What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  In the 1960s London may have been swinging but Golders Green felt like a place where nothing ever happened, the epitome of suburban blandness. As a boy, I knew of course that the tree-lined streets that were so familiar to me had not been there fifty or sixty years earlier. In fact I think now that is what first drove me to immerse myself in history because when I was about ten or eleven I would make visits to the public library on Golders Green Road to find out what I could about the area’s vanished farms, the old field boundaries, the medieval origins of local names. Sitting quietly in the reference section, obsessively mining the riches buried in Eilert Ekwall’s Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, I suppose I was trying to uncover the deeper past that would root me to a spot that otherwise seemed to offer so little. What I had missed was that it was precisely Golders Green’s lack of history that had been the draw for others, that it was in this ultra-new suburb—with its thousands of houses built in scarcely a decade, with no one already there to claim prior ownership—that these newcomers to England found themselves most at home, most easily able to sink into the comfortable anonymity that they valued. The Ridgeway, Woodstock Avenue, Wessex Gardens—the very names of its streets had marketed an anodyne vision of English pastoral to new entrants to the metropolitan middle class. From the start it had been a kind of survivors’ paradise.

  I suddenly saw Golders Green with new eyes, a place exploding into being as the result of one of those amazing speculations that had transformed huge swathes of London every bit as radically as older landgrabs had transformed the empire. In 1900, it was still a rural backwater of dairy farms and scattered villas with a population of a few hundred. But once the high-flying American businessman Charles Yerkes, a land developer, convicted larcenist, and blackmailer, managed to persuade Parliament to give him permission to extend the railway line north beyond Hampstead Heath, land values had shot up, the fields were plowed under, and hundreds of houses were built annually, before and after the First World War. No wonder Max had felt the lure of property development. By 1923 Golders Green had more than twenty thousand residents. There was a shopping parade and you could watch films at the local Ionic and variety shows at the Hippodrome, a gargantuan theatrical mélange of Roman, Greek, and Egyptian. All this was thanks to the trains that ran past the Koldofskys’ window, in and out of one of the busiest underground stations in the capital.

  “Give Golders Green back to the British Empire,” joked a comedian at the Hippodrome in the late 1930s. The neighborhood had gotten a reputation early on for attracting Jewish families from the East End, and refugees from the Nazis settled there too. Yet neither group had much in common with the Russian political émigrés among whom Max had lived before 1914. By the 1930s, many of them had gone, and Max and Frouma kept their distance from anyone who was too credulous about the regime. Goldman—who certainly was not—was just passing through, but the Koldofskys and the Mazowers and the Zukermans were all very close and saw each other regularly. The Mazowers were in Highgate, half an hour from Golders Green by bus. The Zukermans and Koldofskys lived only three streets apart. Round the corner was another member of their circle, David Mowshowitch, who was probably one of the best-informed men in England on the nationalities situation in Eastern Europe.2

  And there were younger friends, figures from the next generation who were equally powerful sources of political insight: Eva Broido’s daughter, Vera, who had fled through Polotsk with Max, was done with Raoul Hausmann by 1934 and settled in London. During the Spanish Civil War, she often came round for tea with Dad and his parents. The man she was to marry, Norman Cohn, had just come down from Oxford and was also in digs nearby. In 1938, he spent three months living in a slum in the East End charting the rise of anti-Semitism across the United Kingdom for the pioneering social research group Mass Observation: The report he helped to author was the first serious study of racial prejudice ever undertaken in Britain.3 Friends like these were a kind of political education in themselves, and they had an enormous influence on Dad at an impressionable age.

