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 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 my own and my family’s history, in all its migrations and incarnations, between Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East and North America. The individual lives of my parents and grandparents reflected the political map of the twentieth century, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The only way to truly explore their story – and mine – was to write a book, and so the idea for my memoir, What Language Do I Dream In? (2016), was born. Russian, Czech, German, Hebrew, English: how was my identity shaped by my languages and the cultures they represented, and by the discovery of my hidden roots?

Joseph Minster with his father Leon, Brooklyn, 1933 – Leon’s last winter in America? Images © family archive.

My memoir grew out of two separate strands: my own life, and the unknown story of the family I discovered in my forties. I became my own historian, researching in minute detail every aspect of the lives of the grandparents I never knew. It was very important for me to understand why my Russian-born American grandfather became a Soviet spy in 1930s New York, and ultimately returned (or rather was ordered to return) to Russia. Had he not, his son Joseph (born in Brooklyn) would not have met my mother in Moscow in the 1950s, and I would never have been born.

But the depth and intensity of this research really took me by surprise. Perhaps I should have expected it: after all, as a journalist, I had written several investigative pieces driven by my relentless curiosity and need to uncover the truth behind intriguing stories and characters – especially if they were about hidden identities. And yet, being my own historical detective, compiling, analysing and interpreting a vast collection of archival materials about everything related to my paternal grandfather Leon Minster, became almost an obsession. As one piece of the puzzle led to another, my knowledge of all his activities – in New York, in Shanghai, in Spain – became so detailed and so alive to me that his story threatened to overwhelm and derail my entire book.

Despite his cloak-and-dagger life, my grandfather was not a high-ranking spy. In fact, as spies go, his remit was limited to technical tasks, such as photography, radio communications and clandestine meetings with secret couriers. The first ‘live’ description of my grandfather appears in Chambers’ memoir Witness ; they belonged to the same cell operating out of an apartment in Gay Street in Greenwich Village:

A human chain of couriers and contacts stretched across the ocean and the continent of Europe, speeding communications back and forth between Moscow and New York. The last link which tied that chain to the Gay Street workshop was an underground worker known as ‘Charlie’ … I know now that Charlie’s real name is Leon Minster. For one day I unexpectedly came across his picture in a group of FBI photographs of Soviet agents in the Far East. My identification of him has been confirmed, independently, by someone who also knew him as Charlie.

Charlie was born in Russia but had grown up in the United States, and was an American citizen … He spoke a fluent Russian curiously roughened by overtones of New Yorkese. He had been, intermittently, a cab driver.

As a man, Charlie knew that everybody was against him. And, in the end, that almost proved to be true, because sooner or later his sullen and distrustful manner alienated most of his co-workers … Charlie had always been a technical worker, and that further embittered his life. As a result, he was extremely jealous of his special skills, imparted them slowly and grudgingly and was especially conscious of his prerogative as custodian of the key to the big trunk.

In the trunk, Charlie kept a Leica camera and a collapsible copying stand, the basic tools of espionage work. And other photographic and chemical supplies.

Chambers goes on to describe how my grandfather – then a young man in his thirties – taught him to reveal invisible Russian writing on microfilm carefully removed from a pocket mirror. These messages were read by a superior and then destroyed. But I was less interested in the technical nature of this task than in the description of Charlie’s character: according to Chambers, he sounded paranoid and bitter. Could these qualities have played a role in his decision to become involved in espionage against the country where his family had fled from Ukraine in 1914, escaping war and persecution as Jews? To his parents and his many siblings, America was the safe promised land. Why did Leon choose communism and the Soviet Union?

To find answers to my questions, I examined everything I could find. I requested all available information from the FBI, under the Freedom of Information Act. Over time, I received hundreds of pages covering many years of the FBI’s surveillance of Leon Minster’s life and activities. I learned to distinguish facts from crude inaccuracies or guesswork – but it all made for very interesting reading.

