July 1, 2017
A family's complicated past recounted in exacting detail.Beginning with a long interview with his aging father, Mazower (History/Columbia Univ.; Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 2012, etc.) launched an investigation into his family's history, mining letters, diaries, photographs, extensive archival material, and memoirs by some of the many individuals who touched his family's life. Central to the story is the author's paternal grandfather, Max, who had been a militant activist in pre-revolutionary Russia. As a member of the leftist Bund, Max strived for nothing less than "political transformation," and he suffered the consequences of his beliefs: police surveillance, imprisonment in Siberia, and exile in Switzerland and Germany. "He had been on the run, arrested, and questioned many times over," Mazower discovered, "and he had sacrificed the prospect of domesticity for the cause of socialism." In 1909, however, he fled from persecution to seek a job in England as a salesman for a typewriter company. Although he traveled back to Russia in that capacity, he made a permanent home in London, where he married and where his children--including Mazower's father--were born. Max and his wife were members of the "the turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish intelligentsia," who welcomed those who shared their "consuming interest in public questions and public activities." No longer an activist, Max remained "still engaged, highly informed, and faithful" to socialist values. Mazower's father also "found political engagement invigorating," and his friends "tended to be joined under the banner of a higher purpose" even though he spent his career "as a middle manager in one sector of a vast multinational company." His life, concludes the author, was marked by pragmatism, resilience, and "the pursuit of contentment and well-being." Through dogged research, Mazower uncovered details about his father's half brother and half sister, myriad other relatives, teachers, friends, acquaintances, classmates, and a host of individuals whose capsule biographies he duly reports. Although some--T.S. Eliot and Emma Goldman, for example--are well-known and many interesting, the sheer number becomes overwhelming. A simultaneously sweeping and intimate family portrait.
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September 15, 2017
Mazower (history, Columbia Univ.; The Balkans: A Short History) illuminates Russian revolutionary politics and emigre life in Britain in this fascinating family history. Max Mazower, the author's Russian grandfather, was of the same generation as Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, but as a Bundist (member of the secular Jewish socialist movement Bundism) was a revolutionary of a different stripe. Remarkable twists and turns sent Max to interwar England, where he brought his wife, Frouma, and her daughter from Russia and became a businessman. The family also included Max's son from a previous relationship, and William, the author's father, who was born in England. Delving into these lives, Mazower shows how his father absorbed his unique background and became a quintessential Englishman. As with David Laskin's The Family, entire family branches disappear in the chaos of war and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, and famous Chekists and anarchists make surprising appearances. Mazower lovingly explores how his father, the youngest in a family marked by upheaval, found comfort living in a close radius of his childhood home for most of his life. VERDICT Readers of family histories and those with an interest in the Jewish Labour Bund will appreciate this book.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL
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