I’ll be honest: I bought The Eitingons because of the cover, which is a beautiful modernist composition in red, black and cream. I didn’t know anything about it, whether it was a novel or even who the author was. It turns out that it is a family history by Mary-Kay Wilmers, who is the editor of the London Review of Books. It also just so happens that her family history provides a fascinating journey through the 20th century.
There are three major figures in Wilmers’ family tree whose stories are covered here, as well as a supporting cast of several more. The first is Motty Eitingon, a refugee from the Ukraine who somehow managed to build an enormous fur import business in New York. The second is Max Eitingon, who became a disciple of Freud, and the third and most interesting is Leonid Eitingon, who was a member of the KGB in its various guises (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, etc) from the revolution until the late 1950s.
Leonid pops up from time to time as a footnote in history books as the man who arranged the murder of Trotsky, for which he seemed to have earned Stalin’s undying thanks until the absurd Doctors’ Plot whipped up such an anti-semitic hysteria that even Stalin’s guarantee that ‘not even a hair on his head’ would be touched was worth anything.
Leonid was the ultimate ‘Checkist’, which is to say a man entirely convinced of the rightness of the Soviet system, and someone prepared to carry out the orders of his superiors in order to protect it from all enemies, internal and foreign. He does not seem to have understood or cared that many of these ‘enemies’ were figments of Stalin’s paranoid imagination. In the end he fell foul of the deadly political mascinations that followed Stalin’s death and then Beria’s denunciation and execution. He was seen as ‘Beria’s man’, and had to pay for it with years of incarceration, no matter how much he asked for his case to be reviewed.
Motty is interesting in a different way. He seems to have been a complete chancer, the type of businessman who plays all ends against the middle and is, mostly, only one or two steps ahead of his creditors and the financial authorities. Wilmers is fascinated to know whether Motty ever helped Leonid in any way. There seems to be some circumstantial evidence that he did, but no more than that. The rest of Motty’s story is taken up with his dealings with the Soviet fur industry, and the inevitable suspicion this brought down on him in the years before and after America’s alliance of convenience with the Soviets.
Max’s story is somewhat less exciting, since he seems to have been much less of a maverick than either Motty or Leonid, but it’s still very interesting. His wealth, thanks to the Eitingon fur millions, was used to support Freud’s work, and, once it ran out, Max became a respect psychoanalyst in his own right.
The Eitingons is one of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I’ve read this year. It’s a wonderfully humane, digressive and intelligent look at the history of the 20th century through the prism of one family’s history, and it’s written in a wonderful discursive, personal tone that puts it a million miles away from formal historical biography. I recommend it unreservedly.
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