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

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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.

Reviews

Mark Mazower is a great historian and a subtle writer always attentive to humane detail. Orhan Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature

Within the experience of a single family can be seen the forces that shaped whole nations and peoplesMark Mazower, a distinguished British-born historian, explores the story of his own family, especially that of his paternal grandparents, Jews who emerged at the turn of the twentieth century from the poverty and backwardness of the Russian provinces into the ferment of socialist struggle and, eventually, into the turmoil of the wider world.Wall Street Journal

Unusual and exceptionally interesting[Mazower] excavates, through rigorous research and tenacious sleuthing, the history of a family whose lives spanned the entire twentieth century, and whose fates were closely interwoven with its many ideological terrors and violent upheavals. New York Review of Books

A fascinating and scholarly reconstruction of a familys life and the myriad relations, friends, acquaintances, places, houses, and adventures that spin out from itWhat You Did Not Tellis proof of what historical research can yield, providing you have the determination, skill and boundless curiosity to pursue it to the bitter end. The Guardian

How is it that the places we live in come to feel that they are ours a noted historian asks in this exacting memoirMazower, plowing through letters, diaries, and archives, finds that his grandfathers story encompasses many of the horrors of twentieth-century Europe.The New Yorker

Many families have stories that are passed down to the next generation, but Mazower has gone beyond storytelling and legend. He has repaid the debt to those who went before him. Jerusalem Post

An enchanting, beautifully written memoirThere are few historians who can write as grippingly as Mazower about secrets and the painstaking work of revealing them. Financial Times

Author Bio

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 includeSalonica, 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 theLA TimesBook Prize for History;Dark Continent-Europe's Twentieth Century; andGoverning the World- The History of an Idea, aFinancial TimesBest Politics Book. His articles and reviews on history and current affairs appear regularly in theFinancial Times, theGuardian,the London Review of Books,The Nation, andtheNew Republic. Born in London and educated at Oxford, he lives in Manhattan.