What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  School, often traumatic for children, seems to have suited Dad, perhaps because it allowed him to escape the pressure of his mother’s unceasing love. But it is also true that he liked facts and words and was always curious so he found the work easy, and he had a circle of friends and got the rudiments of a fine education early on. With his mother, he had begun reading even before he was six at which age he began making the half-mile walk to school alone. The Hudsons had retired many years earlier, and Ingleholme had closed, so he went to Mrs. Holcombe’s grandly named Osborne House School, which was in fact a room or two in one of the larger terraced houses in nearby Dartmouth Park. Two years later, he started at Highgate Junior School, which meant a blazer, canes and detentions, Latin and French grammar with the rest of his form in IIIB, mental arithmetic, and cricket and spelling taught by men who had survived the trenches of the First World War. It was schooling of the most conventional kind, but declensions and conjugations and logarithmic tables suited Dad’s orderly mind. Later on, in his desk in IVB, there was a copy of the sixth edition of Lister’s French Grammar: Simple and Complete and the school’s own Outline of Latin Syntax, with much the same sequence of participles, gerundives, and case endings that schoolboys had learned forty years earlier and that would be drummed into me in the 1970s, the disciplinary bedrock of a serious education that was taught to impart not so much sociability as some kind of almost sadomasochistic mental rigor.

  By now Dad was wandering alone well beyond the Estate. The walk to school would take him up through Highgate village; the journey back brought him past the sweetshop for a two-ounce bar of Cadbury’s. One day he was alarmed at the sight of a tramp resting outside the Flask pub—in the depths of the Depression tens of thousands of men were unemployed and homeless—and it so startled him that he ran down the hill and cut himself dashing through a hedge. This was not much to compare with the riots, pogroms, massacres, and anarchy his sister and parents had grown up with, and it was in a spirit of self-deprecation that he retold the story, a testimony to the sheltering environment of his early years. Sometimes he would walk down to Lissenden Gardens to spend the evening with his friend Sherwood (first names being verboten in those days); they would listen to a music-hall radio show along with the parents and then the boys would head to the balcony to drop paper bags filled with water on unwary pedestrians. Sherwood’s folks were proper in their speech and formally dressed and there were no books, a contrast with Oakeshott Avenue where everyone was always reading. Mr. S., who worked in the Foreign Office and was, in Dad’s recollection “very hidebound,” was Leslie R. Sherwood of Accounts, who would later get the Order of the British Empire and rise to be the head of finance. Friendship with Sherwood junior thus offered an entry point into the life of the English mandarin class, early familiarity with its habits of speech and behavior. And also perhaps with the feeling that often lay concealed beneath the surface stiffness because the Sherwoods for all their correctness were evidently welcoming, and in the summers of 1935 and 1936 they took him with them sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Sixty years later, he still had a boy’s memory of night fishing, the wonder of those evenings, like something out of Swallows and Amazons, his favorite book in those days, when they would moor the yacht at dusk, and he and his friend Jeremy would push off in the dinghy and quietly sail through the flat landscape, listening to the birds calling in the darkness.

  In Dad’s mind, places remained long after the faces and names of former friends were forgotten. He lost touch with Sherwood but always remembered Norfolk, and he took us there to spend summers by the sea when we were the age he had discovered it. The intensity of his attachment to certain landscapes meant that he would return to them with us, often repeatedly, and sometimes many decades later—not only Norfolk but the Normandy beaches and the villages in Dorset and South Devon where he had spent some of his first holidays—so that my own earliest memory of the sea is of peering out of the car window as we drive up the high street in Seaton one summer morning in the early 1960s. I can still hear the seagulls and smell the salt and then, as we crest the rise, the brilliance of the sunlight on the water, a thin blue line suddenly stretched before us, unforgettable. It is a memory he must have wanted to share by bringing us there, one so similar to his own but with the difference that in mine he is present and so is Mum, and my brother Dave is on the backseat beside me, whereas when he first visited the seaside, in 1932, he had been sent to stay with the Stevensons for reasons I have not been able to find out—lack of money is the likeliest explanation—and he was on his own and everyone else was back in London and he was sending them postcards reassuring them he was all right and asking his parents when they were going to visit. And now that I think about it, it occurs to me that perhaps we were there not only because of the pleasures those places had brought him but to exorcise a kind of loneliness he had felt then too.

  I don’t think we ever fully grasped—and perhaps that was the whole point, that we were not meant to—how precarious that middle-class way of life in Oakeshott Avenue must have seemed at times in the mid-1930s and how much the memory of those years of making do contributed to Dad’s later desire for security, his hatred of waste, and his hoarding of scraps of all kinds on the off chance they might come in useful. (This was the man who in Mum’s recollection only lost his temper once—when she threatened to throw out an old kettle he wanted to mend.) The reality was that the family’s savings were running low. Max had abandoned his life as a merchant—world trade had collapsed during the Depression—and begun investing in property. But converting cramped terraced houses in Friern Barnet, an outlying suburb, yielded nothing of substance and he began to worry that his business partner was cheating him. It was a struggle to sustain the life and comforts they had enjoyed earlier, and Max himself was in and out of hospital. It was now that Frouma took charge. She got rid of the maid and began making dresses for people she knew. She also decided to take in paying lodgers, leaving Dad to sleep downstairs sometimes on the sofa in the small front room. It was a sign of how accommodating he was that he put up with it without a great deal of protest. Ira, who was nearly twenty, protested more and kept her room. André would appear sporadically and ask for money and leave in a cloud. Of the children, Dad was already the helpful one.

