by Mark Mazower
This environment, which was rarely disrupted by anything noisier than prams and nannies and their charges, is where he roamed in boyhood with his best friend, a little daredevil from down the road. He was called David Stevenson, and if one asked Dad about his memories of childhood, that was the name that had stuck. In his child’s view adults were mostly absent, but in fact the Stevensons were the first family the Mazowers got to know on the Estate, and it was, I think, no coincidence that they were Leftists. Good-looking, affable, and a marketing genius, David’s father, W. H., was at that time the editor of the Daily Herald, a newspaper that he had turned into the world’s top-selling daily. As a result, Bill Stevenson occupied a position of considerable influence in interwar Britain. The Herald was umbilically connected to the Labour Party and the trade union movement, and the newspaper’s massive two million–plus circulation—unthinkable today when unions wield little clout and the press everywhere is in crisis—testified to the power of organized labor in Britain, an unexpected realization—in a different clime—of Max’s youthful dreams. The newspaper used to bestow an annual Order of Industrial Heroism to celebrate the courage of ordinary workers, and as the national voice of Labour, it was deeply interested in Bolshevik Russia. The Holly Lodge Estate was thus more than a haven; it looked outwards too and gave Max and Frouma and their little boy access to the ideas and people who were steering the country towards a new kind of socialism. Through the Stevensons and others like them, welcoming and open, newcomers to the metropolis themselves, the world of the Bund encountered the very different yet oddly kindred ethos of the British labor movement.
But the Stevensons and the Mazowers were bound by things more consequential and enduring than world affairs. David’s sister, Mari, was Ira’s best friend, the role model for her first brief disastrous marriage. Mrs. Stevenson, Welsh-born, was a justice of the peace, and became something like the Mazowers’ interpreter-guide to the invisible codes of the new society they had landed in: It was in her living room that Max and Frouma swore the oath for their naturalization in 1935, and she and Frouma remained close until their deaths. An aura of melancholy hung over her towards the end, at least in Dad’s recollection. Into the 1950s he would cycle over at his mother’s request to take provisions to Mrs. S., now living alone in a modest flat above the post office in South End Green, a far cry from the beautiful house they had occupied when her husband ran the paper known as “the Miracle of Fleet Street.” Her daughter had died tragically, her husband had drifted away in the grip of drink, and they had separated. Her two sons had made new lives in America. Leaving your aging mother for a foreign land—it was not something Dad could have contemplated for himself. The memory of the Stevensons, I think, came to embody in his mind not only the exuberance of his boyhood but everything that could intervene over the years to tear a family apart.
The Estate had its place for the working classes of course: It relied on them. Dad never forgot Alice, the maid, and the sight of her combing her hair in the kitchen in Makepeace Avenue: She was gone by the time he was five. Trade came round the side: the grocers’ boy, the butcher, and the coal merchant. Most excitingly, there was the milkman: At a time when there were still horses on the roads and few of their acquaintances had cars, his electric Express Dairies milk float was a portent. Dad’s first job was to help him on his dawn round; his first pay, a tub of ice cream. The milkman was not normally allowed to take him outside the estate, however, and when he asked Dad’s parents for permission to take him to see Arsenal, then dominant in English soccer, at Highbury Stadium, it was in tones of extreme deference, for the Mazowers were, despite being “foreign,” unassailably middle-class.
Even as a boy Dad knew that the impoverished elderly “lady workers,” who had fallen on hard times and lived in the half-timber apartment buildings on the other side of Hillway, must have come down in the world because they shared bathrooms and lavatories, a humbler station than that enjoyed by the residents of semidetached homes on their section of Oakeshott Avenue. As for David, he disappeared into a posh school and ended up in one of the most prestigious of regiments, the Welsh Guards, and Dad lost touch with him. These were lessons in the mysteries of English class, lessons without which his generation’s commitment to Labour’s vision of a more egalitarian society would scarcely have been possible. Thanks to the dairyman, Dad was briefly a passionate Arsenal fan—it was the heyday of Ted Drake, a center forward described later as “strong, powerful, brave and almost entirely unthinking”—but only up to the war; after that, any real interest he had once had in sports vanished.
