by Mark Mazower
He was less at ease with the flash and dazzle of his economics tutor, Thomas Balogh, one of the most important and certainly the most colorful of the economists active in twentieth-century Britain. Having started out in Budapest in the 1920s as a youthful supporter of Admiral Miklós Horthy, Balogh had come to England and moved steadily to the Left. A. R. Lindsay had appointed him to teach economics and he helped turn wartime Oxford into one of the principal centers of what would later become known as Keynesian thought (although in fact Balogh and several of his colleagues were as significantly involved in the challenge to laissez-faire as Keynes himself). Balogh’s behavior as a college tutor was unconventional: He was notorious for lying down or wandering off to the bathroom while students were reading their essays aloud; he liked students to call him by his first name and addressed them as “little poppet” and “darling.” Dad did not warm to him—unflamboyant himself, Balogh’s flamboyance did not put him at ease—and recorded with relief on December 1, 1950, his “last essay for Balogh.”
Twenty-five years old, Dad now straddled two worlds. He remained attached to his childhood home on Oakeshott Avenue, and it was still his base outside term time; but his childhood was over and the house was growing quieter. André had departed for Spain, reappearing for a week or two each year; Ira was hard at work in the West End and about to begin married life with her new husband. Max was growing visibly older, fretting about his medications, his enforced idleness, and the lack of money. Looking after him was exhausting Frouma. In a photo Dad took at this time from inside the living room through the French doors into the garden, his parents are together at the bottom of the garden, two small elderly figures, survivors in a way, enjoying a North London summer day.
As his father’s life wound down, Dad was becoming aware of what his could be. That summer, he headed back across the Channel for a holiday picking grapes in Provence. In shorts and a short-sleeved shirt he trekked up mountain slopes, chopping wood in a chalet on the flanks of the Alps; later there were the sands at Bandol, the bay at Sanary-sur-Mer, surrounded by the smiles and handshakes and embraces of men and women his own age, looking forward to what the world has to offer now that the war is in the past. In these months, he walked and walked, great hikes with friends across the Dolomites and into Austria and Switzerland, as though he were testing and hardening himself, taking to the heights to see the way ahead.
Friends were getting married, and I wonder if it is a sign that his thoughts, as his mother’s had been on his behalf, were turning towards matrimony that he formed a couple of friendships, so far as I can tell for the first time, with girls who were, in one way or another, Jewish. One of these was a shy beautiful eighteen-year-old refugee, Barbara S., who had just arrived in England and knew almost no one when mutual friends encouraged them to meet. Lodging in Oxford, she visited him in his rooms and they took pictures of each other, pictures that had struck me when we looked at the photo album. I went through several other Barbaras, some living, some not, before I found the right one, married to a distinguished biochemist and living in very active semiretirement in Switzerland. We chatted, and she was enchanting, friendly, and happy to cast her mind back sixty-five years. It had not been an easy time for her, alone in a new country and unsure of her future, and although she and Dad did not see much of each other after that, what had stayed with her was his kindness, a big man but gentle. It was something she appreciated; for her war had been an exceptionally traumatic time, spent mostly underground in German-occupied Amsterdam before she was reunited with her father. In fact, she stayed only a few months in England in 1950 attending art school in Oxford before going back to Amsterdam, and by the time she returned, Dad had finished his studies.
There was also Ruth Spielman and her brother, Roger. Their background was quite different. The Spielmanns, as they had originally spelled it, were paid-up members of the Anglo-Jewish elite—the “cousins,” as the historian Chaim Bermant once dubbed them. Claude Spielman, their father, had won the Military Cross in the First World War before joining one of England’s oldest engineering firms, based in Darlington, which he ended up running. Ruth and Roger had grown up in the family residence, Hurworth Grange, a Victorian pile on fourteen acres on the banks of the Tees, in the company of a dozen or so servants, two chauffeurs, and several gardeners.
After Oxford Dad had headed north again. He had accepted a position as a trainee manager with Lever Brothers and was sent to Selby in Yorkshire, and there were factory foremen and sales managers to fill his waking hours, the mysteries of the Engineering Department and Administration, Marketing, Transport, and Wages to be interpreted as he rested after work in his lodgings. But early on the morning of Friday, May 2, only a few months into his training, Dad learned that his father had died suddenly of angina. He caught the train straight down to London and was in Oakeshott Avenue by lunchtime. The following day, at St. Pancras town hall, he registered the death: “Mordchel Mazower, aged 79, birth date approximately 1873.” The funeral was held at Golders Green crematorium, and Edvard Grieg’s “Morning” was played while Max’s body was turned into ashes. That same evening Dad returned to Selby and shortly after that he was moved again, to Sheffield and a new set of digs. His father’s death seems to have brought a kind of decision. The security of employment inside a large corporation appealed to him, and he stuck with Lever Brothers for thirty years. But he hated the grime of Sheffield, and with nothing to keep him in the north, he decided to return to London. It is as though one sees crystallizing in his mind the resolution to root himself close to his birthplace, driven by the sense of responsibility he felt to his mother, now widowed in a country he belonged to and knew far better than she did.
