Leo Zeilig's Blog

Lara Pawson's extraordinary and important book describes a vital moment in Africa's post-independent history. Pawson exposes a murderous regime, a forgotten massacre and those who supported it. She is right to target certain (frequently European) Marxists, or more accurately revolutionary nationalists who gave the MPLA government a radical camouflage. Pawson writes with irresistible force about a generation of radicals who many of us depended on for a critical understanding of African politics, history and commentary. So as well as uncovering the massacre the book also looks at the contradictory relationship of a generation of (mostly) white radical intellectuals to apparently progressive and socialist regimes that emerged in the second wave of independence in Africa in the 1970s. It is not often that you can say this about a single book but Africa's modern history will never look the same again.

Saul Bellow's second novel is still very much an apprenticeship. But Bellow's familiar themes are present, the confusion of urban America, the personal knots that bind his principal characters and the slow, hard working out of our predicaments and mistakes. There are also moments of pure brilliance, as great as his major work. Leventhal is waiting for a subway train in New York with his brother, 'They felt the concussion of the train, and the streaked face of the lead car with its beam shot towards them in a smoulder of dust; the windows ran by.'

A lovely endorsement of Eddie the Kid by actor and author Maureen Lipman: ‘This book is the most novel novel I've read this year. It is political but not point making, it is a love story with a totally new kind of love and an elephant in the room the size of Africa. A marvellous and original book.’ Maureen Lipman

Socialist Review (New Zealand) asked some left-wing writers for their picks from 2013.

'...Finally, if you want a novel, try Leo Zeilig, Eddie The Kid (Zero Books). It is the story of a leftist (sometimes ultra-leftist) activist in the anti-war movement and the terrible complexities of his family life. It is often very funny (Zeilig can laugh at the left, even though his commitment is unquestioned) but also sometimes profoundly sad.'

Ian Birchall has been a revolutionary socialist activist, historian, and translator in Britain for five decades

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An extraordinary piece of writing; vast, generous, profound. First published in 1969 yet written with such force about the modern condition, the fraught hell of urban life that still has us in its grip, 'The inadequacy of words - the need for several simultaneous languages to address all parts of the mind at once, especially those parts left free by meagre communications, functioning furiously on their own. Instead, as one were to smoke ten cigarettes simultaneously; while also drinking whiskey; while also being sexually engaged with three or four other persons; while hearing bands of music; while receiving scientific notations - thus to capacity engagé ... the boundlessness, the pressure of modern expectations.' Sammler, like so many of Bellow's creations, is frail and flawed yet prone to brilliant observations. His life, as a survivor of the holocaust, has also been full of confusion and heartache. The cast in Mr Sammler's Planet grapple with the 'garbage of personal life' that haunt all of us, while they try constantly to rise above it. Yet we are always shown a way through, so while we are pompous, vain human beings we can also make the right decisions, looking after each other and love each other. Nothing better expresses Bellow’s sublime generosity as a writer than Sammler’s last speech about his cousin Elya: ‘Elya … who, as willingly as possible and as well as he was able, and even to an intolerable point … to do what was required of him. He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet – through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding – he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know.’



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James Start's very positive review of Eddie the Kid in The Guardian ran on 27 March, 2013:

"Academic and writer Leo Zeilig begins his first novel at the gates of Downing Street. It's late 2002, and activist Eddie Bereskin is borne on shoulders, megaphone in hand, calling Tony Blair a murderer and ordering the crowd to break the police barricade. He is arrested and charged, and as the movements for and against war in Iraq gather steam, falls into a feverish relationship with Rebecca, a beautiful fellow protester, and waits for his court case. Zeilig's sympathy for Eddie's convictions is clear, but he isn't afraid to mock Eddie's flamboyant solicitor (who wants to "rip the fucking head off the global bourgeoisie") or expose the blinkered rage that causes Eddie to turn on Rebecca for shaving her legs. Indeed, Eddie's fraught family life, overhung by his brutal, charismatic father, is at the heart of this honest and powerful novel. Some rather broad scenes – including a sex-shop trip – disrupt the pace somewhat, but this passionate, sad and well-told book offers a compelling portrait of a flawed young radical."

