by Mark Mazower
The shed became not so much a refuge as a kind of home within the home, the place where he could be himself, freed of the responsibilities that he shouldered so readily. It embodied his very practical and precise intelligence, his patience and care with objects. But its charms lay too in its surroundings—part of a garden, surrounded by greenery in the city that had welcomed his parents and whose northern suburbs were his as much as they were anybody’s. It embodied a commitment to the domestic that brought him lasting happiness. Not for Dad the allure of fame (he was too much his father’s son for that) nor the happiness of creative solitude (he was too much his mother’s). He valued money for the stability it provided but he was neither avaricious nor acquisitive, and when he died there were no more than two suits in his wardrobe and a jacket or two. He valued constancy and honesty and loyalty to those close to him. And durability: What he built, he built to last. The shed is empty now and the tools have found new homes, which is what he would have wanted. But it still stands in the old place, and the trees and hedges are starting to grow up around it and honeysuckle is beginning to unpick the lock.
One afternoon in August 1997, eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds into the last tape of our conversations, we were called down for tea.
Dad: “Okay. Let’s stop …”
Me: “Shall we stop there?”
Dad: “Yes, let’s stop there.”
Family Trees
Mazower Family
Toumarkine Family
Notes
INTRODUCTION: ON WEST HILL
1. Aves was an associate of Charles Booth, the Victorian antipoverty campaigner. Aves’s notebook, “Walk with District Inspector Mountfield of the Highgate and Upper Holloway sub-division of the Y division of the Met[ropolitan] Police, District 19 [Kentish Town], 13 December 1898,” pages 159–61, is held in the Charles Booth archive at the London School of Economics.
CHAPTER ONE: THE BUNDIST
1. From “The Salt Sea” (“In Zaltsikn Yam,” 1901) by S. An-sky, written in praise of the “Great Jewish Workers’ Bund,” translated by Daniel Kahn, available at yiddishkayt.org/the-salt-sea. The Bund’s anthem was also by An-sky. On the personality of the Bund, see Vladimir Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist: The Memoirs of Vladimir Medem, translated and edited by Samuel Portnoy (New York: Ktav, 1979), 236.
2. Max’s surname as given in the Russian police archives should probably be rendered Mazover. I have changed this in accordance with the family’s later spelling.
3. See Gur Alroey, “Demographers in the Service of the Nation: Liebmann Hirsch, Jacob Lestchinsky, and the Early Study of Jewish Migration,” Jewish History 20, nos. 3–4 (2006), 265–82.
4. Sholem Levine, Untererdishe kemfer (New York: Solom levin bukh-komitet, 1946), 164–66. Many thanks to Gil Rubin for the research and for the translation from the Yiddish.
5. The Okhrana was the secret police under the Russian Empire. Founded in 1881, it was active after until 1917, when it was dismantled by the Provisional Government.
6. See the excellent Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
7. The following year, there was a police raid on the Nadezhda office in Warsaw, which turned up a cache of Bundist and other revolutionary materials. Whether this was a relic of Max’s stay or an indication that the company itself was being used by others in the revolutionary movement is impossible to say. Ibid., 98.
8. He had probably translated the book into Yiddish from a Russian translation, not from the English original.
9. The Soviet secret police went by several names over the years: Cheka, 1917–1922; OGPU, 1922–1934; NKVD, 1934–1943; KGB, 1943–1991. Even this is a simplification. All these names are used at various points in this book.
10. In the same issue we read of another breakout from the main prison in Kiev. Among the escapees was Max’s contemporary, a Russian Jew from Białystok named Meyer Wallach, better known to the world by his revolutionary name Maxim Litvinov, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister.
11. Medem, The Life and Soul, 227–28.
12. S. An-sky, In Shtrom, cited by Jonathan Frankel, “ ‘Youth in Revolt’: An-sky’s In Shtrom and the Instant Fictionalization of 1905,” in Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 147.
CHAPTER TWO: 1905
1. This document is held in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. The institute was established in 1935 to preserve the papers of the European labor movement in the face of the rising threat of the Nazis; today it is known as an important repository that holds the papers of figures such as Leon Trotsky and of other Leftist groups that were caught between Bolshevism and fascism. But the first collection of documents it purchased was a large part of the archive of the Bund. This it obtained from a comrade and close friend of Max’s, Franz Kursky, who took the files from Vilna to safety in Germany in 1920, and then, when Hitler came to power, sought a new home for them. The files had not yet been catalogued when the Germans reached Amsterdam; the institute was plundered by the Nazis during the war and stripped of its collections. We do not know how much was lost but what remained was returned to Amsterdam after 1945. Fortunately, plenty survived and the institute’s online catalogue lists nearly four hundred and fifty Bund files, as yet largely untapped by historians. ARCH00195/37/33, contains leaflets from Łódź during the 1905 revolution.
2. My thanks to Gil Rubin for tracking down this and the Gomel proclamation, and to Rima Turner for translating them.
3. Y. S. Hertz, Di geshikhte fun Bund in Łódź (New York: Farlag Unzer Tsayt, 1958), 135–37, 150. Thanks to Gil Rubin for his wonderful help discovering this and other sources, and for his translation from the Yiddish. Also Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1905.
