Adult Education Blog

Our "December" book club meeting is pushed back a week to accommodate our holiday travels! Join us this first Wednesday in January at 10:30 on Zoom to discuss In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, In Memory of Memory is an exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers.

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.

In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken poetic voice. Dipping into various forms - essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents - Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.