Allen Lane 2017. Hardback with dust jacket, 382 pp
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.