Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. That generation formed an important part of the intellectual and mercantile elite of Europe, but not the political elite — which is partly why some of them wound up in the radical communist anti-elite instead.
In some families, various members dabbled in all of these worlds. The Eitingons were precisely that sort of family, albeit unusual in that they achieved real status in all of the professions open to them. Max Eitingon was an actual protégé of Freud, and can be seen in photographs peering out from behind the great man’s head. Motty Eitingon was a millionaire fur trader, not just rich but very, very rich, partly because of an exclusive import contract with the Soviet Union. Leonid Eitingon, meanwhile, was a notorious KGB assassin and killer. On the scene in Mexico when Trotsky was murdered, in Spain during the civil war, Leonid had a hand in some of the most notorious crimes of the 20th-century — before ending up in a Soviet prison himself.
As fate would have it, Mary-Kay Wilmers, the mild-mannered editor of the London Review of Books, is also an Eitingon on her mother’s side: Leonid, Motty and Max are all, one way or another, her great-uncles or cousins. Part of a later, luckier generation, she grew up in a world with ‘no wars, no revolutions, no civil unrest or military coups, no famines or tidal waves’. Clearly, she would have preferred something more exciting, and so delved into the lives of her relatives. Over the years, she hunted them down, piece by piece and story by story. This book — which describes both her search and what she found — is the result.
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