The Eitingons
A Twentieth Century Story
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A family history that explores the KGB, the fur trade, Freud and the assassination of Trotsky
Leonid Eitingon was a KGB assassin who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico, helping to organize the assassination of Trotsky. “As long as I live,” Stalin said, “not a hair of his head shall be touched.” It did not work out like that.
Max Eitingon was a psychoanalyst, a colleague, friend and protégé of Freud’s. He was rich, secretive and—through his friendship with a famous Russian singer— implicated in the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in 1937. Motty Eitingon was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, questioned by the FBI. Was Motty everybody’s friend or everybody’s enemy?
Mary-Kay Wilmers, best known as the editor of the London Review of Books, began looking into aspects of her remarkable family twenty years ago. The result is a book of astonishing scope and thrilling originality that throws light into some of the darkest corners of the last century. At the center of the story stands the author herself—ironic, precise, searching, and stylish—wondering not only about where she is from, but about what she’s entitled to know.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the current rage of uncovering ancestral blood lines, Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, stirs up the family cauldron and discovers that three men in her mother's family are not who they seem. This sweeping chronicle traverses the art of 20th-century Soviet espionage, high-end fur bartering, and Freud's circle in Vienna in the last century. Wilmers acquires some letters from a deceased aunt, which sets her on a quest for three influential Eitingon men, wealthy Jews who migrated from what is now Belarus to the West: Leonid, a cunning Soviet enforcer and driver in the Trotsky murder plot; Max, a brilliant Freud prot g , accused by one scholar of being Leonid's agent in Freudian camouflage ; and Motty, the wheeling-dealing fur czar who made lucrative trades with the Soviet government. The author is determined to unravel the Eitingon mystery. The devil is in the details, for the author aptly places each man in rich historical context; drawing on family autobiographies and interviews, she presents them as complicated personalities and family men. Well researched, bold, and revealing, Wilmers's book transforms a series of dark family secrets into an illuminating experience for anybody brave enough to delve into the enigma of family history. Maps.
