What You Did Not Tell Read online

  Mark Mazower

  * * *

  WHAT YOU DID NOT TELL

  A Russian Past and the Journey Home

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION On West Hill

      ONE The Bundist

      TWO 1905

      THREE The Yost Typewriter Company

      FOUR Border Crossing, 1919

      FIVE Brits and Bolsheviks

       SIX Wood End

      SEVEN The Afterlife

      EIGHT Zachar

      NINE The Expanding Silence

      TEN André

     ELEVEN The Krylenko Connection

     TWELVE Frouma

     THIRTEEN Highgate

     FOURTEEN The Sheltering Word

     FIFTEEN Ira

     SIXTEEN Childhood

    SEVENTEEN The War

     EIGHTEEN Oxford and What Came Between

   CONCLUSION The Shed

  FAMILY TREES

  Mazower Family

  Toumarkine Family

  NOTES

  GLOSSARY

  CAPTIONS AND CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOLLOW PENGUIN

  For Selma and Jed

  and for their cousins

  Nina and Clara

  Rachel, Cleo and Nicholas

  Max, Seth and Elliot

  INTRODUCTION

  On West Hill

  I thought I knew Dad well, but the day he died I began to realize how much of his life was unknown to me. We had come back home from the hospice and somebody asked what kind of funeral his parents had had. As none of us was sure, I did what my historian’s training and instinct suggested: I went to the archive. Upstairs in the wardrobe were his boxes of family papers, and on one of them he had written: Diaries, 1941–1996. I climbed on a chair and fetched it down and sat with it on my parents’ bed. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had opened it.

  I had always felt close to Dad, and when my brothers and I were growing up, he had been the most comforting of presences. Once, I remember, we were driving through the Cotswolds, just he and I. It was a spring day, and I must have been twelve or thirteen. We were looking at houses because he and Mum were thinking about buying a weekend cottage. The map was spread out on my lap, and I recall feeling proud that he was relying on me for directions. He drove and I gazed out of the window as the fields flashed past, comfortable in our easy silence and mutual trust.

  A comfortable silence is not an impenetrable one. Dad had not been a talkative man, and he shied away from the personal like a nervous horse. Difficult questions could elicit a faint smile before he responded. But we could ask him anything, and he would tell us stories about his childhood and his parents. Some years before his death, he and I decided to get these stories down—he was a grandfather by then and time was passing—so we went to his room at the top of the house and I switched on the tape recorder. Our conversations ran over several afternoons, and I don’t remember that there was anything he refused to talk about. The limits were really inside me: I felt inhibited about raising some things with him, and there were many others it never occurred to me to ask.

  Inside the box there were a couple of old address books and half a century’s worth of his Letts pocket diaries, neatly arranged in chronological order. He had used them mostly to jot down appointments and I soon found the information we needed. There were no intimate confessions or emotional outpourings—no surprise there—and you could have counted on the fingers of one hand the points at which Dad had recorded a mood or feeling. Yet those resolutely unintrospective pages spoke after their fashion, and as I read on, I slowly began to piece together the pattern of daily movements and social contacts that had characterized his life.

  He had grown up in the North London neighborhood of Highgate and the diaries testified to his enduring attachment to it. At the start of January 1942, when he noted in his Schoolboy Diary that he “saw Daddy off in Waterlow Park,” he was just sixteen. He was about to return to the school he was attending in Somerset as an evacuee; his rapidly aging father was making his way through the bombed-out city to his wartime job in postal censorship. A decade later, Oxford and military service were behind him, and the year his father died was also the year his cousins visited from Paris and he “took the children for a walk on the Heath.” “Children” did not mean my brothers and me because we had not come along yet. But sure enough the Upright Diary for 1954 notes a “walk on the Heath with Miriam” on April 11; barely a month had gone by since he and Mum had met. And before long we were there too and they were playing with us in the meadows above the ponds or walking amid the rhododendrons behind Kenwood House.

  When they became parents, Mum and Dad started filming us, and as we grew older a favorite treat on wintry weekend afternoons was to get out the projector, draw the curtains, and watch ourselves as toddlers: Dave’s first steps, tottering towards the camera across the sands in Devon; Ben in the pram in our back garden; Jony on the climbing frame. One of their earliest efforts dates from the summer of 1958. It is a sunny day and Mum must have been holding the camera—they had borrowed it from a friend. They are on Hampstead Heath for a picnic and as usual they have laid the tartan rug on the ground because the grass is often a little damp even in July and August. Dad is on his back, holding me above his head: He is full of life and looks strong and happy, much as I remember him throughout my childhood. Yet when I freeze the frame, I notice something else now, lurking in the distance: There behind him, across the ponds and above the tree line, is the spire of St. Michael’s at the top of Highgate West Hill. It marks with a strange precision the very spot where I would wait each day to catch a cab to visit him in hospital half a century later, in the last few months of his life.

  It was the summer of 2009 and a sabbatical had brought me back to London. Shortly after I arrived, his health had taken a turn for the worse. Not having a car, I used to walk up Highgate Hill and wait there for a taxi. The autumn was unusually mild—as I remember, there were hardly any rainy days—and the stroll allowed my mind to float away from the image of Dad lying in his ward towards the things he liked to talk about: the war, his childhood, history, Russia.