Even more exciting, however, was the discovery (on the internet) that the National Archives in London had files about Leon Minster’s intelligence work in Shanghai in 1934 and 1935. At this time, he was married with two young children, and the entire family had relocated to China. Leon opened a photography shop selling cameras, but it was clear from the reports that this was a cover for operating a secret radio transmitter.

Shanghai Municipal Police files on Leon Minster’s activities.

Letter found in Minster’s abandoned Shanghai apartment, from Mortimer Lippman, MD, sent from Brooklyn in 1935.

Through these records, I found that Leon was being closely observed by Shanghai Municipal Police. With the help of The London Library, I was able to obtain these records on microfiche, on loan from a university library in Australia. I spent several weeks in the Library, reading these documents and by the end feeling quite at home in 1930s Shanghai, in its atmosphere of international political intrigue and the sinister presence of agents from variouscountries. My grandfather was among them, and it was rather gratifying to find his name on a typed list of ‘persons who are shadowed or once were shadowed by the detectives of the Settlements’: ‘Minster, a Russian American, his home address: 20, Daisy Apartment, 6th floor, Route Camelle Lobloz. ’ This address was in the French Concession part of Shanghai.

The list was found upon his arrest on a senior Soviet spy called ‘Joseph Walden’ . Immediately after, Leon Minster was ordered to leave Shanghai with his family, and to travel to Russia, separately. My grandmother Bessie took the children to Kobe in Japan, and from there to Vladivostok. They were met in Russia by Leon. By 1935, the Minsters were living in Moscow, under new names. Leon (now Grigoriy Schneider) was assigned to two more GRU missions: Finland and Spain. I have no documentation of these other than family lore, and the knowledge that he remained proud of his Soviet military service. However, he was lucky not to have been arrested or executed, as was the norm for many Soviet agents who had been active in the West. Instead, he worked at menial jobs, and grew increasingly disappointed with the Soviet Union. Far from being the workers’ paradise he had believed in, he found it to be hostile to Jews and oppressive to all. V – who remained in email and telephone contact with me after his initial call – sent me a detailed description of my grandfather’s grave and its location in a Moscow cemetery, which he urged me to visit: ‘The inscription is in English. ’

Being my own historian involved much more than examining official archival records relating to my grandfather. I found relatives, distant and close, who told me everything they remembered and everything they had been told by others. They shared old pictures with me. I was very moved to see photos of my paternal great-grandparents, who had brought the family out of Russia and settled in Connecticut – where they are buried.

I learned to navigate my way around sites such as ancestry.com, where I discovered details about my unknown relatives’ lives: a census, army records, ship manifests. The last were particularly revealing: it turned out that Leon Minster had travelled a great deal between Europe and New York, beginning in the 1920s, especially to Germany and France. Perhaps these journeys marked the beginning of his involvement with the Comintern, and his recruitment for GRU. But my main question – why he had chosen this path – could not be answered by any documents or archives.

The family’s arrival in America in 1914 is recorded on a ship called The Czar. The children’s original Hebrew names are listed, with their ages. By process of elimination, I was able to establish that my grandfather’s name was Israel. This information became completely lost over the years – not even his own children knew this – until I told them. Somehow, this felt like closing a circle. After several years of research, satisfied with having traced and pieced together as much of this hidden family history as I could find, across several languages and continents, I made an even more important discovery: most of it didn’t belong in my memoir. The balance of my narrative was restored as soon as I found a way of distilling this knowledge into just one chapter in my book, entitled ‘The Other Side’ . I felt immensely satisfied and enriched by learning so much about the grandparents I never met, and indirectly about my biological father, but my memoir was about the life I knew, and the story and history of the family who had been, and always would be, my real life force: my parents and maternal grandparents, their joy and their love, as much as their own pain and suffering.

Left Lappin with her father Semjon Biller in Prague. Photo © Rada Biller.

I turned to a different kind of personal history research: the passionate reading of my own family lore. Letters, postcards, books, photographs, diaries, family archives: before there was email and digital photography, there was paper. Despite our multiple moves and migrations, my family has always kept everything. All these written and printed documents in various languages were palpably real witnesses of lives forever present in mine. My memoir is just another link in their chain.