A tangled tale—but now that we have Anastasia’s bones, Russian royal-watchers may find this a pleasing historical account.
An exiled Russian noblewoman turns Bolshevik, courtesy of Hitler.
Sophy Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother, left Russia as a child, fleeing with her family following the October Revolution. “Emotional, contradictory, troubled,” as her granddaughter puts it, she sported in the bohemian scene in Paris, married young and moved to England—but then returned to France following the Nazi occupation to tend to her mother. “Sofka,” as the grandmother was called, kept careful notes of what she saw: “All music has ceased on all French wireless transmissions,” she records, “dancing is forbidden.” Her husband, an RAF gunner, was taken prisoner; then she, too, was interned as an enemy alien. Still something of an ingénue, she became a socialist and activist as a prisoner, even refusing repatriation to continue her work helping organize escapes—until she eventually set herself loose, in an entirely improbable turn of events. Zinovieff capably recounts her grandmother’s life, her narrative aided by diaries, journals and even a published autobiography, filling in details that her grandmother had omitted for one reason or another. As Zinovieff writes of one affair, “I wondered why she left these gaps; it certainly wasn’t prudery.” A committed member of the Communist Party following the war, the aging Sofka became an apologist for Stalinism, lauded within the Soviet Union for having shed her class-enemy status and embraced the cause, though not above using her royal status when it served her. “Her excuse for Soviet oppression,” Zinovieff writes, “was that it…was a continuation of what she called ‘the historical, paranoid fear of dissent that has dogged Russian rulers through the centuries.’ ” Mostly, however, the picture of Sofka that emerges is less a propagandist than a slightly more weathered, Bolshevik version of Auntie Mame.
A tangled tale—but now that we have Anastasia’s bones, Russian royal-watchers may find this a pleasing historical account.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60598-009-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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