I have accumulated many debts in the writing of this book. Janis (Jan) Danos and the late Andrejs Bičevskis provided indispensable information through interviews and the sharing of documents. Helga Danos, the late Arpad Danos (Misha’s brother), Dailonis Stauvers and Helen Machen were generous with time and information. Other family members and friends who shared memories of Misha were his son Arpad Michael Danos, his daughter Johanna Danos, his second wife Victoria Danos, and his longtime friend and office mate Evans Hayward, as well as friends of Misha’s youth, Balva Berke and Georgs Jankowskis, to whom Jan introduced me in Riga.
Barry Mirkin contributed invaluable information on his father, Simon Mirkin, as well as photographs and press cuttings of Olga’s arrival in New York in 1950. Jan Danos and Johanna Danos also provided photographs from their family collections.
Kata Bohus carried out research on the Deutsch/Danos family in the Hungarian archives on my behalf. Livija Baumane provided wonderful data on Olga’s fashion atelier in Riga, and Andris Zeļenkovs shared information on the Latvian sporting scene before the war. Scholars who answered questions on various issues that came up in the course of the research include Holly Case, Bjorn Felder, Norman Naimark and Atina Grossmann. I am particularly grateful to Dr Margers Vestermanis of the Jewish Museum in Riga for his help.
For translation assistance, I thank Diana Weekes (who translated the Dresden diary) and Eva von Kügelschen; Johanna Danos and Barbara Helwing for German, Rita Lesnik and Arpad Michael Danos for Latvian, and Marco Duranti for Italian.
The institutions that supported me as I worked on this book are the University of Chicago, the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University (2008 Fellowship), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2008–9 Fellowship), and the University of Sydney, which has been my academic home since 2012.
Because this was an unusual project for me, I leaned more heavily than usual on my friends for advice and encouragement: among them Jörg Baberowski, Phyllis Booth, Lorraine Daston, Desley Deacon, Orlando Figes, Marsha Siefert, Alfred Rieber, Yuri Slezkine, and Bernard Wasserstein. Donald Berger, Katerina Clark, Ann Curthoys, and Anne Nesbett all read chapters, as did Jan Danos and Helga Danos. I am particularly grateful to the long list of friends who read and commented on the entire manuscript: Ruth Balint, Lynn Dalgarno, Kay Dreyfus, Barbara Gillam, Kitty Hauser, Mark McKenna and Ross McKibbin. Their reactions, questions and criticisms were enormously valuable.