City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

What you did not tell, a Russian past and the journey home, Mark Mazower

eng

Includes bibliographical references

no index present

non fiction

What you did not tell

Mark Mazower

a Russian past and the journey home

A warm and intimate memoir by an acclaimed historian that explores the European struggles of the twentieth century through the lives, hopes, and dreams of a single family--his own. Uncovering their remarkable and moving stories, Mark Mazower recounts the sacrifices and silences that marked a generation and their descendants. It was a family which fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the ranks of the Wehrmacht. His British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian-Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping the Bolsheviks, civil war, and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against Tsarist troops, never speaking a word about it afterwards. His wife Frouma came from a family ravaged by the Terror yet making their way in Soviet society despite it all. In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What You Did Not Tell revitalizes the history of a socialism erased from memory--humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But it is also an exploration of the unexpected happiness that may await history's losers, of the power of friendship and the love of place that made his father at home in an England that no longer exists

On West Hill -- The bundist -- 1905 -- The Yost Typewriting Company -- Border crossing, 1919 -- Brits and Bolsheviks -- Wood end -- The afterlife -- Zachar -- The expanding silence -- André -- The Krylenko Connection -- Frouma -- Highgate -- The sheltering word -- Ira -- Childhood -- The war -- Oxford and what came between -- The shed -- Family trees; Mazower Family; Toumarkine Family