Life
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad review: An epic tale of a family’s struggle
Daniel Finkelstein's family memoir manages to tell an intimate story on a grand scale
June 8, 2023 15:27
Daniel Finkelstein's family memoir manages to tell an intimate story on a grand scale
June 8, 2023 15:27Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival
By Daniel Finkelstein
William Collins £20
Before I begin this review I must declare an interest: Daniel Finkelstein is a close friend. But if you think that disqualifies me from hailing this book a masterpiece then I urge you to read it and discover it for yourself.
Certainly I don’t recall ever being quite so moved as I was by Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir; I spent much of the time reading it in tears.
Lusia and Dolu in 1930s Lvov (Photo: HarperCollins)
The story of his mother and father’s early lives under, respectively, Hitler and Stalin, it is at once an epic tale on the scale of War and Peace, an intimate portrait of his family and its traumas and a book of compelling urgency, with a vital political message at its heart.
The structure — alternating chapters telling the parallel tales of the Wieners and the Finkelsteins — reflects two separate yet similar stories, but brings home a wider point that is the book’s central thrust.
Particular and specific as his mother’s story is of domestic life under the Nazis, then in concentration camps followed by an almost absurdly unlikely release through a prisoner swap, the broader themes of the Nazis’ wanton barbarity and the Holocaust are familiar through literature, documentaries, history and education.
But his father’s story of internal exile in Siberia under the Soviets (internal in the sense that his home city of Lvov in Poland was transferred almost overnight to the Soviets) is less familiar and less often told, despite there being nothing between the brutality and criminality of the two regimes.
Lusia and Ludwik in 1932 (Photo: HarperCollins)