  Thanks to Goldman—or, rather, thanks to her letters—something of this remarkable network of people swam back into view. She had left a truly voluminous correspondence at her death—even her lover Berkman had been staggered at her capacity for letter-writing—and it helped me to appreciate just how intense, and how political, these overlapping friendships had been. Through the second half of the 1930s, she would write regularly to the Koldofskys on the notepaper of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista, the London-based body of which she was honorary secretary and which numbered George Orwell and Havelock Ellis among its sponsors. There was news from Spain and her reports on the state of politics in France, which Goldman found depressing and introverted. And in each of these letters there was a brief message for the Mazowers and often for Zukerman and Mowshowitch as well. In Paris, waiting for a visa to Spain, she asked Liza to “remember me most kindly to the Mazowers.” “Affectionate greetings to the Mazowers,” she wrote from Canada on September 12, 1939. “Remember me to Mr. Zuckerman. Remember me also to Mrs. Mazower and Mr. as well,” in January 1940. Sending Liza some articles on Stalin’s malign influence in Spain, the Red Army purges, and Soviet overtures to Hitler, she asked her to “please let the Mazovers [sic] read the articles and then send them to Doris Zhook, 12 Hillside Gardens Edgware Middlesex.” (Zhook was an anarchist veteran—she and Goldman went back to the 1890s.)

  What all this points to is the afterlife of a late-nineteenth-century Russo-Jewish socialist tradition—one that had begun with the Bund and then been overtaken and overshadowed but never entirely erased by Bolshevism. Some of these people were Bundists, others were Mensheviks or anarchists, but the labels did not matter much anymore and perhaps they had never mattered as much as historians make out. What lingered invisibly in London’s Metroland, passing down through the generations, was an outlook, no longer confident of its capacity to shape the future but still engaged, highly informed, and faithful to its original values. Certainly not everyone in Dad’s parents’ milieu had been as political a creature as Semyon Koldofsky or William Zukerman, let alone Emma Goldman. There were businessmen, more or less successful, import-export traders in timber or coal, a doctor or two, journalists, and some research scientists; there was a tailor and a pioneering Yiddish art critic who had written early appreciations of Chagall and Modigliani. But of these a surprising number were or had been on the Left, former revolutionaries focused now on making their homes in this country where they had chosen to settle, behind the privet hedges and lawns of the very suburban streets that would end up exercising such a subliminal pull on my father that we would end up growing up there. Neither of the other two Mazower children, Ira and André, showed any interest in their parents’ circle, and both in their different ways made it clear that they wanted to throw off the part of their background that these circles represented. Max and Frouma did nothing to stop them. Whether they were eating properly was always a more urgent subject for Frouma’s concern and Max’s approach was to allow his children to guide themselves. It was their son Billy who was most attentive to the grown-ups. I imagine them clustered around the radio for the news from Spain, the latest horrors in the Third Reich, and the unfolding tyranny in Moscow, the faint but intense buzz of conversation in Russian that reaches him while he is with Dick in the next room, playing corpses, a favorite game, lying on the living-room floor pretending to be dead while Max emerges silently in his smoking jacket, an early-evening drink in his hand. In this atmosphere, Dad’s political consciousness matured rapidly, and unlike that of his half siblings, it quickly came to replicate his parents’ orientation. He went through a brief communist phase but by the time he was fourteen his mother was reporting half in amusement, half seriously, that he was “through with communism and is now simply a socialist.”

  The first time it occurred to me to think about Dad’s life more systematically, about the world of his childhood and how it had formed him, was when the Hayward Ga
llery hosted an exhibition about art in the era of the interwar dictatorships. The centerpiece was a re-creation of the 1937 Paris International Exposition, at which, famously, the German and the Soviet pavilions faced off as if foreshadowing architecturally the imminent war, collectively looming over the optimistic internationalism of the previous century that the Eiffel Tower had once incarnated. I went down to the South Bank with Dad to see it, and at one point, as we went around, he turned to me and said, “I was there, you know.” I could hardly believe it; it was a shock to imagine him, standing there full of life in front of me, back in history, on the wall. But it was true—he was never wrong about such things: He had been there.

