Indignity A life reimagined

Ypi's first book, Free (2022), told of her adolescence during the turbulent 1980s and 1990s in Albania. Now she tells the story of her grandparents, Leman and Asllan, who were young newlyweds at the height of WWII, navigating the complicated politics of the Balkans. Ypi's family was at the center of the communist/capitalist tangle as the region was destabilized and reorganized, particularly in Albania and Greece; Asllan's father was the prime minister of Albania, and his friends were deeply involved in the Communist Party. Ypi investigates the paper trail of her grandparents' mysterious journeys, which gives the book a thrilling pace. She sees a picture of her beaming grandparents in 1941 and asks how they could look so fabulous and happy during one of the heaviest times in their region's history. Their world comes to life in vivid detail through Ypi's imagined flashbacks of what Leman, Asllan, and their families faced. Guiding readers to be curious about their own roots, Ypi's exquisite research and compassionate curiosity for the past make for another great read.

In this heartfelt account, bestselling memoirist Ypi (Free) doggedly investigates her grandmother's shadowy life story. When a mysterious photograph is posted online featuring her grandparents on their 1941 honeymoon in the Alps, Ypi is taken aback by their apparent happiness in the midst of WWII, as well as by comments below the post accusing her grandmother, Leman Ypi, of collaborating with either the communists or fascists. In search of the truth, Ypi delves into crumbling state archives, and pieces together a vivid recreation of Leman's life. Born to a wealthy family in Greece before moving to Albania as a young woman, Leman, in Ypi's telling, saw her path repeatedly intersect with the tumultuous geopolitics of the early 20th century, from a post-WWI population exchange to fascist Italy and Nazi-occupied Albania to the rise of Communism. The latter led to the imprisonment of her husband (the author's grandfather) for "collaboration with British intelligence officers" and to Leman being relegated to working as a sewer cleaner. The narrative can, at times, devolve into a dizzying array of governments, military takeovers, and insurgent political movements. However, the profound descriptions of Leman's struggles are poignant, as is Ypi's "oscillat between curiosity, frustration, and resentment" as she meticulously attempts to balance family lore with inconsistent and sometimes seemingly inaccurate records. It's a moving meditation on the quagmire of probing the gaps in one's family history. (Nov.)

A noted philosopher explores her homeland and the family secrets it conceals. Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, opens in the archives of the former Communist secret service in her Albanian homeland, seeking documentation about her grandmother, Leman, and hoping, as she writes, to rescue her "from the trolls." One such troll, of the social media variety, has somehow unearthed a gone-viral photo of Leman and her husband, Asllan, vacationing in the Italian Dolomites in 1941, well into World War II and the Italian occupation of Albania, leading to another troll's accusation that Leman was a Communist spy after first having been a fascist collaborator. The assault sets Ypi on a search for the truth about her family, outsiders who, though ethnically Albanian and Muslim, had made their home in Salonica, Greece, home to a thriving Jewish community until the Nazi invasion. The family, bookish and aristocratic, enters the tobacco business in Albania with a German partner who, virulently anticommunist, is apoplectic when Leman, a convert to socialism, becomes a chain smoker, doubtless the fault of the Bolsheviks and "the way they inspire the young to disrespect their fathers and mothers." It's ironic, then, that Leman should have been suspected by the communist government of Enver Hoxha as a "foreign agent" and an enemy of the state who had "expressed hatred towards the People's Republic, and the Party in Power." Ypi's skillfully written tale includes thoughtful meditations on the notion of dignity as a philosophical construct; in a provocative turn, Ypi compares her condition to the surveillance state of old that had Leman under constant observation: "I am a generic consumer, a cog in a corporate machine, a means to profit. She's still recognized as human by another human…a subject whose dignity can never be fully destroyed." A beguiling, elegant book whose surprise ending, just one of its many real-life twists and turns, befits a mystery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.