Lynn reviewed Family Papers by Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Review of 'Family Papers' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
It took me a while to become engrossed in this, because there are zillions of main characters and it’s difficult to keep them all straight. The author provides a hand-drawn family tree, which was helpful once I got the hang of it, but it’s very rough and not very lineal, so even that took some practice.
Once I just stopped trying to keep track of which grandchildren and great-grandchildren belonged to which of Sa’adi a-Levi’s many children, it became much less difficult and then it was fascinating. It really is so very interesting how a widely scattered family network maintained connection by correspondence; how that connection - eventually among people who had never really known one another in person - tied them to an identity they honoured without really remembering; and how gradually that connection and that identity faded away as later generations got on with their own lives in …
It took me a while to become engrossed in this, because there are zillions of main characters and it’s difficult to keep them all straight. The author provides a hand-drawn family tree, which was helpful once I got the hang of it, but it’s very rough and not very lineal, so even that took some practice.
Once I just stopped trying to keep track of which grandchildren and great-grandchildren belonged to which of Sa’adi a-Levi’s many children, it became much less difficult and then it was fascinating. It really is so very interesting how a widely scattered family network maintained connection by correspondence; how that connection - eventually among people who had never really known one another in person - tied them to an identity they honoured without really remembering; and how gradually that connection and that identity faded away as later generations got on with their own lives in distant nations, speaking alien languages.
“These conversations and encounters have left me thinking about the ways in which the past does and does not matter to a family,” the author writes in her conclusion. “The answer, I think, is that history emerges at unexpected moments, long after we assume it to be over, or even without our being aware of it.”