The Eitingons is the record of a 20-year search by Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, for the marks that three very different members of her family, all bearing her mother’s maiden name — Eitingon — have left on history.

First there is Leonid, a committed Bolshevik who rose through the ranks of the Soviet intelligence services to become a KGB general, and who is believed to have been the mastermind behind the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Then there is Max, who was one of the earliest supporters of Freud and his ideas, and who used his inherited wealth to fund a psychoanalytic clinic in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis persuaded him to emigrate to Palestine. The third Eitingon is Motty, a flamboyant American businessman whose connections in Russia after the revolution made him one of the biggest successes in the international fur trade in the 1920s and 1930s.

Wilmers’s account is an ambitious attempt to make the family emblematic of many of the driving forces of the 20th century — communism, entrepreneurial capitalism, psychoanalysis. But, although Max and Motty were Wilmers’s great-uncles, and although the enigmatic Leonid may or may not have been a distant cousin, the author fails to show that there is any unity in their story beyond the coincidence of the name. Leonid’s cloak-and-dagger life as a Soviet agent abroad — and his fall from grace with Stalin and his successors — provide the book with its most interesting sections by far, but they get lost amid Max and Motty’s much less engrossing activities.

Wilmers has the reputation of being a demanding editor at the London Review of Books, a position she has held for the past 17 years, but in The Eitingons — a book that could have been twice as compelling at half the length — she seems badly in need of editing herself.

The Eitingons by Mary-Kay Wilmers
Faber £20 pp478

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