Indignity: A Life Reimagined

The award-winning author of Free returns with an extraordinary investigation into historical injustice, personal and collective dignity, truth and imagination

When Lea Ypi discovers that a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Italian Alps in 1941 has been posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with deeply unsettling questions. Growing up, she had been told all records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed “when the police came and took everything” in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan: glamorous newlyweds while World War II was raging in the background.

What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy in Salonica, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans, through secret police archives and muddied memories. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? If her family lived in the Ottoman Empire, why did she speak French? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941? All these questions were also asked by the Albanian secret police.

As much a sweeping story about lost worlds as it is a philosophical inquiry, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history. Through reports of communist spies, court depositions, anecdotes and characters that live on in Ypi’s memory, we move between “now” and ”then”, fact and fiction, what we learn from archives and what we can imagine, to reckon with the injustices of the past.

By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity is a meditation on the fragility of truth, both personal and political. Ultimately, Ypi asks, with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?

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