Status Updates From In Memory of Memory

the siege of Leningrad sounds like Ukraine this winter

"the inviolate world, when everything was in its place" . . . not

I’m reading this book in one month installments, sharing it with someone else at the city library. Somehow it works fine. Now I have to give it back again but I have read some more brilliant reflection on the fate of highly educated European Jewish artists in the 20th century. The weight of history versus memory and the personal representation. Looking forward to next installment.

" a list creates the illusion of possession"

🥺 love this already

"...y entonces me propuse distinguir tres tipos de memoria.
La memoria de lo perdido: melancólica, inconsolable, con un inventario preciso de los daños y las pérdidas, consciente de que nada puede ser recuperado.
La memoria de lo recibido: ahíta, de sobremesa, satisfecha de lo que le echaron.
La memoria de lo que no fue: la que crea fantasmas a partir de lo no visto..."

This is as much a collection of philosophical essays as a novel in linked parts. Well-written and insightful.

A quite extraordinary book. Of a life in cultured families with histories which again and again have become erased, exterminated, integrated, pushed in the gutter. Stepanovas family history is so rich, I envy the sort of weight a form of professional class intellectually active lives of many generations, give. What is my nothing family history in this? But what is history? A reflection? A mirror? A narrative?

Got this one back from the library again and continuing from page 100 where I had to give it back. My brain has in the meantime been cooked by influenza, sort of losing its structure in exhaustion. But I’m slowly getting back into this wonderful book of the meaning of memory

1.5 hours left on the audiobook, I’m really hoping this next chapter is interesting especially since it’s about a family member I’m invested in. No more essay / critic please!

Page 373: The dead have no rights…

Page 362: The child born to 15 January 1998 — the date of my mother’s death — would now be an adult.

I wish every chapter was like Lyodik’s chapter, going into Joseph - I hated this even more

Chapter VIII. Lyodik, or Silence: Had be SOBBING at the end of this chapter. The usage of historical texts from others to fill in the blank of what happened to her great uncle, wow.

Page 301: ‘Nothing much to report’ was the mantra, and it filled the sheets of paper — whatever was going on around him was by now beyond description.

Page 298: we, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenseless. Especially after we are gone.

Page 292: In the new century people didn’t sing, they sang along and they knew the music not from the page, but from the voice, the raw and irresistible original.

Page 270: how he, such a ‘special’ child, could be born to ordinary parents.

- creates a fantastical imaginary live to match specialness
- “dreaming that your mother is not your mother…”

Page 268: It’s vitally important for the text and the narrator that the relationship be presented as a triangle with Charlotte forming the third side: the grown-up and equal rival.

Page 267: …she rehearsed the notion of inseparability, from embrace to complete union.

Page 262: In her text, alongside the initial ‘The action takes place in 1913-1940 in Germany and later in Nice, France’c she writes ‘Or between heaven and earth beyond our era in the year I of the new salvation.’ … and that is how Charlotte saw herself and her situation: the known world had ended, together with everyone she had loved or hated.

Page 251: Yerushalmi’s Zakhor is a book about memory as the highest of all the virtues, and yet it ends with a near-prayer for oblivion…

Page 225: …speak about their mutual friend, a volunteer White Army colonel with his poems and his illusions — a man on the losing side, in other words.

Page 213: Sometimes it rather seems to me that the pictures need protecting from us…

Page 209: “This is where I came from.”

Long line of photos with the same faces

Page 195: These are universal, each had its own facial expression, meaning that what has been observed once can be applied many times, like a mathematical formula or a prayer.

Page 161: “And you see only those who stand in the light / While those in the darkness nobody can see.” —Bertolt Brecht

Page 134: …and barely notices the ghosts that float back and forth, ignoring state boundaries.

I wish this book had stayed only in Russian text, then maybe I wouldn’t have to read it. 😩

Page 110: Plato’s Phaedrus- …You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding: and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom…

Page 105: The subjectivity and selectiveness of memory means we can fix on a historical ‘excerpt’ which has nothing in common with history itself…