  About fifty yards from where I would be standing there was a sign that marked a fork in the road: It had one arrow pointing to “Highgate Village,” the other to “The North.” As the cars sped past, in and out of town, there was something about that sign—perhaps it was the stark choice it offered, or maybe it was the midcentury font—that got me thinking about the places Dad had called home. I realized that his eighty-plus years could be plotted—stints in the army and college and business trips aside—as a series of points around Hampstead Heath, the great rolling expanse of which unfolded below me. Unlike his parents, who had been uprooted from Russia and parted from their families and had suffered great hardship by the time they settled in London, his experience of home over the course of his life was pretty much contained within the circle of a day’s walk from where I was standing. Now it was ending only a couple of hundred yards from where it had begun, and I wondered whether the contentment I associated with him—an acceptance of life, a kind of happiness, really, if it is not presumptuous to call it that—was linked in some way to his enduring bond with the area, whatever it was that had drawn his parents not just to England but to this part of London in particular, and led them to make it their home and his.

  Since moving to New York a few years earlier, I had started to feel acutely nostalgic for my native city. When I was growing up, things were in many ways not very different from how they had be
en in Dad’s time: The Lyons teahouses had gone, and the first Sainsbury’s supermarkets had arrived. But the Victorian classrooms in the school down the road, the grim toilets across the playground, the warm public libraries, the whole class-driven ethos of England had stayed more or less intact. By the start of the twenty-first century, all this was disappearing fast. Transformed by massive inflows of capital, London was changing before my eyes. As Dad lay ill, I thought about nostalgia and what precedes it. How is it that the places we live in come to feel that they are ours? What had it meant for Dad’s taciturn father, Max, never to see his birthplace again? How had Dad’s affectionate, intuitive mother, Frouma, come to terms with being separated from her family in Moscow for thirty years? What invisible psychic struggles, what efforts of renunciation, had gone into making a home in Highgate for their son to grow up in? These questions acquired new meaning for me once I returned to Manhattan. The more I thought about them, the more this double loss—Dad’s death and the vanishing of the London I had known as a boy—came to seem inextricably intertwined.

  Behind them lay a third, more distant loss as well. I had never really known Dad’s parents because Max had died before I was born and Frouma when I was six. But it was clear enough from everything we had been told that Dad’s silence had nothing on his father’s. How else could one account for the fact that although Max and Frouma had been close, he had never apparently told her the name of his own mother? Unlike Dad’s, Max’s silence had hidden real secrets. Before he met Frouma, he had been a revolutionary socialist in Tsarist Russia, something he never spoke about later, once he had left his underground existence behind. Many of his closest comrades ended up in violent deaths, shot either by the Bolsheviks or by the Nazis. His decision to come to England, to marry and start a family with Frouma, had been a precondition for our existence. In her, he had found someone for whom the nurturing of family ties was a way to withstand the pain of history. But for Max, settling down had depended upon his renunciation of activism: The building of a home and political disillusionment could not be separated.

  Perhaps this explains why my image of him was suffused with the melancholy aura of dashed hopes. In the courage and commitment of his youth, I saw something exemplary for our more jaundiced age with its demagogues and its obscene wealth and its ever more intense introspectivity. Today many people seem to be too chastened and paralyzed by their suspicion of social utopias, even the most practical ones, to want to fight for anything much at all beyond the perfection of their own souls. Max had fought hard for others—driven by a very old-fashioned passion for justice that had been animated by a firsthand knowledge of poverty and exploitation. He’d had a visceral opposition to tribalism of any kind, ethnic and religious above all, an opposition that came from the gut as much as the brain. The movement for which he had fought more than a century ago had lost out and languished in oblivion, but that hardly seemed to matter. History’s losers have more to teach us than its winners. No victories last forever—it is what you do with defeat that counts.

  Back in Highgate, I found myself thinking about Fisher and Sperr, an antiquarian bookshop on the high street next door to the Hilltop Beauty Salon. Why it had come into my mind I am not sure—maybe because nothing preserves defeated ideas better than an old bookshop, which keeps intact the possibility of their discovery and reincarnation. And perhaps for that reason I remembered how dismayed I was only a few months after Dad’s death when a dusty green curtain appeared across the familiar bow window to mark John Sperr’s passing. The shop had been there so long I had somehow assumed it would go on forever; Mr. Fisher had disappeared years ago, but John Sperr had manned the desk to the end. He had become forbiddingly deaf and barked at visitors, but once you had his confidence, the key came out, the cavernous back room with its treasures was grudgingly unlocked, and the light was turned on. Inside it was always freezing and the books were crammed high, gathering dust and rarely touched. One afternoon, I found a small leather-bound edition of the Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, its title page bearing in a precise but minuscule schoolboy hand the signature “V. E. Rieu” and the date “Nov. 10th 1902.” I bought it because I had heard of Rieu, who would later become the first translator of Homer in paperback and the founder of Penguin Classics, the great disseminator of the world’s learning. He had lived and died nearby, leaving his library to be dispersed and then reassembled in a bookdealer’s afterlife.