Eddie the Kid is a story about a 34-year-old activist, Eddie Bereskin, involved in the extraordinary anti-war movement of 2002–03. The novel finishes on the famous demonstration in London on 15 February in 2003. Eddie is, perhaps more unusually, a radical socialist—he works closely with a fringe revolutionary group, though he is not a member. So the novel speaks to two slightly hidden subcultures: that of the activism that briefly broke into the UK mainstream ten years ago as resistance to the Iraq war spread, and that of a far more ‘underground’ group of far-left socialist activists.

Of course these subcultures are not ‘hidden’ to the thousands who every day attend meetings, demonstrations and socialist discussions, or the even larger numbers who have passed through the ranks of anti-war and socialist groups over the last fifteen years. But in contemporary fiction these stories are almost entirely silenced. What do the lives of these activists look like? What are the private hopes and passions of modern, UK-born revolutionaries? How do Eddie’s commitment to women’s liberation and to a socialist society collide with his own private life?

There is some cross-over between the novel and my own life. My father was a socialist, though not an activist like Eddie’s father Stewart. Our household buzzed with political debate and heated conversations about books, newspapers articles and campaigns. My dad had grown up in the Communist Party of Canada, in a Yiddish-speaking household in Winnipeg where anti-Zionism and the Soviet Union were defended with equal fury. In the novel, Eddie hears his grandfather describe hearing of Stalin’s crimes after Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ in 1956 and “feeling like a child had died”—these were the words of my grandfather to me in 1990 when the Soviet monolith was breaking up. My father split from the Communist Party in 1968, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. The family arguments at the time are legendary—my mother remembers her red-faced father-in-law hitting the table, exasperated by his son’s condemnation of the invasion, his refusal to bend, again, to the party line. But my father held onto his rage against injustice and the arms race. He defended socialism as a vision of the poor coming together to create a world based on mutual solidarity, not greed—rather like my grandfather’s stories of the utopian promise of the Russian Revolution. We would learn, as they had, to build a society of full employment and limitless possibilities—the promise of a socialist society that had been betrayed by Stalin. My father breathed this vision into his children.

Yet my father, like Eddie’s, was also violent. Politics, justice, peace and socialism pervaded my childhood—but so did my father’s occasional violent outbursts. Many children experience their parents’ love as schizophrenic—lurching from affection to violence against their children and against one another. The poet Philip Larkin memorably described parents, in his poem on family life, who ‘half the time were soppy-stern, and half at one another’s throats.’

I explore these themes in Eddie the Kid—a father who is all love and affection one moment, all angry outburst the next. In the novel Eddie witnesses Stewart beating his mother, then takes a beating himself and has to cope as the pain is followed by hugs and kisses. But Eddie the Kid also asks: what happens when a parent is violent against his wife and children, but is also a committed and principled communist? How does this experience shape a child’s notions of political activism?

In the novel Eddie is involved in an anti-war group in Tooting; he reads the left-wing press and argues with friends and comrades about how to change the world. When he finds himself falling in love with Rebecca, who he meets on the Halloween anti-war protest in 2002 in London, he rapidly comes apart. Arguing about the dialectic is one thing, but Eddie can’t prevent the experience of his childhood, his father’s treatment of women, from infecting his relationship with Rebecca.

Falling in love draws out our early lessons—but when these have been fused with activism and socialist politics, Eddie can’t find a way out. Instead he repeats his father’s destructive pattern. Eddie comments early on in the story that ‘life is just the continual folding over of what has already happened to us. When we think we have moved on we find ourselves staring back at our old, past lives.’

Eddie is not alone; his sister Esther, too, struggles to cope with her childhood trauma. Esther suffers from psychotic episodes. She self-abuses; the anger and violence visited on her by her father bubble out of her as madness. While Esther fights herself, Eddie comes at the world, inflamed by his love for Rebecca, with his fists flying.

Eddie the Kid is not a didactic novel, but it does tell us that activists and socialists have been, like everyone, profoundly marked and disturbed by the violence and prejudices in our families and societies. Those of us active on the left are more like Eddie Bereskin—and there are more Eddie Bereskins—than we’d prefer to admit.

I should add a final word about writing fiction. We often have a lazy habit when reading novels to see the author in every scene and his voice and troubles in each chapter. Eddie the Kid that mixes real and made-up events, but the ‘tangle’ of these elements in this book has created something entirely fictional. Though I may have disturbed the still waters with my own life, it has been from the ripples arching away from me that I have written.

Leo Zeilig