In Memory of Memory

With the death of her aunt Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs old postcards letters diaries and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm steady hands these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes W. G. Sebald Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken poetic voice. Dipping into various forms - essay fiction memoir travelogue and historical documents - Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.