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  • Published: 16 July 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141986845
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $22.99

What You Did Not Tell

A Russian Past and the Journey Home




A family memoir, encompassing some of the most fascinating aspects of twentieth century European history, from the acclaimed author of Dark Continent

Uncovering his family's remarkable and moving stories, Mark Mazower recounts the sacrifices and silences that marked a generation and their descendants. It was a family that fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the ranks of the Wehrmacht. His British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping the civil war and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against tsarist troops, but never spoke of it. His wife, Frouma, came from a family ravaged by the Great Terror yet somehow making their way in Soviet society.

In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What You Did Not Tell recounts a brand of socialism erased from memory - humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But it also explores 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.

  • Published: 16 July 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141986845
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Mark Mazower

Mark Mazower is Reader in History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the prize-winning Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 (co-winner of the Fraenkel Prize and the Longman/History Today Book of the Year). He writes and broadcasts regularly on current developments in the Balkans.

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Praise for What You Did Not Tell

Brilliant ... a staggering story

Robert Fox, Evening Standard, Book of the Year

Fascinating, vast and rich ... a dramatic family memoir

Guardian