Max was fifty-one when Dad was born, and he remained reserved with his young son, never reading to him as Frouma did. He did not hug him and was sparing with praise. They went to the cinema together, but Max’s pleasures were mostly solitary: an evening whisky, reading quietly in a deck chair in the garden. As time went on, he became more and more preoccupied with the state of his health. He told Dad next to nothing about his own youthful political exploits, and said equally little about his line of work. The first time Dad figured out the nature of his father’s modest and mostly unsuccessful dabbles in property, conducted from a small office above a parade of shops in the nondescript suburb of Muswell Hill, was as they were being wound down after the Second World War. Dad found Max taciturn and undemonstrative; he thought he seemed to be a man to whom fatherhood had not come naturally. But Max was not entirely detached and he did keep an eye on Dad’s progress. “You need to write more to the point of the subject,” he and Frouma advised Dad while he was in school—to stick to the unshowy and direct approach to writing that Max had adopted since his days in the Bund, and that Dad was to take as his own. In 1938, on Dad’s thirteenth birthday, he got a missive from his parents jointly wishing him “many happy returns of the day” and reminding him—in a very rare reference to their all but nominal faith—that “according to Jewish Law you are already considered to be a responsible person … We hope you will grow up to be a joy to us and a success to yourself. We embrace and kiss you with all our love and expect you to enjoy your birthday as much as you can.” And it was always “Dear Billy” and “Love Dad,” a degree of affection that was by no means automatic in middle-class interwar England and, later on, during the war, when Dad was away from home, his father let him know, in his self-deprecating way, that he missed him.
For Frouma, it was the presence of her boisterous son that made the dull pain of emigration bearable and brightened days filled with material anxieties and hard manual work. Even with a maid’s help, the business of keeping a household was arduous. Shopping often required a walk down the hill into Kentish Town, a distance of a mile or more. At home, there were generally six to eight people to be fed. There was no fridge until after the Second World War, no washing machine and no central heating. Clothes were washed in the sink in the poorly lit kitchen, scrubbed on a washboard, and wrung out by putting them through heavy wooden rollers that were turned by hand. Coal needed to be brought in daily, the fireplaces cleaned. There were the chickens to look after in the coop, and rabbits and the garden, none of which her husband was in a condition to help with. In addition, Frouma made clothes for herself and Ira. And there were, as time went on, more and more visits to the doctor and the hospital—for Max, who was often in ill health, for her children, and often too for her friends who came to depend on her for support. Frouma was very fond of her daughter but she was worn down by her flightiness and so her son became her chief solace. For many years they went together to the local library and shared the books they brought back; and they went often to the cinema, usually with Max, sometimes without him. Tired by the daily grind, she delighted in and depended on the company of her “Billychik,” and she missed him enormously whenever he was not at home. I don’t expect it is a coincidence that unlike André and Ira, both of whom were initially dispatched to boarding schools, Dad was schooled nearby until the war intervened. Arguments over their son when he misbehaved were one of the few things that c
ould lead to discord between his parents, but in this area, as in most things to do with the home, Max deferred to his wife, and Dad’s upbringing was characterized by a high degree of tenderness and gentleness and the omnipresence of his mother’s affection.
Thanks to the maid, and the milkman, and the Stevensons, and not least to his father, English was Dad’s native tongue. But plenty of Russian was spoken in Oakeshott Avenue too—between his parents, or whenever his aunt or uncle came to stay, or when visitors came to tea—and this attuned his ear from an early age. Ira kept to English (she was, in Dad’s words, the “most English” of the family), but by the time he was fourteen, he and his parents were habitually mixing Russian and English in the same sentence. He was also writing in Russian almost as early as in English, and although he needed it less and less as his older relatives died, he could slip effortlessly into it once or twice a year when he spoke by phone with his cousins in Moscow. In 1975, I think it must have been, he and I flew to Moscow from London and, shivering in the immigration hall at the airport, we waited in line. When one of our fellow passengers, a Spaniard, could not make himself understood to the official in the booth, Dad, who knew both languages, went up the line to offer to help out. Naturally, no sooner had he opened his mouth and uttered the first fluent words of his antiquated and mostly pre-revolutionary Russian than we were pulled aside for questioning. They let us go eventually, but by the time we emerged, everyone else had already left. I suppose this episode left its mark on me not only because it showed some of the more unexpected consequences of Dad’s default helpfulness but because it seems to sum up the ambiguous value of his fluency. Even in the Cold War, it opened surprisingly few doors for him. Not that he ever pushed very hard. He never used it in his thirty years of service in the United Africa Company where his hours were passed in his office by the Thames, supervising the construction of breweries and devising marketing strategies for selling beer in West Africa. I think now he was probably content to keep it, like so many things, for the family.
