What You Did Not Tell
A Russian Past and the Journey Home
By Mark Mazower
Other Press. 400 pp. $25.95
Mark Mazower, a noted Britishborn historian of the darker sides of 20th-century Europe, has now turned to the history of his own family, bringing his formidable research skills to subjects that often prove as elusive and ambiguous. The “you” in his book’s title is Mazower’s father, Bill, an enigmatic and recessive figure who, but for his fluent Russian and colorful relatives, might pass for an ordinary Oxford-educated middle-class Englishman. But it is Mazower’s grandfather Max, with his adventurous, cosmopolitan past and unresolved mysteries, who steals the show.
Part of this is because of the latter’s radical past. Living in Vilna in the early years of the 20th century, Max (born…