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The Eitingons cries out for an editor to cut the overabundance of material and frequent investigative dead ends in an otherwise fascinating story of a family that included a KGB operative, a New York fur magnate, and a psychoanalytic pioneer—a family whose wealth was so great that they were once called “the Rothschilds of Leipzig.” Mary-Kay Wilmers, herself an Eitingon (on her mother's side), is the long-serving editor of the London Review of Books. Working on this volume for the past twenty years, she traveled to Russia and Belarus, unearthed KGB documents, and has probably settled the question of whether Max Eitingon was a Russian spy. It remains unproven that he was. Leonid (aka Naum) Eitingon (1899-1981) was a cousin of Wilmers's maternal grandfather. He rose in the Checka and the KGB to be one of Stalin's “killerati” operating in Turkey and Spain. Leonid recruited the assassin for the 1940 ice-pick killing of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Leonid drove the getaway car. Although imprisoned by a paranoid Stalin in 1951 during the “doctors plot,” he had been a favorite of Stalin's for his part in the Trotsky murder. There are wonderful pictures in this book of him as a young Bolshevik and a KGB officer, as well as many other pictures of family members. The endpapers contain a picture of the elegant assemblage of Eitingons and friends in Berlin, at the 1928 first wedding of the author's mother. The picture attests to the wealth of the Eitingons from the fur trade.
Motty Eitingon (1885-1956), Wilmers's millionaire great-uncle traded in fur from the Soviet Union and enjoyed a special relationship to Moscow. Investigated many times by the FBI, he was never charged, and is reported to have been a smooth operator, using his money to advantage.
Finally there is Max Eitingon (1880-1943), a cousin of Wilmers's grandfather, to whom the psychoanalytic movement is indebted, because his great wealth was used to finance and support many psychoanalytic endeavors. There were suspicions