  With lodgers came a heightened sense of foreboding and a more intimate view of the threat from across the Channel. Heinrich “Heini” Grunwald, a mathematically inclined half-Jewish young refugee from Vienna, came to stay with them in 1936 or 1937. After the Anschluss, he was followed by a pair of sisters from Austria, and then by an older couple who managed to get out of Danzig on the eve of the war. The world was becoming more troubled and Dad was more attuned to its political complexities than other boys of his age: “I was really quite a political animal, I suppose … Most of the boys weren’t interested in politics.” On the wall of his room he was marking a map of Spain with the key battlegrounds: Guadalajara, Lleida, Jaén, Guernica. In the local library, he had long discussions about General Franco with the librarian, a fellow republican sympathizer, and wondered why his favorite writer, the prolific Percy Westerman, the author of such popular yarns as A Mystery of the Broads and Standish of the Air Police, had taken the nationalist side.

  Because his parents could no longer afford the fees at Highgate, Dad won a scholarship that took him to a new school across the Heath in Hampstead. Down the road Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were holding rallies and denouncing the overrunning of the country by refugees. Fascism seemed to be on the rise in England, and in Hampstead, around his new school, there was plenty of anti-refugee feeling openly expressed. At UCS, as University College School was known, the Leftist tradition of Oakeshott Avenue now made itself felt. His parents forbade Dad from joining the cadet corps and along with some other juvenile pacifists, he spent long afternoons weeding the playing fields. When he began polling fellow pupils to gauge opinion on the Spanish Civil War, the headmaster feared he was breeding a dangerous radical and called him into h
is study and urged him to think less about politics and to make more friends.

  The looming crisis began to prey on his nerves. He was waiting at Gospel Oak station one September morning on his way to school when he glanced across the tracks to a deserted platform on the other side and spied a disused line with weeds growing out of it. He started fantasizing about phantom trains speeding through, like the one in Walter Forde’s popular 1931 film The Ghost Train that terrifies a small group of passengers stuck at night in an isolated country backwater—a potent incarnation of the nightmares of revolution that troubled the “deep, deep sleep” (in Orwell’s phrase) of middle-class Britain, faced with the increasing threat of extremism from across the Channel. In the railway carriage that took him to school, heavy leather straps held down the windows and he wondered worriedly how easy it would be to cut them if there was an accident and they needed to get out. On his twelfth birthday, his parents gave him a bike. He took enthusiastically to cycling, at first over the Heath to school and then farther and farther afield, a glimpse of freedom, a way of banishing the anxiety of being trapped.

  There was always a coming and going at Oakeshott Avenue. To Max, and especially to Frouma, friends had an almost existential significance, reinforcing family as a resource in hard times; their closest ones they saw regularly over decades. These were people they trusted, often living nearby, who had shared many of the experiences of their generation and background. Most of them had taken politics seriously their entire lives, and understood the stakes for Europe.

  I only became aware of how remarkable some of them were long after Dad’s death. I had started to notice a familiar name—Zukerman, often abbreviated as Zuk—cropping up in Frouma’s letters, and one thing I did know was that Dad had been friends with a boy called Dick Zukerman. I remembered him because he and Dad had stayed in touch over the years, and when I was growing up he would sometimes come to visit us, a warm and charismatic man in his forties. The Zukermans and the Mazowers had been good friends, close enough for Frouma to have entrusted Dad to them for summer holidays by the sea, and later, in the panicked days of September 1939, to their care for a spell in the country to get him out of London and away from German bombs.

  What I had not understood until I was guided by Frouma’s letters—and found myself in the middle of something much larger—was exactly how Dick and Dad had come to be playing together. Dick’s father was a journalist called William Zukerman who had been born in Tsarist Russia. Like Max and Frouma, he had gotten out, and like them he was on the Left but not a communist. What he was or became, in the Bundist spirit, was a vocal Jewish opponent of Zionism, and after the creation of Israel in 1948, he was a prominent and early critic of what he called American Jewish tribalism. In 1949, settled by then with his family across the Atlantic, he wrote a prescient essay entitled “Jews as Conquerors,” one of several in which he deplored the treatment of the Arabs in the new Jewish state and likened it to the way the Jews themselves had been treated before the war in Europe. Today William Zukerman’s writings have been rediscovered by a new generation of American Jewish critics of Israel. But between 1920 and 1941, when Zionism was not the obsession it has become today, he was the European correspondent of a New York Yiddish daily, sending dispatches from across the Continent. In 1936 he reported on the rise of fascism in Britain and the Battle of Cable Street; in 1937, he published The Jew in Revolt: The Modern Jew in the World Crisis; the following year his attention turned to anti-Jewish policy in Poland and the changing political outlook there. His wife was also very much part of their circle too, not least because she had a sister in Moscow with whom she was in touch, and she and Frouma relied on each other from time to time to evade the Stalinist censorship by sending coded messages through their loved ones in Russia: you only did that with someone you trusted.

