Ivan Jablonka's grandparents' lives ended long before his began:
although Mates and Idesa Jablonka were his family, they were
perfect strangers. When he set out to uncover their story, Jablonka
had little to work with. Neither of them was the least bit famous,
and they left little behind except their two orphaned children, a
handful of letters, and a passport. Persecuted as communists in
Poland, as refugees in France, and then as Jews under the Vichy
regime, Mates and Idesa lived their short lives underground. They
were overcome by the tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalinism,
the mounting dangers in Europe during the 1930s, the Second World
War, and the destruction of European Jews. Jablonka's challenge
was, as a historian, to rigorously distance himself and yet, as
family, to invest himself completely in their story. Imagined
oppositions collapsed-between scholarly research and personal
commitment, between established facts and the passion of the one
recording them, between history and the art of storytelling. To
write this book, Jablonka traveled to three continents; met the
handful of survivors of his grandparents' era, their descendants,
and some of his far-flung cousins; and investigated twenty
different archives. And in the process, he reflected on his own
family and his responsibilities to his father, the orphaned son,
and to his own children and the family wounds they all inherited. A
History of the Grandparents I Never Had cannot bring Mates and
Idesa to life, but Jablonka succeeds in bringing them, as he
soberly puts it, to light. The result is a gripping story, a
profound reflection, and an absolutely extraordinary history.
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