Like André and Ira, Dad could also speak and write French with ease thanks to regular stays with his uncle and aunt in Paris, not to mention those August weeks with his parents on the coast of Normandy at the resorts they loved along the stretch from Franceville and Houlgate to Deauville. An army translator’s course allowed him to add German to his quiver, though he never much used it afterwards, and later he learned to speak Dutch and Spanish fluently too. But the interesting thing is not that he could speak so many languages. His father could too, and so did many Jewish émigrés of that generation. What I find more remarkable is that while this marked him out from the average Englishman who could at best murder a few words of French and took pride in making no concessions to accent of any kind, Dad seems in most other respects to have been indistinguishable from any English boy of his age.
Assimilation, a term that has spawned dozens of social-science treatises, is both too grand and too crude a label to help us understand how this happened, not least because it suggests the Procrustean bed of a dominant culture, into which in some monstrous process the alien immigrant or immigrant child must fit, at greater or lesser cost to themselves. One thing wrong about this is that it implies a degree of cultural cohesion that did not exist: Neither England nor the world of North London Jewish émigré life represented anything as straightforward as a unitary culture. Also, none of the obvious academic categories—refugee, immigrant, minority—really gets at the specific social position of Dad’s parents who were, if anything, émigrés by choice and design rather than refugees. Perhaps the best description of their position and outlook can be found in a memoir penned not long ago by a man who shared much of Dad’s background:
We were not immigrants to Britain. We were not members of the Anglo-Jewish community, nor did either of my parents make the slightest effort to join it. So far as they could be defined socially, and so far as their interests, perspectives, and habits of conduct were concerned, it is almost enough to say that they were of that distinctive and remarkable class—essentially a cultural, not an economic or professional or even, properly speaking, a political class—known as the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. They were never to leave it, and were never to be transformed into something else.
Little enough has been written about these remarkable men and women of the turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, least of all in their exile: of their boundless energy, their intensity, their seriousness, the freedom with which they moved from one level of non-Jewish society to another, and the ease, betokening a kind of aristocracy, with which they were able to deal with whomever they encountered on whatever terms immediate circumstances seemed to require. But their supreme characteristic was their undeviating interest in public affairs, by and large to the detriment of all other concerns: income, literature, art, simple entertainment, or, not least, family. Virtually everything else came second to the common, consuming interest in public questions and public activities, or, not to put too fine a point on it, politics.1
In the case of Dad’s parents the idea of family was much more important than this suggests. But it otherwise illustrates very well the importance of their background, and their detachment from the existing gradations and hierarchies of Anglo-Jewish London. As it happens, the passage’s author, David Vital, had been at school for a time with Dad in Highgate, although later they lost touch because the politics of their families were very different. In those days, he was not called David Vital but David Grossman; Meir Grossman, his father, was a leading Revisionist Zionist and a close associate of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Jewish nationalist whose opposition to the Bund went back to the start of the century and who became the chief inspiration many years later for the Israeli Right. In 1934 the Grossmans left London and emigrated to Palestine, something Max, with his anti-Zionist background, would never have contemplated. After a gap of sixty years, and by now a well-known Israeli historian and former government policy adviser, Dad’s childhood friend resurfaced and was invited to our home in Golders Green. The evening stands out in my mind. Dad was a courteous host and dinner was passing in a predictably low-key way. But an old family friend was also there, and at one point Deborah, who must have been in her mid-eighties, lovely and eccentric and nobody’s fool, expressed surprise when Vital started explaining, in terms suggestive of approval and respect, his father’s close ties with Jabotinsky. “Jabotinsky,” she mused. “Wasn’t he like Hitler?” It was the only time I can recollect something like a political explosion at my parents’ table, and an outraged Vital got up to leave. “No, no,” she went on quite unfazed. “I don’t mean that Jabotinsky was like Hitler so much as that Hitler was like him.” I still can’t tell if she was really trying to calm the waters or the opposite. Dad, who usually liked the quiet life, did not strike me as very disturbed: Deborah had only slightly, I think, exaggerated his own views. As he knew, the polemic was almost a century old, and our dinner table was witnessing one of the last rounds in an argument between Jabotinsky and the Bund that had begun around 1900. David Grossman had emigrated with his father and became David Vital. Was there ever any question of Dad doing anything but staying in the country of his birth? None at all. In fact, when the army asked him, during the war, whether as the son of two foreign-born nationals, he was planning to settle elsewhere, he told them he was not, and off he went to Sandhurst and officer training.
