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Book

Indignity : a life reimagined

Author

Lea Ypi

Call Number

  • 921 Y85 (CEN, OSH)

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Edition

First American edition.

Publication Information

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

Physical Description

xvii, 340 pages : maps ; 22 cm

Summary

"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?"--

Contents

  • Prologue. The photo
  • The sick man of Europe
  • The unmixing of peoples
  • Everything has a price
  • To take a risk
  • A smoke-filled room
  • All for the best
  • The Albanian
  • Prologue. The Greek
  • The dogs. Intermezzo. Asllan's biography
  • Slippers and the general will. Intermezzo. Lessons from history
  • Onion and lavender
  • A sign. Intermezzo. Material concerning Leman Ypi
  • Skanderbeg couples. Intermezzo. Telegram ; Intermezzo. Minutes of the meeting of the Albanian Constituent Assembly
  • Putting out fires
  • Red stars at dawn
  • Pick your side
  • Je m'appelle 10017
  • Prologue. A recent visit to Thessaloniki. Intermezzo. A woman from Salonica ; Intermezzo. Surveillance reports
  • Another humanitarian intervention
  • Lambs and eagles
  • The future of democracy. Intermezzo. Excerpt from a report on the present administration of Albania ; Intermezzo. Asllan's deposition ; Intermezzo. Court decision
  • The grey coat. Intermezzo. Deportation orders
  • Comrade Leman
  • We had done nothing wrong
  • To understand. Intermezzo. A death certificate
  • Coda. The other Leman Ypi.

Subjects