The Shapiro Family: Jewish Creativity and Courage in Russia and Eastern Europe

By Rachel Bayvel

Vallentine Mitchell, £14.89

A beloved late editor once told me that there was never any need to describe someone as “the famous X”. If they were famous enough, he said, people would recognise the name.

I’m going to make a small exception to this rule with Rachel Bayvel’s ancestors, the Shapiro family. On several occasions in this family history she refers to various characters as “the famous X”. In their time they almost certainly were famous and it is tragic that today few will have heard of them.

The Shapiro Family consists of various essays written by Rachel and collated by her daughter, Polina Bayvel, a professor of optical physics at UCL. Bayvel herself, who died in 2016, was noteworthy in her own right. She was born in 1936 to a deeply observant family in Leningrad and married Leopold Bayvel in 1962. In 1978 the family moved to London where Rachel took a job in Marks & Spencer’s design department. But she had always wanted to be a historian, and on retirement began her second career – researching international archives to unearth the story of the Shapiro family and, with them, a generation of Soviet Jewish artists, actors, writers and musicians.

The Shapiros were certainly a remarkable dynasty. From the 11th century they tended to produce two kinds of men — printers and rabbis, sometimes both. In 1791 they established the first printing house in the Russian empire, the Slavita press, and Bayvel tells us that “the books printed… are considered to have special sanctity, in that even the printing tools and letters were dipped in the mikveh, or ritual bath, before the work began”. Today these rare surviving works are sold for thousands in Sotheby’s auctions.

The women were pretty formidable too. Rachel’s great aunt, Chava Shapiro, who was born in 1876 in Slavuta, Ukraine, became a pioneering feminist critic, author and champion of feminist Hebrew literature. Her personal life was unhappy, though. At 18 she had an arranged marriage followed by a son, but five years later she fell in love with Reuven Brainin. Sixteen years older than her, and married with four children, Brainin was a well-known figure in Zionist circles and had published the first biography of Theodor Herzl.

He was also, Rachel reports, a misogynistic slug who borrowed money from everyone, including her, and who did not repay his debts. Chava’s desperate attempts to win over Brainin – a crusade which lasted for a shocking and unsuccessful 29 years –  are reflected in a cache of 184 letters, which ended up in a public library in Montreal. She eventually died in Prague in 1943, before she would have been deported to Terezin. Her diary made it to her brother in Palestine. She deserves to be better known.

I could have done with a lot more pen portraits of people like Chava Shapiro and fewer about Jewish artists and their survival in Soviet times, even if one of them was Marc Chagall’s teacher. But this is a fascinating story of a truly extraordinary family few now remember.