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A Life Reimagined
by Lea Ypi
Book Reviewed by:The author of Free returns with an extraordinary inquiry into historical injustice, dignity, truth, and imagination.
When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told all records of her grandmother's youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.
What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, spanning the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, and the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?
By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history―and reveals the fragility of truth, collective and personal. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi's memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination. With what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?
Prologue
The Photo
'I'm looking for the secret-service archive,' I say as I approach the first taxi parked on Paris Commune, one of Tirana's bustling streets, connecting the city centre to its outer ring road. I hesitate to call it my street, even though it has been my address in Albania for more than twenty years. Already when we moved to the capital during the 1990s, the question 'You're not from here, right?' came up with nagging regularity every time I struck up one of those casual conversations with strangers that appeared innocuous at first, but soon turned awkward.
Most people returning to Tirana comment on how much it has changed: there are now more high-rise buildings, paved roads, cafés, bars and cycle paths. Yet for me it is a place of grief, guilt and endless what-ifs. I have no happy memories of it – at best dispassionate associations with news items, communist-era films and, more recently, traffic jams. The longest stay I endured in the city was when my ...
Over the course of Indignity, Lea Ypi mixes three different methods of storytelling: a first-person narrative of her time at archives looking for clues; a third-person, fictionalized retelling of her grandmother's life through various characters' eyes; and selected primary source documents, like embassy telegrams and espionage reports. Ypi's ability to flow naturally and smoothly between these narrative threads verges on the superhuman. In three sections, the story progresses from searching for records on a lagging archive computer, to her great-grandfather Ibrahim Pasha's death in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, to a spirited debate on national identity post-World War I—all without losing focus on the central questions of memory and dignity...continued
Full Review
(1055 words)
(Reviewed by Margaret Belford).
David Runciman, author of The History of Ideas
Lea Ypi goes deep into Europe's forgotten past to explore who owns the story of a life and who gets to tell it. A gripping tale of secret police, fractured families, and undying loyalties, this is also a remarkable reflection on how history is made and what happens to the people who get left behind. Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
A captivating journey of imagination and longing, and a gentle uncovering of a deep buried history that goes to the very heart of identity with brilliant storytelling.
Indignity author Lea Ypi's grandfather—her grandmother Leman Ypi's husband—was charged by the Hoxha regime with espionage because of his interactions with British nationals in Albania. Vandeleur Robinson, Eliot Watrous, and Brigadier Edward Hodgson are all described in the author's index first as "Asllan's friend" and second as members of the British intelligence and military services. Together, those descriptors landed Asllan Ypi a twenty-year prison sentence with hard labor, despite the British government's support of communist antifascist forces during the war.
During World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill tasked his country's new Special Operations Executive with encouraging undercover activities in ...
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