Most writers, eventually, feel called upon to write their family story. Mary-Kay Wilmers is not a writer, but she is important to writers as the editor (and financial saviour) of the London Review of Books, a journal as highbrow as herself. Her dustjacket picture shows her elegant, beady-eyed, with cropped grey hair, spectacles perched on nose, lips pursed: a thinking, serious person of “editorial pernicketiness”. Having thought about this book for 20 years, she opens with a disarming confession (“When I was fifteen, my mother told me nobody liked me”) and a cogitation on why we keep family letters: “You think you’re interested in their story, only to discover that mainly you’re obsessed with your own.” Her father was sceptical about her investigating her maternal Russian family “on thin and contradictory evidence” but after he died she decided that she could think differently from him. “He took it for granted that objective reality was coterminous with his own thinking.”
She first met the Eitingon clan in her American childhood; they had heavy Russian accents, were excitable and prone to tears. They had once been “the Rothschilds of Leipzig”. Motty Eitingon, a New York furrier, seemed to rule the world with his wheeling and dealing across the Soviet-US divide. Motty’s cousin and brother-in-law, Max Eitingon, was a close colleague of Sigmund Freud, and founded the first institute of psychoanalysis in Palestine. And in the vivid opening chapter Wilmers reveals that her grandfather’s cousin, Leonid Eitingon, was the Soviet NKVD agent who groomed Trotsky’s assassin, Ram?n Mercader: he was at the wheel of the getaway car in which Mercader never got away. While sleuthing, Wilmers wondered, might she herself fall victim to an umbrella point or a poisoned cup of coffee?
Motty Eitingon was the most dangerously charming of the clan. His arm around the shoulder could beguile, broker deals and break strikes. “You can do anything with the Bolsheviks,” he said, “if you have money.” For him the 1929 crash struck only a glancing blow, “perhaps because when the rich are ruined, they are never quite finished”. Max Eitingon, the source of whose “staggering” wealth was unclear, was also “staggeringly generous”, to a fault. He had few patients, possibly because of his stammer: “Who would choose to be analysed by a man with a stammer?” Wilmers — who has an analyst herself — asks. His Poliklinik in Berlin accepted everyone (including Trotsky’s daughter, whose analysis proved fruitless, since she later gassed herself) but he moved on to Palestine when his profession was aryanised under Hitler.
The narrative picks up its skirts and runs when Trotsky hoves into view. “If one of your characters is an assassin,” Wilmers writes of Leonid Eitingon, “you’d just as soon he wasn’t a minor one — a one-horse assassin.” He was in Valencia during the Spanish Civil War — he gave Hemingway a gourmet lunch during a tour of guerrilla training camps — before orchestrating Trotsky’s death by ice-pick in Mexico, a familiar story retold here in graphic detail. Stalin had said that not a hair of Leonid Eitingon’s head would be touched, but after further assassinations, including a botched attempt on the former German Chancellor Franz von Papen, he was eventually charged with high treason and spent 12 years in jail. He was released after Stalin’s death, only to be reimprisoned under Khrushchev. Even the Eitingons’ sufferings could not always be alleviated by money.
The predominant impression of the book is Wilmers’ tenacious and Casaubon-like questing. Was Motty a traitor, a spy? Was Max? Might she have glimpsed Leonid in the street during her New York childhood? She finds this notion “a little thrilling” but, like her speculation about whether an agent such as Leonid might spend his “down-time” reading thrillers, it is pointless: there is no answer.
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With her Oxford degree in languages, including Russian, Wilmers originally planned to become a UN interpreter. Instead she has devoted her life “to other people’s words: washing them, ironing them, preparing them for publication”.
But the weight of her research, ballasted with names, aliases, geographical displacements and generational leaps, does not rest lightly upon her narrative, and nobody seems to have dared to launder it. Which does not help the reader struggling effortfully to care about the Eitingon dynasty, or to share the author’s thrall to them.
The Eitingons by Mary-Kay Wilmers (Faber and Faber, £20; Buy this book; 496pp)