‘In her latest book, renowned historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recounts the remarkable wartime odyssey of Michael Danos (1922-1999), known also at various times as Mikelis/Mischa/Mischka, the theoretical physicist to whom she was married until his death. Drawing on diaries and letters, she retraces Mischka’s journey from occupied Riga via a displaced persons camp to Heidelberg, where his career began to take off. Fitzpatrick does not claim that Mischka’s story was representative, indeed she thinks of it as “singular”. It’s an honest and sometimes unflinching account: we learn of his devotion to his mother, his fledgling scientific career (he regularly carried in his suitcase twenty volumes of the Zeitschrift für Physik), his love of sport and music, and his multiple liaisons. When he and his first wife reached the USA in 1951, he proclaimed “We made it”. In this labour of love, Fitzpatrick shows how they did, and why it matters.’

Peter Gatrell, Professor of Economic History, Manchester University and author of The Making of the Modern Refugee

‘At once tender and forensic: a beguiling combination of scholarship and love.’

Anna Goldsworthy, author of Piano Lessons

‘Two dramas are played out in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Mischka’s War: that of Misha, navigating the European catastrophe with an equanimity that often threatens to confound our understanding of it; and the author’s own drama, as she tries to preserve the historian’s objectivity and “distance” from even the most terrible events, while uncovering the story of one man among the millions caught up in them—the man she met and fell in love with long after the war was over. The result is an absorbing, unsettling, rare and memorable book.’

Don Watson, author of The Bush