Sometimes he would get away to spend weekends with the Spielmans at Hurworth, where there were long walks and lunches with local colonels and their wives. It was not a friendship he ever mentioned to us, but it is suggestive of the way the social landscape of England had opened itself up to him, that he moved easily in these years, sometimes in the same day, from the wealth of Hurworth Grange to the poverty of the Doncaster mining villages, from Anglo-Jewish aristocracy to West Riding workers. Afterwards, his range of acquaintances would narrow, for many reasons I think, some of them willed and some of the times, as the energy of the war decade, which drove so many to mobilize and socialize around politics and the army, gave way to a life of family and domesticity that was focused on North London. But I like to think of him in those last few months of his father’s life, a young trainee manager, with the army and Oxford behind him, jumping out of Roger’s car in the drive at Hurworth in the winter of 1951, and walking with the Spielmans across their snowbound estate down to the Tees.
CONCLUSION
The Shed
There are many ways to tell a life. There is the unfolding of genius, beloved by the Romantics. There is the debunking of genius, beloved by those who followed them. There is the Odyssean quest, the pursuit of psychic stability, facing down ghosts and exorcising demons, the story of pain overcome, and the revelation of hidden secrets and of the effort required in keeping them buried. This is what biography often does in an age magnetized by the omnipotence of trauma: It reassures us that traumas can be identified and surmounted, the sinful dead and the perpetrators identified, the victims consoled. But these genres and tropes betray the limitations and perhaps the poverty of our literary expectations and psychological assumptions. What would it be to tell the story of a life that illustrated the unfolding of a different, much older theme: the pursuit of contentment and well-being? Of life lived across generations as a story not so much about suffering and the isolation and loneliness of an authentic individuality as about resilience and tenacity and the virtues of silence and pragmatism and taking pleasure in small things?
Dad’s capacity for this kind of pleasure was connected to a strong sense of purpose and seriousness. “Billy is the same helpful boy he always was,” his mother wrote to her sister and brother in France as the war ended. He was the g
ood son, which meant to be of use to those around you, and the value of this was deeply inculcated into him by both of his parents. Growing up in an era of falling bombs and tight money, he was the one who kept the house in order, and landladies as well as his parents benefited from his love of making things work. As a mischievous twelve-year-old, he once sabotaged the wiring in Oakeshott Avenue for the sheer pleasure of impressing the family by bringing the lights back on. As a grown man, he could not walk home past a rubbish skip without plundering the contents for anything that might be added to the woodpile in the garden or stored in the loft, deposited against life’s mishaps, malfunctions, and eventualities. He had the craftsman’s knowledge that accidents and breakdowns are a part of life. When they happened, they were to be fixed without fuss. If they were not soluble, there was no point talking about them.
This approach meant saving words for when they could affect things and make them better. It was not that he mistrusted words, not at all—the faded red covers of that mid-century classic of teach-yourself philology, Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language, protected a book he prized, and there was always a dictionary to hand at dinner to check on meanings and derivations—but he did like them to be exact, and exactitude was harder when it came to the category, a large one, of those things it was not generally worth talking about. Among these were metaphysical speculations, disappointments, and pain. His parents had, I think, taught him this lesson, each in their way, and the result was that it did not come at all easily to him to talk about personal difficulties. As a teenager, in the first pages of his diary, even when he did note openly—as he soon ceased to do—those days of being “depressed,” his language was allusive. We never heard about the ill health he had suffered as a boy, nor the period of lassitude and frustration that came over him after he finished the army and could not get into university. This softer version of his father’s stiff upper lip was the obverse of his pragmatism, and it was characteristic of many in his generation. I soon realized that when he skated over things, it was where he needed to be gently pressed about something that had happened and that he had not wanted to think about for one reason or another—things to do with his half sister and half brother, for instance. When I did probe, I never encountered protest, and sometimes found a willingness and even enthusiasm to contemplate things he had not thought about for decades. But I did not probe very deeply because I suppose I have more admiration and respect than I perhaps should for the ethos that underpinned his reticence, a reticence that was never more admirable than at the very end of his life when his stoicism impressed itself upon all of us afresh and upon his doctors as well.
The turbulence and upheavals of the twentieth century had a direct impact on Dad and shaped him particularly through their effects on his parents and siblings. They affected him too insofar as he understood his relationship to the place of his birth in a very specific and deeply felt way and because he knew what good fortune was whenever he looked at his family tree. In tracing his life, I have tried to show this, to convey how these family experiences and the social possibilities in the country of his birth came together in his childhood to foster a certain outlook that prepared him for the life he was to follow. Max’s political ideals provided the basic orientation—socialist but not communist (and yet not ardently anticommunist either)—that Dad learned in the light of English conditions as he came to political consciousness during the Spanish Civil War. It is striking that it was his half brother’s support of Franco into the 1960s that convinced Dad they had nothing in common. But then, fairly or not, he had already found André wanting because of his attitude towards his parents. Frouma’s belief in family, her commitment to nurturing those ties through visits and letters with her siblings in Russia and France, left an even greater mark on him than his father’s politics—and turned out to be more enduring—because he was so close to her and because she expected so much from him. The responsibility he felt as the son of immigrants never left him. He could not emulate her letter-writing, though at times he tried, but he remained devoted to his uncle and aunt, and above all to her, and made sure his children followed in his steps.
