When Maryam Diener began to research Edith Tudor-Hart and Ursula Kuczynski, she noticed the many parallels running between their lives…  

Edith Tudor-Hart was a Bauhaus-trained photographer, and Ursula Kuczynski a writer and polyglot. Both were immigrant dissidents fighting fascism throughout the turbulent 30s and 40s.

They never met, and yet communist agents, radical activists and devoted mothers both, their lives regularly crossed on the leafy streets of Hampstead and in the sophisticatedly bohemian world of the Isokon building – a haven for free-thinking émigrés and modernist marvel that promised a new way of living. Maryam Diener is masterful at the blending of fact and fiction.

In Parallel Lives she traces the haunting secrets, traumas and victories that bound these remarkable women. 

My Review

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the lives of these two women, but I struggled to actually ‘admire’ them. They were, after all, spies for the Russians.

Edith Tudor-Hart’s photos are remarkable. She was undeniably a real talent. Ursula Kuczynski travelled to China, and while I understand that she was appalled by the living standards of the poor (I wonder what she would think now), she still left her two-year-old son with her in-laws, so she could train to be a spy in Moscow.

It’s easy for us to criticise, but the two women, being Jewish, (one German, one Austrian), were afraid of the rise of the right and fascism in Nazi Germany. I do understand – my Jewish mother fled Vienna in 1938. But my father, a Polish Catholic, was a prisoner-of-war in Siberia during WW2, so you’ll have to forgive me for having strong feelings where the Russians are concerned. And of course feeding secrets to Russia today would be unthinkable. Kim Philby was notorious for being a Russian spy, and one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, and he figures in the book. His first wife was Litzi Friedmann, who was great friends with Edith.

I cannot criticise the writing of Parallel Lives. It’s brilliant. It’s just about where I stand on the womens’ beliefs. I rarely get political in reviews, but it’s unavoidable here. I read around the subject quite a bit, during and after reading. Apart from Philby, there were other interesting characters, like Arnold Deutsch who had recruited Philby, Edith’s husband medical doctor Alex Tudor-Hart, Ursula’s first husband architect Rudolph Hamburger, and the nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs.

Edith’s son Tommy, who was severely autistic, ended up in a home from the age of eleven and was never released. But again hindsight is a dangerous thing. Maybe not our place to judge. Edith was broken by it, and eventually gave up her photography to open an antique shop in Brighton. She died fairly young, unlike Ursula who lived till she was 93.

But one of the most interesting things for me was the connection with the Bauhaus (which I have recently read about in another story), and the famous Isokon building in London where some of them lived. The occupants were mainly bohemian artists, writers and architects, free thinkers, who also believed in free love, something which our two women seemed to indulge in regularly. Maybe it’s not our place to judge once again, but they both seemed to become too emotionally and sexually involved with their fellow spies. I think this was probably their undoing.

An outstanding 5 star read for me, regardless of my personal views on the ‘protagonists’.

Many thanks to Grace Pilkington Publicity for inviting me on the #ParallelLives blog tour

Buy link: www.amazon.co.uk

About the Author

Maryam Diener was born in Iran and attended the Sorbonne in Paris before receiving her Masters from Columbia University. She is the author of The Moon (1998), Sans te dire adieu (2007) and Beyond Black There is No Colour: The Story of Forough Farrokhzad (Quartet Books, 2020) and Exquisite Corpse (2021). In 2012 she co-founded Éditions Moon Rainbow, a publishing company specialising in limited-edition books on poetry and the visual arts including There Must Be Someone to Rewrite Love, which features contributions from Bei Dao and Francesco Clemente.