  August 8, 1937, was a blisteringly hot summer day in Paris, and when Dad got up that morning at his aunt Niura’s house, she was already fretting about letting him stay out in the sun too long, especially in his new suit and tie. It was his first visit without his parents but there was no chance of his being neglected. As he was only twelve, Heini, Max and Frouma’s lodger, had accompanied him across the Channel to suburban Beauchamp, north of Paris, where Niura lived with her husband, Yasha. After breakfast in the garden, Yasha, Heini, and Dad caught the train into town. At the Gare du Nord, his uncle Vitalie was waiting for them, and the four men—Dad, Heini, Yasha, and Vitalie—went around the newly opened Palais de la Découverte, and then crossed the Seine to tour the grounds of the exposition. Heini, the refugee from Nazism, was on his way back to Vienna to try to get his family out; Yasha was a tough White Russian who had fought his way to France through not one but two civil wars; Vitalie had served in the Red Army before making his own escape from the Soviet Union. The intensity of the ideological confrontation looming over Europe needed no explaining to men like this, and it was in their company that Dad in his boyhood came to know and love France. They joked around in French—first language for none of them though Vitalie and Yasha were fluent by this time—and headed back to Beauchamp around four for tea. I have the letter that Vitalie wrote his wife later that day describing it all. Dad, whom they had got to know a little a year or so earlier when they had visited London, is “vraiment un garçon épatant et il est beaucoup plus attaché à nous maintenant.” The boy had tired easily—it had been very hot—and anyway the sights themselves had been disappointing. Back at the house, the dog adores him and so does Niura. He charms them all. He tells Niura that he loves Alice, Vitalie’s wife, better than his sister, Ira. He is palpably energized by the company of younger, more communicative men than his ailing father, and by the affection of the lively women who doted on him. After the strains of home, the doctors, the worries from Moscow, the lack of money, Paris must have been a shot in the arm.

  When I was sent to stay for the first time in Beauchamp with Niura and Yasha, I was about the age Dad had been when he went in 1937. The line wound out of the Gare du Nord through the Paris outskirts, just as it had done in his day, and there were the same quiet hedge-lined streets once you stepped off the train. The tall iron gate that Niura always kept shut defended a rather lifeless front garden. The bell rung, Niura would emerge from the house, trimly patting her always neat bun, not a hair out of place: She had a slightly coquettish manner, attenuated by age. This was not the house they had lived in before the war—they had left the avenue Hébert place with its wild garden and old trees—but it was in the same sleepy district and is the setting in which I always think of Niura and Yasha. Inside it had the stillness of a house without children, and Yasha was retired, ailing, and seemingly charmless. Even so, the Toumarkine warmth meant one never felt unwelcome. My halting French was met with fond kisses and a stream of Russian endearments and food quickly emerged from the kitchen for the golodnyye sobaki—hungry dogs. Then off I would be sent to the local boulangerie for baguettes, French or no French, as Niura had once sent Dad out too.

  The haven at Beauchamp had been a precarious one in those days, much more precarious than I had realized. Niura, the youngest of the Toumarkines, had left the USSR shortly after Frouma, passing through London before settling in Paris where she had gone to a party of Russians and met Yasha Stepanof, a stocky hard-drinking railway engineer. Both of them had the Nansen passports issued to refugees by the League of Nations, which meant that they were officially stateless; neither of them acquired French citizenship until after the war. There had been a rocky few years in the mid-1930s in which Yasha had lost his job, and they thought seriously for a time, despite Yasha not being Jewish, of emigrating to Palestine. Nothing came of that and luckily he found work again in the design offices of a large French rolling-stock manufacturer. He was an accomplished draftsman who had been trained in the imperial engineering college near Smolensk before World War I and he had learned his trade the hard way—on railroads in Finland and the Caucasus. In Beauchamp, stretched out on the chaise longue in the living room, he would regale his nephews with stories. Unlike Max, he was happy to talk and had a vast technical knowledge. He spoke to Dad about the Trans-Siberian Railway in the old days and the workers whose hands he had seen frozen to the rails. It was the cold, he said, that had started him drinking—he did not hide his problem with the bottle, a problem that in later years was to get so much worse that Niura would often have to go out in the early hours to get him out of the gutter and bring him home. He had fought the Reds at Sebastopol, and needed little prompting to unbutton his shirt to show the Bolshevik “gift” he had received there, a bullet wound in his shoulder. Like others in the White armies he had escaped across the Black Sea to Constantinople. He had then made his way to Bulgaria where he built roads and offered his services, as thousands of other Russian soldiers did, to the Bulgarian army in its bloody coup against the agrarian Left. This fighting was behind him by the time he settled in France late in 1923. He had briefly been married before, but his first wife, Bulgarian to judge from her name, had died shortly after their move to Paris. Once he met Niura they settled in Beauchamp and lived near the railway sidings and his workplace.