CHAPTER THREE: THE YOST TYPEWRITER COMPANY
1. Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 54.
CHAPTER FIVE: BRITS AND BOLSHEVIKS
1. Ivy Low [Litvinoff] papers, “Materials for Autobiography,” 32, 37, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
2. Intriguingly, the Okhrana reported a Bundist agent called “Daniel” active in Warsaw in 1910 and 1912. It is unclear if this refers to Max, or someone else. He is described as a member of the Bund Central Committee.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE AFTERLIFE
1. Miklós Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2003), 285.
2. Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter: Two Heroes and Martyrs for Jewish Socialism (Jersey City, NY: KTAV, 1990); “NKVD Documents Shed New Light on Fate of Erlich and Alter,” East European Jewish Affairs, 22:2 (1992), 65–85.
3. Benjamin Nadel, “Bundism in England,” Jewish Socialist Nos. 6–7 (Summer–Autumn, 1986).
CHAPTER TEN: ANDRÉ
1. By coincidence, Warrant for Genocide, the definitive history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was written by Vera Broido’s husband, Norman Cohn. On Cohn and the origins of his interest in the study of anti-Semitism, see chapter 16. The Omni publishing house is included among twelve “anti-Semitic radical traditionalist Catholic groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center in its Intelligence Report of Winter 2006.
2. For a vivid account of the college when André was there, see Joseph C. Harsch, At the Hinge of History: A Reporter’s Story (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 2–4.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE KRYLENKO CONNECTION
1. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, edited by Gary Smith, translated by Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 26–27.
2. The date of birth that the British police had on file for him in the Central Register of Aliens, and that he had presumably gotten from whoever had brought him over to Engla
nd, was off by a day—March 2—as was the birthday present the Hudsons had given him in 1917. I deduce from this that probably neither André nor Max had possessed a copy of his birth certificate before he decided to apply for French citizenship. Indeed, in 1932, when he applied to be naturalized in London, he said he still did not have a copy. See HO (Home Office) 144/18052 (U.K. National Archives).
3. See A. Bosniacki, Utopia-wladza-prawo: Doktryna I koncepcje prawne “bolszewickiej” Rosji, 1917–1921 (Warsaw, 1999), 182. Hence when Max was arrested by the Cheka in 1919, his acquaintances in the revolutionary administration likely included not only senior Chekists but also Sofia herself in a senior position within the judicial apparatus.
4. See Paul Avrich, “Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G. T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group,” Russian Review No. 43 (1984), 1–29; also “Lignes directrices de la K.A.I. [1922],” in La gauche allemande: textes du KAPD, de l’AAUD, de l’AAUE et de la KAI (1920–1922), edited by Denis Authier (Naples: La Vecchia Talpa, 1973), 124–26.
5. Max Eastman, Love and Revolution (New York: Random House, 1964), 432–34.
6. In the meantime, Max, who had his own family as well as Frouma’s in Russia to worry about, kept utterly silent about his Krylenko connection, and I doubt he had any contact at all with Sofia after the early or mid-1920s at the very latest. When André was young, Max would have been a natural intermediary for their correspondence, but with time it is likely that André and his mother communicated independently of him.
7. An entry in the Liège population register sows further confusion: it records that DE MEYER, Constantin and KRYLENKO, Sophie left the city for Russia on September 24, 1918, and that they had two children, entered as:
DE MEYER André (né à Paris, le 03/03/1904)
DE MEYER Nathalie (née à Liège, le 11/06/1912)
It is extremely unlikely that Sofia and Constantin were in Belgium throughout the war, or still in Liège in September 1918, since we have the record of their wedding in Petrograd in November 1914, after which time return to Belgium would have been next to impossible.
It is certainly striking that André is registered under Constantin’s family name, but if he ever officially recognized him as his son, Sofia never informed her son of the fact.
There is also at least one clear error on the register—André’s year of birth was 1909, not 1904, and this provides additional reason to doubt the accuracy of the entry as a whole. In all, it is a useful reminder that archival sources raise as many questions as they answer.
CHAPTER TWELVE: FROUMA
1. Dmitri Baltermants was the stepson of Alexander’s brother, Nicolai Baltermants, who gave the boy his name.
2. Or was the intermediary, as Dad believed, Frouma’s brother Lev, a lawyer and prewar activist in the RSDLP? For his fate, see here.
3. On Kogan, see Joseph Fraenkel, “Lucien Wolf and Theodor Herzl,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England No. 20 (1959–1961), 161–88. See also “Outpost on Pampas Where Jews Once Found Refuge, Wilts as They Leave,” New York Times, June 9, 2013; and George Fortenberry et al., eds., The Correspondence of Harold Frederic (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1977), 317.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE SHELTERING WORD
1. My thanks to my cousin Boris Kobrinsky on whose writings about his grandparents I have relied.
2. Zalman Shazar, “My First Convention,” in Minsk Anthology, Volume 1, translated from the Yiddish by Jerrold Landau (Tel Aviv: Tarbut Vechinuch, 1971), 438–48.
