[D66] Review 'With Trotsky in Exile'

[A.OUT]

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/love-thy-neighbour/

Love thy neighbour
A review by Francis Wyndham of With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to 
Coyoacán by Jean van Heijenoort, first published on August 4, 1978
TLS
February 7, 2020

Readers of Trotsky’s Diary in Exile 1935 may remember affectionate 
references to “Van”, the “young French comrade with a Dutch name” who 
posed as a nephew of Trotsky and his wife Natalya when they were hiding, 
disguised as a bereaved French family, at a pension near Grenoble which 
turned out to be a hotbed of the extreme Catholic and Royalist right. 
This is among the diary’s lighter entries:

After each repas our “nephew” would tell us about these Molière-like 
scenes; and half an hour of merry, though suppressed laughter (we were, 
of course, in mourning) repaid us at least partially for the discomforts 
of our existence. On Sunday N. and I went “to Mass”—really for a walk. 
This heightened our prestige in the house.

Van’s own account of the episode is similar in tone (“Truly a Feydeau 
comedy!”) but adds a further irony. Apparently Trotsky did enter a 
church for ten minutes, and after listening to the sermon asked: “Does 
he speak as well as Gérard?” (“Gérard Rosenthal was, among all the Paris 
Trotskyites, the one most noted for his oratorical skill.”)

Paris Trotskyites were then not many in number; even so, the Ligue 
communiste (the French Trotskyite group) had already suffered turbulent 
dissensions among its few members and had also been infiltrated by at 
least one Stalinist agent, Mark Zborowski. Jean van Heijenoort was only 
twenty, and “in total revolt against society”, when he joined the Ligue 
in 1932: in October of that year he travelled to the Turkish island of 
Prinkipo to serve as secretary, translator and bodyguard to Trotsky 
himself. He stayed for seven years, following the formidable exile to 
France, briefly to Norway, and finally to Mexico; he left in November 
1939, nine months before Trotsky’s assassination, which he read of in a 
Baltimore newspaper. He ends his memoir with the words: “Darkness set 
in.” He remained in the Trotskyite movement for another seven years, 
when further revelations of Stalin’s concentration camps led him to 
question the basis of Bolshevik ideology. Since then, he has had a 
distinguished career as a mathematician.

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