My Cloak and Dagger Family History Elena Lappin discovers hidden stories in her family’s archives In 2002, I received a life-changing phone call from a complete stranger. He rang my London number from Moscow, spoke English with a heavy Russian accent, and could barely control his emotions as he told me that the father who raised me was not my biological father. ‘You are the daughter of Joseph Minster, though your mother knew him as Schneider. He was an American living in Moscow. His father – your grandfather – was a Soviet agent in New York. His name was Leon Minster. ’ The man (‘V’) said he was my uncle by marriage, the ex-husband of my father’s sister. He had made it his life’s mission to find me. With my permission, he would give my number to Joseph, who was now living with his family in New York. I agreed. As soon as we hung up, I rang my parents in Germany to confirm his story. The consequences of V’s phone call added a new layer of complexity to my life, which had never followed a simple trajectory. I was born in Moscow in 1954, moved to Prague when I was three years old, emigrated to Hamburg as a teenager, then moved again – to Israel, Canada, America and, finally, London. I would need some time to fully understand and accept this revelation, and to share it with my husband and children. I already knew it was probably true, because the name ‘Leon Minster’ had come up in a biography I had recently read, Whittaker Chambers (1997), by American journalist and historian Sam Tanenhaus. Chambers was a controversial, fascinating figure in American history before and after the Second World War. A key witness in the famous Alger Hiss spy case in 1948, Chambers had undergone 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
a transformation from Communist agent to fervent anti-Communist. In one of the chapters about Chambers’ clandestine life as a spy in 1930s New York, I had found a mention of ‘a Russian American, Leon Minster (“Charlie”)’ , a technical worker whose job it was to study secret messages sent from the Comintern in Germany. A footnote referencing the source of this information pointed in the direction of FBI files Tanenhaus had researched, and also to Chambers’ own highly acclaimed memoir, Witness, originally published in 1952. At my request, Tanenhaus kindly allowed me to take a look at a few pages of those files. Most of the text had been redacted, but there was no doubt that Leon Minster was a real person who had played a minor part in GRU (Soviet military intelligence) espionage in the US in the 1930s, and possibly earlier. I found much more information about Leon Minster in Witness, information that was partly interesting and true, partly inaccurate and fanciful. Eventually, I would undertake the systematic disentangling of all the strands in my grandfather’s story. I had many questions for my parents. I wanted to know how and why the story of my biological father became a secret, and remained one for such a long time – my entire life so far. I needed to hear from them why I was told the truth by a stranger. And I was deeply curious about Joseph (my biological father) and his side of the family. Yet I was also certain that no matter how well I would get to know Joseph, my love for my father – the one who raised me – would never change. Several years later, some of these questions were beginning to crystallise into answers that formed an outline of
Above, from top Photo of Leon Minster from his cabdriver’s licence, New York, 1923; Joseph Minster with his father Leon, Brooklyn, 1933 – Leon’s last winter in America? Images © family archive.