3. Wilhelm Adam, Der schwere Entschluss (Berlin, 1965), 457, for the reference to Nata. My thanks to my cousin Anna Carlen for sharing these stories and the reference.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: CHILDHOOD
1. David Vital, “Our Road to Zion: A Memoir,” Commentary, May 1, 1989.
2. Born in Minsk, Mowshowitch had been the secretary of the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow before coming to London in 1915 and advising the Anglo Jewish elite on foreign policy. In 1919 he had left his mark on history, playing a vital backstage role at the Paris Peace Conference in getting minority rights on the diplomats’ agenda. In the 1930s, he remained quiet, learned, and formidably well connected.
3. This was the Mass Observation: Anti-Semitism Survey, completed in December 1938. See the paper by Tony Kushner, “Observing the ‘Other’: Mass-Observation and ‘Race,’ ” available online at www.massobs.org.uk/images/occasional_papers/no2_Kushner.pdf.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE WAR
1. Alice’s father was Jean-Antoine Lauthe (1884–1963), born Guingamp, the son of an infantry officer; he attended the École des Beaux-Arts and was an architect and painter. A Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, he was wounded in 1916 and received the Croix de Guerre.
Glossary
Arcos The All-Russian Cooperative Society, the official buying and selling agency of the Soviet Union, opened its offices in London in 1920. The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed the following year, and formal diplomatic recognition of the USSR followed in 1924.
Bermuda Conference An international conference held in April 1943 to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe.
Blackshirts Members of the British Union of Fascists, formed by Oswald Mosley in 1932.
Bolsheviks The so-called majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which split from the Mensheviks in 1903 under Lenin’s leadership.
Bund The General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, founded in Vilna in 1897, and organizer of the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in Minsk the following year.
Cheka (see also GPU, NKVD) The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage was established in December 1917 under the leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Comintern The Communist International, founded in 1919 and dissolved in 1943.
Dzerzhinsky, Felix [1877–1926] A Polish socialist from a gentry family, educated at the Vilna gymnasium, who helped found the SDKPiL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) before joining the Bolsheviks. He was the first head of the Cheka.
Einsatzgruppen SS death squads tasked by Heinrich Himmler with carrying out mass killings of civilians in occupied Poland and Russia.
Fabian Society A Left-liberal think tank that exercised a major influence on interwar and wartime British social policy.
Gosplan The chief central economic planning agency in the USSR, founded in 1921.
GPU Successor to the Cheka as the chief state security organization in the USSR, also headed by Dzerzhinsky, 1922–1923. Known as OGPU from 1923–1934.
Jabotinsky, Ze’ev [b. Vladimir Yevgenyevich Jabotinsky, 1880–1940] A journalist and political activist who was leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement.
Jewish Colonization Association Founded by Baron Hirsch in 1891 to support Jewish emigration from Russia and eastern Europe to agricultural colonies on lands purchased by the association.
KAPD (Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands, the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany) Founded in April 1920 in a split from the KPD.
Kenwood House Formerly the house and grounds of the Mansfields, adjacent to Hampstead Heath in North London, it was opened to the public in 1928.
KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, Communist Party of Germany) Formed in December 1918 out of the Spartacus League, becoming in the 1920s the largest communist party in Europe.
Kronstadt Rebellion An uprising by sailors of the Baltic fleet against the Bolshevik regime, calling for freedom of speech, new elections to the soviets, and the release of political prisoners. It was suppressed by the Red Army in March 1921 at the cost of hundreds of lives.
Kustodiev, Boris [1878–1927] Russian painter.
Litvinov, Maxim [1876–1951] Born Meir Hennoch Wallach-Finkelstein into a wealthy Jewish family in Bialystok, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. Lived in London 1910–1918 and married Ivy Low, was 1921–1930 Deputy Commiss
ar of Foreign Affairs, 1930–1939 People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and 1941–1943 Soviet Ambassador to the USA.
Lubyanka Headquarters of the Soviet secret police and prison.
Mass-Observation Pioneering social research organization founded in the UK in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge, and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings.
Medem, Vladimir [1879–1923] A leading political theorist of the Bund.
Mensheviks The so-called minority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which split with the Bolsheviks in 1903. Banned in the Soviet Union after 1921.
MI5 The British Security Service, established in 1909 under Vernon Kell.
MI6 The British Secret Intelligence Service, established in 1909 under Mansfield Cumming.
Myasnikov, Gavril Ilyich [1889–1945] A Russian metalworker and Bolshevik who was expelled from the party in 1922 and became a leading critic through his opposition Workers’ Group.
Nansen passport Travel documents issued by League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen. Initially issued to refugees from the Russian civil war from 1922 onwards.
New Economic Policy (NEP) Lenin’s shift away from war communism towards what he described as state capitalism with a mixed economy that recognized the importance of private ownership and foreign investment.
NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) Successor to the Cheka and GPU, 1934–1946.
Okhrana Tsarist secret police that monitored political opposition within and outside Russia.