A grandmother's story of dignity
Our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers had the subversive dignity to assert their personalities against all odds, to resist being conditioned by men (fathers, husbands, sons), family, social class, race, religion, or nation to the point of determining who they were, of overriding their essence. After Freedom, an essay turned into a surprising autobiography, Lea Ypi (Tirana, 1979), Albanian political scientist from the London School of Economics, now publishes Indignity (Ángulo Editorial and Anagrama), a painful quest into the life of her grandmother, Leman Ypi.
All knowledge is a form of remembrance, said Meno, Socrates' slave. Lea Ypi has spent three years remembering and delving into eight archives in five countries, sifting through thousands of pages to reconstruct Leman's life. The result is a fascinating and moving puzzle, terrible, impressive, and loving. "My grandmother is dead, and I am a product of the system that destroyed her life." The system is the autarkic, police-state communist Albania of Enver Hoxha (1908-1985), the dictator who, in his youth, had been a friend of Leman's husband and Lea's grandfather, Aslan Ypi. "There is only one thing I cannot forgive you for: you are too good a person," Enver Hoxha had once told the idealistic Aslan Ypi.
The book has a surprising twist ending, a result of the incredible surveillance to which the Albanian totalitarian state subjected citizens considered dissenting. The beginning of the story is also intriguing. It starts when the author sees a photo of her grandmother, an image she was unaware of, go viral on Albanian social media: it shows a very young Leman and Asllan in hammocks in front of a luxury hotel in the Italian Alps, the Vittoria, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, on the 9th of the war. The young newlywed couple were on their honeymoon at a ski resort. They were the happiest days of her grandmother's life. What happened next? Where did the photo come from?
Lea Ypi embarks on a meticulous and delirious search that makes her doubt everything. "The suggestion that my grandmother might have been a collaborator—communist or fascist, or, worse still, both—clinges to me like a shadow. Perhaps I'm wrong to think of her as a paragon of virtue." The book, a tortuous sentimental and investigative journey, begins in Tirana, in a clunky office of the Authority for Information on Documentation of the Former State Security Service. What truth will she find? Will she be able to reconcile the stories her grandmother passed down with those in the police files she is about to uncover? What is true and what is false?
To understand who her grandmother really was, to delve into the terrible years obsessively recorded in the archives of repression, she first looks back at her family history, that of Francophiles straddling Greece and Albania. My grandmother was born and spent her childhood and adolescence in Salonica (better known as Thessaloniki), a Greek port city with an extraordinary mix of sounds: French, Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Judeo-Spanish, Italian, and, of course, Greek. With friends from the French Lycée—where she was the only girl—she learned Judeo-Spanish and became politically active in a left-leaning environment. In 1936, she finished her studies with a gold medal.
One day, Dr. Elias, a Sephardic Jew, tells him: "The French are obsessed with their homeland. homeland, the homelandThey keep repeating it. But we are fortunate to have many. Just as you can love more than one child, you can also cherish different countries and different peoples. It's a blessing, not a curse." So, what is a good citizen? "A good citizen is a good person," he tells her. indignity The title is the reverse side of this Rousseauian perspective.
A quest for dignity
The book is an investigation into the grandmother and into dignity. About the difference between doing the right thing, adapting, or rebelling. It's not easy. Dignity is always a hard-won and imperfect conquest. While many of her classmates leave to study in France, Italy, or Austria, Leman, at 18, decides to go to Tirana. Didn't the professors call her "the Albanian girl"? Didn't she never have been there before? Well, she goes and arrives in an Albania then under the protective wing of Mussolini's fascist Italy. "Albania is beautiful, tortured, and boring," she concludes succinctly. As throughout Europe, history, and her life, will soon take a tragic turn that finds her at the heart of events, working as a stenographer on the prime minister's staff: she was the first woman to work in the Albanian administration.
The human spirit resists all attempts at offense, harm, or humiliation. I leave it to the reader to discover, through Lea Ypi's eyes, the story of her grandmother. A story, yes, of silent struggle, of survival, of love. Now that Europe is once again teetering in a world without rules, it is worthwhile to grasp the extent to which grand History shapes small lives. In the Balkan periphery, many years ago, one woman did not succumb. Many other women and men lost everything, absolutely everything, including their dignity.