for her to get married,” he advised Frouma about the granddaughter he had not seen for fifteen years.