Memory is handed down, history is written down; memory is concerned with justice, history with preciseness; memory moralizes, history tallies up and corrects; memory is personal, history dreams of objectivity; memory is based not on knowledge, but on experience: compassion with, sympathy for a desperate pain demanding immediate involvement. At the same time the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies and misrepresentations — the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past.
Maria Stepanova had always been fascinated by family artefacts — the photos, diaries, letters, and postcards that recorded the lives of this family of Russian Jews who, for the most part, traversed the twentieth century unscathed — and from a very young age, she always knew that when she was old enough, when she had enough life experience and context, she would write about these people known only through sepia-toned images and faded fountain-penned lines. When her aunt passed away, removing one more source of family knowledge, Stepanova — by now a celebrated poet, essayist, and editor — decided it was time to finally pull together everything she knew (family stories overlaid with what is recorded of the times through various art forms), and In Memory of Memory is the result. This is a fairly dense read: the stories, transcribed correspondence, Stepanova’s travels and what she relates about twentieth century art and letters is all fascinating reading, and underpinned with philosophical writing about what can actually be captured about history and memory, this is something more than memoir; certainly something more than one family’s history, and I found the whole to be an education and a starting point for deeper contemplation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
We sat at a long wooden table in the library, which appeared to hold every book written on any matter that might be considered Jewish. I asked questions and got answers. Then the museum advisor, a historian, asked me what I was writing about and I began to explain. “Ah,” he said. “One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots — there are plenty of those now.”
“Yes,” I answered. “And now there will be one more.”
Although the family’s Jewishness didn’t figure very prominently in the letters and diaries they left behind, it had made them targets throughout twentieth century Russia — subject to pogroms, asset confiscation under the Bolsheviks, exile and relocation, held under suspicion during “The Jewish Doctor Plot” — and antisemitism isn’t going away anytime soon. Having been raised in the want and fear of Soviet Russia, when the Berlin Wall came down, Stepanova’s parents immediately applied to emigrate to Germany, to their daughter’s surprise. Within a few years, they boarded a train from Moscow, and as Stepanova watched her parents pull away, “a man holding a can of beer glanced at me from out a train door and said: ‘Kill the yids and save Russia.’ It’s all too neat, but that is how it happened.” More recently, Stepanova went to Paris, visiting the hotel where her great-grandmother stayed while studying medicine at the Sorbonne. The current Jewish owner told her, “It’s very hard for us here again. I give us at best another five years in France. After that it will be worse. Far worse.” Between untended Jewish cemeteries, family names that disappear from official records, and knowing that her own direct line had been lucky to avoid the worst disasters of their times, there is a sense of urgency to preserve this family’s story.
Putting my family on general view, even if I do it with as much love as I can muster and with the best words in the best order, is, after all, something of a Ham’s deed, exposing the vulnerable and naked body of the family, its dark armpits, its pale belly. And most likely I would learn nothing new in writing it, and just knowing this made the act of writing even more fraught. Yes, free of scandalous revelation, far from the hell of Péter Esterházy, who found out that his beloved father had worked for the secret police, but also far from the bliss of having always known everything about your people, and bearing this knowledge with pride. Neither of these outcomes were mine. This book about my family is not about my family at all, but something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.
In this way, In Memory of Memory is about so much more than this one family; it’s also an examination of what can really be known about what we accept as “history” after everyone who lived through it is gone. To that end, Stepanova examines historical work that is not just intertextual, but interdisciplinary. She connects Shirley Jackson’s horror novels with Francesca Woodman’s photography and Joseph Cornell’s art boxes with Salvador Dalí’s painting (just two examples of many such connections), mixing in the essays of Susan Sontag, the poetry of the exiled Osip Mandelstam, referencing music, film, and memoir; leading to countless passages like the following:
Jean Cocteau said that cinema is the only art form that records death at work. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are solely occupied with recording death, and lined up together they make a sort of protofilm — whereas the kilometers of selfies, taken and uploaded for communal access, look like the exact opposite to me: the chronicle of death as it walks amongst us, no longer of any interest to anyone.
Stepanova inserts many letters verbatim between chapters — I particularly relished the ones written by her grandfather’s cousin, Lyodik, that he wrote home to his mother while a soldier during the Siege of Leningrad — and while these certainly have the feel of “truth” about their historical moments, Stepanova also shares that her father refused her permission to include his own letters (upbeat missives written home from his far-flung work assignments), arguing, “I can’t bear to think that someone will read those letters and think that’s what I am.” Knowing that Stepanova’s father (and before him, Lyodik) put a cheerful spin on grim circumstances when writing home, it really brings into question just what can be reconstructed about the past from letters, diaries, and other so-called primary sources. Do the artists and writers do a better job of preserving the truth of the moment? And what is to be made of our own time of oversharing and manipulating every image of ourselves? Where can truth be found? History and historiography, the personal and the philosophically universal; there’s much in here to learn and think on.