  Rieu was not the only local resident to have valued ideas and books: Like an urban mountaintop, Highgate’s elevation seems almost designed to inspire thought. “Once up the hill and the trouble of ascending it is at an end, it is felt that a haven has been reached,” noted Ernest Aves, an acute observer of the streets of Victorian London, after he had walked up into the village one mild December day in 1898. “Philosophers or Friends ought to be living here.”1 So they have, along with poets and novelists, conservative romantics, anarchists and revolutionaries; the most famous communist in history lies in its cemetery. Many, like Karl Marx, were émigrés. Others, like Rieu, were the children of foreigners. It is as if the city views from London’s northern heights drew in the contemplative and the idealists, and gave its charms a special significance for those who had braved political turmoil and sought sanctuary without ever wanting to give up on the world.

  “Mostly it was footsteps, rustling leaves,” in John Betjeman’s words—the bard of Victoriana had passed his infancy on Highgate West Hill. When Dad grew up there, horses still pulled the milk float along Langbourne Avenue and sheep were herded down North Road. The pace of the neighborhood suited his parents, and once they had settled down on the Holly Lodge Estate, an interwar development of half-timber houses and wide avenues on the flank of West Hill, they refused to uproot themselves again. When family circumstances drove them to sell their first house and move to a smaller place, the van picked up their furniture and deposited it at their new home five minutes later: It was just around the corner. And later still, when Dad’s father died, his mother moved into a block of flats less than a quarter of a mile away. There is a privilege in being able to stay put, in choosing when to move, and the upheavals, fears, and deprivations of their early lives had equipped Dad’s parents to appreciate it.

  This was the terrain Dad grew up in, and he knew it intimately. It gave him confidence, I think, the kind that perhaps comes only by knowing where you are from and having been happy there and having kept it close. In hospital, some time in his last weeks, I brought him the memoir of a man who had grown up in the poor backstreets of Highgate New Town below the cemetery, and when I queried the name of a road the author had mentioned, Dad identified it immediately because he had canvassed there for the Labour Party before its historic victory in the magical election summer of 1945. As his health grew worse, while he was lying in a noisy ward that overlooked the streets sloping down to the West Heath ponds, there were few things that worried him as much as momentarily forgetting how to get from home to the hospital. A local map restored his natural sense of direction.

  This ability to orient himself, to know where he was, had always been important to him. Among the first photographs he took when he was a boy, in the early 1930s, were shots of the Heath, tokens of the lure of the place, its grip on his imagination. The trees are mostly bare, and to judge from what the blurred figures above the ponds are wearing it is probably a spring day. It is not the people that have caught his child’s eye but the slopes, the skylines, and the hedgerows. Already one can see an attachment forming, and the way he passed that on was only one of his gifts to us.

  His, and his parents’ too. For them, it had come at a price—the price all refugees have to pay—because making their home in England had meant forsaking other, older places, with memories of their own. One or two of these we knew a little about because during our childhood we would from time to time overhear Dad speaking in fluent Russian on the phone to relatives in Moscow and Leningrad. Other places were never anything more than names—Smolensk, Vilna, Grodno, Ri
ga—that cropped up occasionally in anecdotes. I was not sure where they were exactly, or who had lived in them. It had all seemed so far away.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Bundist

  At the time Dad was born, his father was doing well. Max was a company director several times over, and he ran the Engineering and Mercantile Company Ltd, which exported Sheffield-made machine tools to Eastern Europe. In the photograph, the three-piece suit, the tightly buttoned jacket, the cuffs, and the lightly held cigarette convey respectability, the poise of someone comfortable dealing with balance sheets, trading positions, and capital.

  But his air of latent watchfulness hints at a man on his guard, and the wary glance off to the side suggests that his careful appearance concealed as much as it revealed. A leading anarchist named Rudolf Rocker once wrote in his recollections of the political exiles he had known in turn-of-the-century London that they were taciturn men, disinclined to talk much, and Max was of that kind: His wife, Frouma, called him zhivotik—“little stomach”—because words stayed down there and rarely made their way up into his mouth. He had no difficulty with languages—he spoke four fluently and his English was impeccable, with no trace of an accent. But Max had learned to say no more than was necessary in any of them.

  He belonged to the same generation as Vladimir Lenin, the Menshevik leader Julius Martov, and the future Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, and his path had almost certainly intersected with theirs because when he had entered business in the years before the First World War, working for a Russian shipping firm in the city of Vilna, he had simultaneously been involved in running an underground socialist movement. Its full name was Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland (the General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), but it was known simply as the Bund. Today it has been almost entirely forgotten: Its language, Yiddish, barely survives, and the people who supported it—the Jewish working classes of the Russian Pale of Settlement—were mostly wiped out in the war. Yet in its time the Bund played an absolutely critical role in the birth of left-wing party politics in the Tsarist empire. Leading a double life as a merchant’s bookkeeper and revolutionary agitator, Max had learned early on the value of those habits of caution, silence, and mistrust that were necessary for survival. He never forgot them—or the loyalties he grew up with. To the end of his life Max was not just a man of the Left: He was a Bundist.