Book description
Leonid Eitingon was a KGB killer 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
when Trotsky was assassinated. 'As long as I live,' Stalin had 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 began looking into aspects of her remarkable family
twenty years ago. The result is a book of astonishing scope and
thrilling originality which throws light into some of the darkest
corners of the last century. At the centre 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.
Mary-Kay Wilmers is the editor of the London Review of Books.
