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By Root 1678 0

a particularly self-satisfied example. What other don would have told us in 1936 to read the recent French Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, not yet famous even in its own country, to invite the great Marc Bloch to lecture in Cambridge, presenting him to us, justifiably, as the greatest living medievalist? (Alas, I can remember nothing of his lecture except the image of a small pudgy man.) Though passionately anti-communist, Postan was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great central and East Europeans, and took their work sufficiently seriously to expound and criticize it. He knew nevertheless that he attracted the young Marxists, and, though denouncing their belief in Russian bolshevism, welcomed them as allies in the fight against historical conservatism. 2 During the Cold War, when I depended on his references as my doctoral supervisor, he also helped to keep me out of jobs by pointing out to anyone concerned that I was a communist. I cannot exactly say that he was my teacher, or indeed anyone’s teacher – he formed no school and had no disciples – but he was my bridge to the wider world of history. And he was certainly the most surprising figure to be found in a senior history chair in Britain, or probably anywhere, between the wars – impressive, charming and absurd.

For Mounia Postan, somewhat improbably for a historian, was a lifelong fantasist and romancer. Without corroboration you could not believe a word of what he said. If he did not know the answer to a question – about the middle ages or the love-affairs of his students – he invented one. Since he was also very obviously an outsider in interwar Britain, whose highest ambition was to be an insider, the scope for fantasy was vast. Moreover, he lied with an utterly disarming shamelessness or chutzpah. Many years later when he was due to retire from his Cambridge chair but did not want to, he told the university that he was one year younger than his documented age, claiming that his birth record in what had then been Russia and was now Romania, no longer existed. As usual, he did not convince. As usual, people shook their heads, smiled, and said: ‘That’s Mounia!’

In some ways the greatest of his fantasies was the construction of a new identity in Britain, where he arrived from Soviet Russia via Romania in 1921. His early history was very much what one might have expected of a middle-class Jewish youth from the south-western borders of Tsarist Russia. He had studied at Odessa University until the Revolution, which he welcomed, joining a radical Marxist-Zionist group, divided only between those who wanted to go to Palestine to build a socialist society immediately, and those who wanted to organize the world revolution first. Mounia belonged to the second tendency. When Soviet power, distrustful of Zionism, was firmly institutionalized in the Ukraine after the civil war, he found himself imprisoned, he claimed for a few months, and then released. (During the Second World War this made him unacceptable to the Soviet authorities as a representative of the British Ministry of Economic Warfare.) He then came to England where, beginning as a part-time student, he made his career in the London School of Economics as a medieval agrarian historian. He did not so much conceal his background as allow the world to choose between an assortment of stories of varied continental adventure, mostly implying non-Jewishness, although no Jew who met him, and even in interwar England few non-Jews, could have been deceived for a moment. And yet, he succeeded by sheer brilliance, absurd charm, immigrant determination and not least the help of his teacher and first wife, the medieval economic historian Eileen Power (1889–1940), in climbing the peaks of his new environment, ending his life as Sir Michael Postan, married to Lady Cynthia Keppel, sister of the Earl of Albemarle. In this he was more successful than the other implausible and intellectually brilliant historiographic import from Eastern Europe, the very consciously Jewish L. B. (Sir