  In early 2016 I found that Dick, just shy of ninety, was living in very active retirement in Vancouver. Since I wanted to track the network of my grandparents’ friendships, it seemed like he might be a good starting point. I called him up and asked if he could remember any of the people his parents and the Mazowers had known together. It was some eighty years in the past and only one name came to his mind, he said, but it was quite a name: Emma Goldman, probably the most famous American anarchist of the twentieth century. Dick thought he recollected at least one occasion on which she dined with his parents when the Mazowers had also been there. Whether or not they all ever ate together—and the odds are he was right—it turns out that that they certainly knew each other. A kind of proof: On the shelves in Dad’s office we found one of Zukerman’s books with a handwritten inscription by the author to Goldman. Somehow it had never reached the intended recipient and ended up with us, probably because Max or Frouma had failed to deliver it.

  “To Emma Goldman, from a sincere old admirer who hopes to become a friend.” The date is August 1938. William Zukerman and Goldman had in fact known each other in some small way a long time because back in 1910, the twenty-four-year-old Zukerman had written for Goldman’s anarchist journal, Mother Earth. But that Dad’s family had ever moved in the same circles as this world-renowned subversive was something I had certainly not expected.

  Their acquaintance seems to have begun around 1937 when Goldman, who had been stirring up trouble, and hearts, on both sides of the Atlantic for forty years, arrived in London as a representative of the powerful anarchist grouping in the Spanish Civil War. She set to work as strenuously as only this passionate, egocentric professional revolutionary could, drumming up support and speechifying at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. But her habitual energy hid a growing inner sadness. It was not a happy time in Goldman’s life and friends mattered to her more than ever. At sixty-eight, she was growing old for the life of a nomadic activist, especially as her longtime companion, Alexander Berkman, had just died in terrible circumstances in France—ill with cancer, he had tried to commit suicide and died painfully and slowly with Goldman by his bed.

  She had never liked London or understood the English, so families from the world of her youth provided solace and shelter. One of these yielded her London “headquarters” in those months, as she threw herself into what was to be her last great cause. The location was, to my astonishment, a tiny spare bedroom in a modest Golders Green apartment, and it was there that another forgotten name from my childhood rose up to greet me. I remembered Liza Koldofsky as a thin, elderly Russian lady who always had sweets available for small visitors and let us watch her television in her scrupulously neat dark home. We lived only a few streets away, and when we were kids, we used to call in to see her whenever we visited our doctor because she was across the road from him. It had just been her—there had been no husband when we knew her. Now it turned out that this frail ghostly figure, soon departed from our lives, had lived in Golders Green since before the Second World War and had been Emma Goldman’s landlady and close friend, and the likely link between her and the Mazowers.

  Goldman, the Zukermans, and now the Koldofskys—threads in the tangled skein of this vanished micro-society of the Russian Jewish emigration that I was trying to unravel. Liza’s husband had been a pro-Bundist journalist in London in the Tsarist years, a union organizer in Canada, and a manager of American Jewish relief funds during the Russian Civil War. He had been targeted as a communist by the Canadian police and as an anticommunist by the Bolsheviks. He was clearly a capable, idealistic, and very brave man who like all the others in this little group had survived a period of extraordinary turbulence. The worst of it had come during the Russian Civil War, when the Jewish populations of the former Pale had been devastated by a series of pogroms, mostly carried out by the White armies, which had left thousands, if not tens of thousands, dead. In those days when international relief work was in its infancy and conditions were unbelievably dangerous, Semyon Koldofsky negotiated with Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks alike in order to bring aid to the devastated shtetls of the Pale and had managed the task well. He had first met Emma Goldman in
Moscow during those years, when, as she later wrote in a tribute to him, “life was cruelly hard and the struggle bitter.” By the late 1920s, eking out a living as a translator and a penniless journalist, he and his wife had settled in London.

  And where exactly had they chosen to live? Right there in the undistinguished suburb where my brothers and I would later be raised, in Golders Green, only a few doors down from my old kindergarten. They had found a small flat in Beechcroft Court, a cheap apartment block that backed onto the new aboveground section of the railway—the trains heading up to Brent Cross and Hendon screeched past their windows from morning to night. That then was where Emma Goldman holed up, at least until Semyon died prematurely, worn out by ill health, poverty, and overwork, at which point Liza, who earned a pittance sowing curtains for friends, moved to the modest semi on nearby Sneath Avenue, where she was still living thirty years later.