BIOGRAPHY: The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story, By Mary-Kay Wilmers, Faber & Faber, 476pp. £20
DURING THE 19TH century, in what is now Belarus, a Jewish family named Eitingon became extremely rich “buying pelts or skins from Jewish pedlars and exporting them to larger Jewish enterprises further west”.
The author’s mother was an Eitingon and though Cesia (born 1907) appears, this book’s stars are her uncles Max and Motty, and their distant cousin Leonid.
Max, born 1881, was the son of Chaim, founder of the Eitingon fortune. Max studied medicine and in 1907 went to Vienna to study with Freud. “‘He was the first to come to see me,” Freud said later, meaning the first to come from abroad.
In the Great War, Max, a captain in the Austrian army medical corps, treated victims of “war neuroses”. He thrived. Post war, “Freud invited Max to join the inner sanctum of psychoanalysis, the secret Psychoanalytic Committee”, while in Berlin (where his private practice was). Max established the Berlin Poliklinik to train analysts and psychoanalyse the poor for free. It was a triumph.
Max’s German life ended on April 8th, 1933, with the decree requiring all medical organisations to aryanise. He went to Palestine (today he’s known as the father of Israeli psychoanalysis) and died in 1943.
Max’s cousin Motty was born in 1885 and aged 17 went to work in his Uncle Chaim’s office; in 1907 he married Chaim’s daughter, Fanny. In 1918, Motty, now a successful fur dealer “with gold in his pockets”, was arrested in Moscow (where he was buying pelts) by opportunistic Bolsheviks. He paid a ransom to get out of jail, went to New York and took over the American arm of the Eitingon fur empire, Eitingon Schild.
In 1926, Max signed a contract with the Soviet government to buy pelts valued at $8 million. In 1928, the New York Timesdescribed Eitingon Schild as, "the dominant skin trader of the industry". This was Motty's high point. The depression hurt Motty's business life: the second World War more or less killed it. Post war, Motty tried to resurrect his fortunes by marketing sheep's wool as a cheap substitute for fur: this failed. He died, broken, bankrupt, in 1956.
Wilmers’s third subject, Leonid, was born in 1899. His father, a bookkeeper, was a low- achieving Eitingon. As a youth, Leonid was involved with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, rivals of the Bolsheviks. In 1920, he joined the Soviet secret service, the Cheka, and in 1921, he entered the Secret Operations Department.
For the next three decades, thanks to his linguistic skills (he was fluent in several languages), Leonid travelled the world killing enemies of the Soviet state. His most impressive operation was Leon Trotsky’s dispatch. The exile was actually murdered by his protégé, Ramón Mercader, using an ice pick but Leonid was waiting nearby. On hearing the news of what Leonid had done, Stalin said, “As long as I live not a hair of his head shall be touched.” Alas, for Leonid, it wasn’t to be.
In October 1951, he was denounced as a “Zionist plotter”, arrested and tortured. In March 1953, Stalin died, Beria took over and Leonid was released. Then Beria fell; Leonid was re-arrested and convicted of high treason. He emerged from Vladimir prison in 1964, a wreck, died in 1981, and was eventually rehabilitated in April 1992, five months after the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist.
The lives of these three are fascinating, but for Wilmers, the real interest are those places where their paths crossed and the intriguing possibility that Max and Motty, secretly sympathetic to Communism and the Soviet Union, helped Leonid. And it is with consummate skill (honed on the London Review of Books, which she edits – and which has just celebrated its 30th anniversary) that she teases out the connections between her three disparate Eitingons.
For instance: in 1937, in Mexico, where Trotsky was then living, Trotsky’s allies organised a commission to investigate (and refute) the charges laid against him in Moscow. The Soviets were desperate to send a delegate but it had to be someone untainted by association with Stalinism – so whom?
Step forward Motty’s New York houseguest of many years, the Austrian Communist and exile Franz Hoellering, who was funded by Motty to attend, his detailed report eventually finding its way back to Moscow. Did Leonid put Motty up to this?
Or again: Max’s closest friends included the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, “the nightingale of Kursk” and her husband, General Skoblin, a White Russian veteran. On December 20th, 1938, the Skoblins took Max (they’d been on holiday in Paris together) to the Gare de Lyon station. Two days later, in an operation orchestrated by Leonid, Skoblin and another Paris-based ex-tsarist officer, General Miller, were lured, trapped and “liquidated”. Plevitskaya was convicted of complicity and got 20 years but should Max (mentioned frequently in the trial) have stood in the dock beside her? The case is so puzzling Max’s involvement can’t be discounted, quite.
Or again: in 1940, after Trotsky’s murder, Leonid spent many months in New York. He said later that “Jewish interests” in the city helped him with documentation and to get a new passport. Did he really mean Motty?
These are just three tantalising possibilities. There are scores more, yet throughout, the author never overstates her case and scrupulously distinguishes between what she does and does not know.
Being so shrewdly non-emphatic is a brilliant strategy; she certainly persuaded me Leonid and his kinsmen had an understanding. However, her care has had another, bigger effect: it enabled her to write a book that’s not only about what she doesn’t know about her ancestors, but a book that reminds us we’re all just as ignorant of the lives of our forebears as she is of hers. This is a lesson we need to be reminded of and the fact that it’s delivered with style and panache, as is the case here, well, what a lovely bonus.
Carlo Gébler is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen's University, Belfast. The Room in the Tower, his collaboration with composer Roger Doyle, had its premiere at the Project in Dublin last month
