Thriller thrills on account of the fact factor
District VII
allen Lane, £20
Reviewed by Vernon Bogdanor
MARK MAZOWER is a distinguished historian of 20thcentury Europe, best known for his work on Nazi occupation policy in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe. Educated at Oxford, he is now a professor at Columbia University. What You Did Not Tell — subtitled A Russian Past and the Journey Home — is the saga of his family’s Russian origins. Its central theme is deracination, the strains it imposes on the psyche, and how successive generations of Jews have coped with it.
Mazower’s grandparents had uprooted themselves from Russia and his father grew up in placid surroundings in North London. Reticent about the family background, it was only during his last illness that Mark was able to talk to him about his roots. Mark’s grandfather and many other family members had been Russian socialists, though not Communists, at a time when socialism seemed the wave of the future and Zionism an aberration.
Most had supported the Bund,a secular Jewish socialist party, part of the Social Democratic party in the Tsarist empire. Though largely forgotten today, at the beginning of the 20th cen- Head of Zeus, £18.99 Reviewed by Alan Montague
JOURNALISTS, PARTICULARLY at the more scurrilous end of the market, are sometimes accused of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story. No one could ever say that of Adam LeBor. As a respected foreign correspondent of long-standing, facts, detail, evidence are his stock in trade.
Unfortunately, what is commendable about his journalism has at times hampered his thriller writing, with facts getting in the way of a good story.
His Yael Azoulay series of novels about a United Nations official battling terrorism and corruption was bogged down in explanations of the workings of the organisation, job descriptions of senior and not-so-senior figures and the exotic backgrounds of various characters.
Readers were left vastly better informed about the UN, but thrilled? Maybe not so much. tury it had more members than either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks, both much smaller groupings then than they were later to become.
The Bolsheviks had little time for the Bund, since they thought in terms
In District VIII, however, LeBor has rectified the problem. Not that he has abandoned his journalistic ways — far from it. But the facts are inserted seamlessly into the story and, for the most part, the narrative runs as smoothly as a broad and free-flowing river.
And let’s say the river is the Danube, because this time out Lebor is on home ground in Budapest, the city where he lives and which is his base for reporting on events across eastern Europe.
It is the height of the refugee crisis, and thousands of asylum-seekers from Africa and the Middle East have collected at Keleti station in downtown Pest, halted on their journey westwards after the Hungarian government closed the border with Austria.
A Syrian man goes missing, and murder is suspected. Enter Balthazar Kovacs, a homicide detective, whose investigation is hindered by the fact that no body has been discovered and that Kovacs’s colleagues in the security forces seem strangely keen on obstructing his inquiries.
Lebor trade-marks, familiar from the UN novels, are on show here. Kovacs is an outsider, a gypsy, not quite trusted of class, not ethnicity. Lenin is said to have referred to Bundists as Zionists suffering from sea-sickness. Nevertheless, the Bund supported the Soviets in 1917, but dissolved itself in 1921. Many of its members were to perish in the Escape attempt: Syrian refugees making their way towards Budapest in 2015
— especially as, in his case, his brother is a big-time gangster.
A reporter, Eniko, is also an outsider on account of both her job and her Jewish roots; she, too, is on the trail of the murderer. They really should pool resources but they are ex-lovers weighed down with emotional baggage, so working together isn’t an option. What they separately uncover is terrorism and political corruption at the highest level.
The real joy about the novel comes in the descriptions of Budapest, which rival any guide-book. Lebor clearly knows every nook of the city and its various districts, from upscale Buda, 1930s during Stalin’s purges. Mark’s grandparents, who emigrated, were among the lucky ones.
In the 1990s, a school friend of Mark’s father, the distinguished Israeli historian, David Vital, came to dinner with them in Highgate. Vital spoke of his father’s respect and admiration for Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement. One of the guests began “one of the last rounds in an argument that had begun around 1900”, by musing: “Jabotinsky? Wasn’t he like Hitler?”
But the Zionists had won the argument. They had won what Mazower calls their wager on fate; and the Bundists would have fared better if they had been able to overcome their sea-sickness.
But his book is not primarily about politics. It is an inquiry into the importance of roots and the psychic contentment that comes with belonging. Confidence, Mazower believes, “comes only from knowing where you are from”, and his parents were privileged, “in being able to stay put, in choosing when to move”.
Indeed, they saw themselves not as immigrants, assimilating into an undifferentiated British culture, but as representatives in Britain of a RussianJewish intelligentsia, now sadly dying out. It was this dual identity — as Russian-Jewish and as British — which gave them psychological stability.
What You Did Not Tell is a marvellous book from the pen of a fine historian, written in a foreign country and steeped in nostalgia.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College, London.
where government ministers have their mansions, to gritty District VIII, where the gypsy community lives.
Hints of the city’s once-flourishing Jewish life are sprinkled through the book, and there’s a shocking account of how, during the war, Budapest’s Jews were rounded up and executed on the banks of the Danube.
I may be nit-picking but a little more narrative pace could have been injected as the story reaches its climax but, all in all, this is a satisfying outing that thriller fans — and geography geeks — will enjoy. And that’s a fact.
Alan Montague is the JC’s news editor
and
(Simon & Schuster, £10.99). In his first adventure, Shylo saved the Queen from embarrassment at the hands of Papa Ratzi and his gang of cyber-bullying journorodents. Now, the President of the United States is visiting and with POTUS come ROTUS – the rabbits of the US — flying in on Air Hutch One. Kate Hindley’s illustrations are nosewhifflingly cute.
Age five to nine, with jokes for parents.
Lila the koala loves to watch her family prepare for Shabbat. But she is too small to help with making eucalyptus candles or wine and her first attempts at baking are unpalatable. Eventually, she discovers the secret ingredient of perfect (by
Kar-Ben, £5.99). Under-sevens will sympathise with little Lila’s attempts to make her family sit up and notice her — and Maria Mola’s koala illustrations are adorable (especially the father and sister — there is something about a koala wearing glasses). Not sure about Lila’s secret ingredient, though. Parents should stress that eucalyptus is not human food.
Hanna lives in the Jewish community of 12thcentury York. Although only 11, she is adept at helping her grandfather heal people, even with operations. She is also fascinated by magic but these are dangerous times to be dabbling, with the new king, Richard, on the throne and mobs on the streets attacking Jews and torching their homes. Out of the Fire by Millie Pearson (CreateSpace, £6.99) culminates in the events at Clifford’s Tower. Pearson excels at both day-to-day detail and wide historical drama. Age 12 up.
It is an inquiry into the importance of roots