PositiveThe New York Review of Books[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 … It is an odyssey that extends from prerevolutionary Vilna to the Soviet Union and postwar Paris and London, and that Mazower recounts through a succession of individual, thickly contextualized life stories. The enigmatic figure at its center is his paternal grandfather, Max, a man so secretive or laconic that the most basic facts of his past remained unknown to his wife and son, but whose impenetrable persona belied a life of almost fantastical turbulence and drama … The last sections of the book, in which he draws on his elegiac memories of the places he shared with his father and their quietly close relationship, are the most personal in the book.