  Yasha was old and cantankerous by the time I got to know him. But in pictures from the mid-1930s he seems much more at ease and more affectionate, if not with his wife—theirs was never a happy bond—then with his nephew. It was, I think, from his White Russian engineer uncle that Dad learned about planting vegetables, putting up sheds, and keeping chickens, practical lessons that were to prove useful on Oakeshott Avenue when the war started. It was in Beauchamp too that Dad found how much he loved playing with their dog, Pchelka (Bee), with the result that in the spring of 1939 their charlady in Oakeshott Avenue thrilled him, and his mother, by bringing round an eight-week-old puppy to take their minds off the international scene.

  There were other lessons too in Yasha and Niura’s stormy, nerve-racking relationship, something Dad had not experienced at close quarters before. Niura was lively, conscious of her appearance, a great confidante—even the secretive André seems to have confided in her—and to judge from her love of hamming it up for the camera, the extrovert in the family. But she was unhappy that she had no children, and her husband tended to flirt heavily, especially when he was drunk—and with his friends he drank a lot. They had frequent and explosive quarrels, loud enough to worry Dad when he was there, and to make him wish he wasn’t: His parents wondered how bad things got when no one else was around. Perhaps as a result, Niura was often mysteriously ill during those years. At the same time, she was a devoted and loving aunt, and like Frouma, her cooking covered all of Russia’s holidays and traditions: borscht, blinis and cakes, homemade curd cheese, stuffed carp. Despite the domestic turbulence, Beauchamp became a refuge for her nephews and nieces, and visiting her in Paris was a rite of passage that all the Mazower children—André included—went through in the 1930s.

  Back in Highgate, the plight of Heini Grunwald brought home the lengthening shadow that was being cast by Nazism. They were certainly aware of it before, but the plight of Jews trying to get into Britain could not and did not leave them unmoved. Dad once commented to me that Ira was the lea
st Jewish of all of them, and when I asked what in fact it meant for the Mazowers to be Jewish, given their Christmas trees and Easter feasts and unease with Jewish festivals and total horror of synagogues—the whole Bundist suspicion of more or less any form of organized religion—he said that what it evoked for him was chiefly that sense of solidarity that he and his parents had felt with the refugees trying to escape Germany and Austria after the Nazis came to power.

  Six or seven months after Heini and Dad had gone to Beauchamp, the Wehrmacht marched into Vienna and the refugee crisis came to Oakeshott Avenue. Heini’s uncle and father (his mother had died when he was young) had fled Austria on the day of the German takeover, made their way through France to the Channel, and were expected in London any minute when the telephone rang: It was them. They had been refused entry at Folkestone and sent back to France, so Heini went to Paris the same day to try to sort things out. Not only did he fail but he came close to being refused entry back into England too. A fragment of one of Frouma’s letters to her brother in Paris conveys her state of mind, plunged suddenly back into the uncertainty and terror of flight:

  [On Friday Heini] immediately left by a night steamship. In the middle of the day on Saturday, [he] shows up all of a sudden, in a terrible condition, unshaven, thin and pale, and he tells us that his father and uncle have returned to Vienna and that he was detained on his way back here in Newhaven, and they didn’t want to let him through. After four hours in detention, they let him in, but marked his passport that he is only permitted to stay in England for one month, because he revealed that he has twenty pounds in the bank and they said that is enough for one month …

  I tried to calm him down as best I could; I told him we will go to Stevenson and ask them to take steps, and we will petition his college director, in a word not allow him to leave. Now I will have to charge him much less of course since I cannot turn him away in such circumstances. I sent him to take a bath and he went to sleep, since as it turned out he had not slept for two nights. He slept from 2 p.m. on Saturday until 11 a.m. on Sunday, and woke in better shape.