Inspecting the remnants of their lives, she realizes that the monument she has hoped to raise has been there all along: “I always knew I would someday write a book about my family,” writes Maria Stepanova in a chapter of In Memory of Memory called “On Beginnings.” Most of her Russian Jewish ancestors were ordinary people who devoted their lives “to remaining invisible, to achieving a desired inconspicuousness, to hiding in the dim household light and keeping themselves apart from the wide current of history.” She on the other hand is a poet and journalist, “the first and only person in the family who had a reason to speak facing outward.” Her job, and possibly her life’s purpose, is to “build a monument to those people, making sure they didn’t simply dissipate into the air, unremembered and unremarked upon.”
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