A psychic balance all his own helped him blend the world of his parents, a very specific Russian Jewish atmosphere preserved in Highgate living rooms, with many of the middle-class values of interwar England into which he was raised. It was not that he never felt embarrassment—the complementary mortifications he once mentioned to me were, first, whenever people mistook him for a White Russian, and, second and conversely, the times he went with his mother to some more observant Jewish family friends and felt out of place. But neither kind of embarrassment was insurmountable. At the same time, a series of networks so natural that they seemed to have always been there smoothed his path and gave social confidence: circles of friends of his parents, Mensheviks and Bundists born before the century had begun; the Fabian Society; and the Labour Party. Oxford and the army were equally powerful as entry points into ways of speaking and thinking about oneself that became part of the essence of the man.
There were role models, negative and positive, in a half brother and half sister from whom semi-detachment was key. Both André and Ira responded to the family’s revolutionary past in romantic ways that he could not share—in André’s case through a kind of exaggerated conservatism, the Catholic Church, and conspiracy theories; in Ira’s by glamorizing the Tsarist era and creating a series of aristocratic literary fantasies. Suspicious of excesses of the imagination, Dad’s response was practical: to make sure the money was there for a family life. But this never led him to making money for its own sake. His father, impressive in many things, some of them hidden, had acquired the savings to support them in a few fortunate years around 1912, but afterwards, when money got much tighter, Max’s business acumen was found wanting. Among the familial maps that one could draw across North London is one of the properties that at various times Max toyed with buying and that would have made his fortune had he done so. Success in making money was not a trait of the Mazowers and too much attachment to it was undesirable, which is why the Jaguar parked outside our door when Ira and Jeff came to call was always grounds for suspicion. Neither was worldly ambition or seeking the limelight; getting things done was more important. Max’s entire early life was an illustration of the virtues of political commitment behind the scenes.
To a surprising degree, this was a life Dad chose, pushed I think in particular by his father’s death in 1952, and once the uncertainties of the late 1940s were behind him, there seems to have been little wavering. He chose a job that would give him stability and allow him to raise a family. He chose to be more present in his sons’ lives than his father had been in his. He chose to marry and was fortunate as well as thoughtful enough to know instantly when he had found the woman he wanted to make a home with. By the time he began working at Lever Brothers, his mother was already on the lookout for a prospective daughter-in-law. There was a couple called the Kidels, who had lodged with them in Oakeshott Avenue before the war and later moved down the road. On Saturday, March 14, 1954, they invited Frouma and Dad, now twenty-nine years old, to meet some friends who had a daughter they thought he might like. That was the evening he and Mum met—through old-fashioned matchmaking in the Eastern European style. Mum’s father, Reg Shaffer, was a self-made businessman who owned a small textile manufacturer in Manchester. His wife, Ruth, who looked after their home in London during Reg’s frequent trips north, was the daughter of a well-known Jewish novelist, a serendipitous connection because Max had published this writer, Sholem Asch—a giant in Yiddish literature—back in another world and another time, in a Bundist journal he had edited before the First World War in Vilna. Mum was nineteen, an only child, home from a not terribly happy stint in Paris and training to become a physiotherapist. Little more than a year after that dinner they married. They both wanted a family and children followed, four of us, all boys, all close. They moved into the house that became our home in 1959: They would occu
py it into the next century. Frouma was only a couple of miles away. Set amid the Golders Green streets that Dad knew from his visits to the Zukermans and the Koldofskys when he was a boy, the house is not unlike the one in Oakeshott Avenue, a little older but in a very similar style, semidetached, with French doors at the rear that gave onto a long garden that ended in trees.
Dad’s shed first went up just below the house, and my brother Dave and I, then aged two and three, are caught on film washing its wooden sides with water—we’re trying to be helpful. By the late 1960s, by which time our brothers, Ben and Jony, had arrived too, it had been moved to its present location farther down the garden and along the wall on the other side. As we grew up, this was Dad’s domain. It was small and functional and there was room only for one person to work, with perhaps a small boy alongside. Standing at the workbench, you looked out across the garden to the large cherry tree we used to climb; behind were shelves of screws, nails, and other items, all neatly housed in an assortment of small containers and carefully labeled.
He had fastened the tool cabinet to the wall at the end and this was where his chisels, hammers, saws, and mallets were housed. I don’t remember him ever buying tools, which may be because these were things he had begun collecting as a schoolboy at the Woolworths in Kentish Town and then supplemented during the war. None was for show and none looked new, and there was always a smell of sawdust and usefulness; an apron was worn lest there be hard words when he came dirty into the house. Once the shed acquired a light, he could spend hours there in all seasons.