Critic Reviews
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Based on 5 reviews on
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.
"Within the experience of a single family can be seen the forces that shaped whole nations and peoples...Mark 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 family's life and the myriad relations, friends, acquaintances, places, houses, and adventures that spin out from it...What You Did Not Tell is 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 memoir...Mazower, plowing through letters, diaries, and archives, finds that his grandfather's 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 memoir...There are few historians who can write as grippingly as Mazower about secrets and the painstaking work of revealing them." --Financial Times