The living room of 20 Oakeshott Avenue looked over the small front garden to a grassy curb, a tranquil road, and the flower beds of the house opposite. North-facing, the room was dark but homely; a thickly impastoed forest scene hung on one wall, and two Russian peasant women sitting under birch trees on another—somehow Max had spirited the canvases out. There was whisky on the heavy sideboard from Maples, a tree at Christmas, borscht in cold weather, and blinis for Easter.
Growing up in interpenetrating worlds, Dad never gave the impression later on that combining them had required great effort or that he had felt caught between them. There ha
d certainly been moments, some of which he mentioned, when he had been forcibly and perhaps uncomfortably reminded of his parents’ origins, when life had struck the occasional xenophobic note, but I do not believe that this apparent effortlessness was a façade. His parents had given him a lead by making their fundamental declaration of outlook in his very name: Joseph, after his paternal grandfather in accordance with tradition; Mazower, a family and a place of origin; and, first and foremost, and most unexpectedly, William, a name from the land that would henceforward and through him be home—a name that we can be sure had never before been found in the family. A homage to the Bard, it was supposedly the only English name his mother knew when he was born, a signal that both she and Max wished to look ahead and not back to the old country, a signal he always followed. It seemed so naturally a part of him, I never thought to ask him about it, although in his case it was further anglicized to Bill, which was how, never being one to stand on ceremony, he always liked to be known. So in those three names there was the Russian background, there was England, and in addition there was the being Jewish, the last being probably the least important within the family but certainly not negligible—neither something to be flaunted nor to be hidden but diluted and flanked by the double acculturation provided by the other two.
He knew of course that his parents stood out locally, with their unusual name, their stream of foreign visitors, and his mother’s heavy Russian accent. In those years before the influx of refugees from Germany and Austria there were few other foreign families in the neighborhood. Westwood is a wonderful novel set in Highgate that was written by their neighbor Mrs. Webb—better known as Stella Gibbons, the author of the best-selling Cold Comfort Farm, she lived just across the road from them at number 19—and in it one sees how rare it seemed to encounter a “Jew” in middle-class life at that time even in London. “It was a very, very English atmosphere,” Dad recalled. None of his closest friends at school had come from farther away than Wales, and when his parents bought their first radio around 1933 so that they could anxiously follow the news coming out of Europe, what their eight-year-old son really wanted was to get to the cricket scores at the end so that he could discuss them in class the next day. The swapping of comics and collecting of stamps were his favorite pursuits. His parents would get summertime postcards from excursions to Littlehampton and Wroxham and Southbourne-on-Sea addressed to “Munch” (or more rarely to “Punch,” the English turned into an almost Russian diminutive) with requests for magazines (Rover, Hotspur, or The Modern Boy), batteries, and torches, filled with stories of kidnapping and signed “Your loving son Billy (ex-brainy boy)” or on one occasion “Sir William Mazower.”