BRONSHTEIN IN THE BRONX

The veteran spy novelist indulges what he calls an “obsession” with Leon Trotsky to imagine the Russian’s brief New York sojourn.

Born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, Trotsky took his better-known name from one of his prison guards. Littell mentions in a foreword that his own father was born Leon Litzky, but he had the surname legally changed in 1919 to Littell because of its resemblance to the infamous revolutionary’s nom de guerre. This nominal link is why, the novelist says, he “couldn’t resist fantasizing” about Trotsky’s 10 weeks in New York just before the 1917 revolution erupted. Trotsky sails with his longtime companion and their two sons in early 1917 to New York, where his fame has preceded him. J. Edgar Hoover conducts his immigration interview, a likely anachronism, and the press greets him on the pier. Trotsky moves into an apartment in the Bronx and begins writing for the Russian-language newspaper Novy Mir and the Jewish Daily Forward. He begins an affair with a journalist named Frederika Fedora, who has ties through her father to Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. He gives speeches and argues with various emigres and sympathizers, including Nikolai Bukharin and Eugene Debs. The average reader might be mystified by the factional nuance and rhetoric that emerge among committed Socialists, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks. The U.S. visit comes to an end when the czar abdicates and Trotsky feels he must return to a Russia where revolution has begun again. While the historical characters are little more than foils and talking heads, Littell creates a well-rounded personality in Trotsky. Some of the character development derives from his highly active and vocal conscience, whose contrarian bent constantly tests the man’s convictions and assertions. And note that Trotsky associates his conscience with a “childhood nemesis” named Leon Litzky—which may make sense if you’re fantasizing about an obsession.

A colorful but uneven venture into historical fiction.