Indignity

The author of Free returns with an extraordinary inquiry into historical injustice, dignity, truth, and imagination.

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: glamorous newlyweds, celebrating while World War II raged.

What follows Ypi's discovery 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 was the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman, where she met a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And what prompted her enigmatic smile in the winter of 1941, one of the darkest periods of World War II?

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 on 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?