What You Did Not Tell: A Father's Past and a Journey Home - Softcover

Mark Mazower

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590519868 ISBN 13: 9781590519868

Publisher: Other Press (NY), 2018

Synopsis

A warm, insightful memoir by an acclaimed historian that explores the struggles of twentieth-century Europe through the lives and hopes of a single family--his own

Following his relatives' remarkable stories, Mark Mazower recounts the sacrifices and silences that marked a generation and their descendants. With a rich array of letters, photographs, interviews, and archives, he creates a moving portrait of a family that fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even the ranks of the Wehrmacht. His British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping civil war and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a member of the socialist Bund organization and manned the barricades against tsarist troops, but never spoke of it. His wife, Frouma, came from a family ravaged by the Great Terror yet somehow making their way in Soviet society.

In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What You Did Not Tell recalls a brand of socialism erased from memory: humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But it also examines the unexpected happiness that may await history's losers, the power of friendship, and the love of place that allowed Max and Frouma's son to call England home.

About this title

Review:

"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...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." --KIRKUS REVIEWS

"After discovering his grandfather's work as an agent for the Jewish socialist Bund, Mazower, a Columbia University historian, explored the efforts people later took to hide their involvement in the revolution. Through the story of his grandfather, Mazower reconstructs the history of this largely forgotten Jewish socialist group that, he writes, was instrumental to the revolution's success." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Mazower (history, Columbia Univ.; The Balkans: A Short History) illuminates Russian revolutionary politics and emigre life in Britain in this fascinating family history... Readers of family histories and those with an interest in the Jewish Labour Bund will appreciate this book." --LIBRARY JOURNAL

"What You Did Not Tell is a memoir that only one of our finest historians could have written. To call it a "memoir" even is to represent only a small part of Mazower's investigation into his family's past. This is a saga of cities--Vilna, Moscow, Paris, London and New York--and a profound meditation on what it takes to call a place home. It spans more than a century and sheds sparkling light on the Bundists, the first mass Marxist party in Russian history. It is history made intimate, history made personal--a story of idealism, exile, revolution and defeat. One of the great thrills of What You Did Not Tell is to behold Mazower's deep knowledge of Europe meld with his own ancestral past." --Michael Greenberg, author of Hurry Down Sunshine

"The family memoir of a great historian and a subtle writer who is always attentive to humane detail." --Orhan Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature

About the Author:

Mark Mazower is a historian specializing in modern Greece, twentieth-century Europe, and international affairs. He is currently the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. His books include Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the Runciman Award; Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, winner of the LA Times Book Prize for History; Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century; and Governing the World: The History of an Idea, a Financial Times Best Politics Book. His articles and reviews on history and current affairs appear regularly in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and the New Republic. Born in London and educated at Oxford, he lives in Manhattan.

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Press (NY)
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1590519868
• ISBN 13: 9781590519868
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400