Surviving Europe’s 20th century
The Swedish journalist Elisabeth Asbrink’s 1947is an extraordinary achievement. Careening around Europe and the Middle East as well as South Asia and the United States through a singular year, she deliberately juxtaposes the intimate and the ephemeral with immensely consequential political and diplomatic developments. New inventions like the Soviet engineer Mikhail Kalashnikov’s assault rifle, the French couturier Christian Dior’s resplendent New Look, the American Navy admiral Grace Hopper’s virtuoso development of computer language, Thelonious Monk’s and Billie Holiday’s musical genius and the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin’s coinage of the term “genocide” jostle with the United Nations’ efforts to find a workable resolution for Palestine, gruesome rapes during the partition of India, anti-Semitic riots in England and the Nazi Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg. These, in turn, are nestled alongside evocative accounts of the ardent physicality of Simone de Beauvoir’s love for Nelson Algren, the struggles of George Orwell working on 1984 and ships filled — variously — with fugitive Nazis or displaced Jews.
Her constant intercutting of the worldshaking with the quotidian — including her father as a child navigating post-Nazi Budapest — underscores a challenge to more mainstream genres of history writing. The year 1947 did mark a tipping point between the savagery of the immediate past and the tentative stirrings of postwar potentialities. Ultimately most compelling is 1947’s relationship to our present. A chilling recurrent subplot involves the remarkably rapid regrouping of undeterred ex-Nazis, already inventing denialism, networking transnationally and dreaming up a renewed pan-fascist future.
Mischka’s War, as well-researched tribute, provides unconventional but persistently intriguing perspectives on the major totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. It concerns Ms Fitzpatrick’s husband, the theoretical physicist Michael Danos (the “Mischka” of the book’s title, he died in 1999), and his mother, Olga, whom Fitzpatrick never knew. At the book’s center are a cache of documents from the 1930s through the early 1950s: diaries of son and mother, letters between them and from others and papers relating to their status as postwar displaced persons.
Only after Mischka’s death did Fitzpatrick learn that the father of her Latvian husband had been Jewish. This fact would appear in hindsight to have made it even riskier for Mischka to choose, as he did, to become an exchange student in Nazi Germany in 1944. What we glean over time, however, is that for those who did not understand themselves to be Jewish, existence in the Third Reich seemed by far a less awful fate than what awaited them in the Soviet Union.
Mischka’s War contains riveting disclosures. One focuses on Mischka’s harrowing and unparalleled aboveground eyewitness account of the firebombing of Dresden. Another involves Olga’s audacious ingenuity in protecting Jewish labourers from the Riga ghetto in her tailoring atelier. In a remarkable connection across what is otherwise the traditional divide of 1945, a Jewish man Olga rescued would later sponsor her and Mischka’s emigration to the United States. And there is a heart-stopping sequence where Mischka observes with horror as families of Christian Latvians take the occasion of Easter Sunday, 1943, to go on an afternoon excursion several kilometers through the snow — to sight-see at the mass graves of Jews who had been slaughtered there.
What You Did Not Tell, a beautiful book by Mark Mazower, a historian at Columbia University, revolves around his grandfather Max’s enigmatic postwar silences. Max had been a brilliant and leading organiser of the Yiddish Bund, a humane form of non-Communist leftism that attracted tens of thousands of adherents in prerevolutionary Russia, Lithuania and Poland. Hunted by czarist police, the Bundists would be crushed not by their enemies but by the far smaller band of jealous, self-interested Bolsheviks, who had other ideas about how to pursue a revolution.
An organiser in Vilna and Lodz, Max renounced his activism and settled in a quiet suburb of London. There he raised a family and provided sanctuary for often traumatised emigrants. Soon, however, Mr Mazower’s narrative opens out onto an expansive, branching cast of characters that includes family members as well as numerous icons of 20th-century Jewish history (from Emma Goldman to Walter Benjamin). These stories are remarkable, if often devastating. Max’s Bundist associate Shmuel Zygielboym persuades the BBC to report on the gassings of Polish Jewry, only to commit suicide in guilt over having left his wife and child behind in the Warsaw Ghetto. Max’s long-ago lover is a Menshevik firebrand named Sofia Krylenko, the sister of Lenin’s muchfeared people’s commissar for justice, while the siblings and cousins of Max’s deeply adored wife, Frouma, later became ensnared in Stalin’s Terror.
Mr Mazower’s family saga may begin as an effort to recover a way of being Jewish that is often now lost from memory. In the end, it is a profound testament to the saving grace of a sense of rootedness in place and home.
1947
Where Now Begins Elisabeth Asbrink Translated by Fiona Graham Other Press
280 pages; $25.95
MISCHKA’S WAR
A Story of Survival From War-Torn Europe to New York
Sheila Fitzpatrick
I.B. Tauris
313 pages; $29.50
WHAT YOU DID NOT TELL
A Russian Past and the Journey Home Mark Mazower
Other Press
379 pages; $25.95