Sarah Abrevaya Stein is a Professor of History and holds the Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA’s Department of History, and she also is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. Besides Family Papers, just a few of her many other notable books include Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (2008), and Sephardi Lives, an incredible documentary history which she co-edited with Julia Phillips Cohen.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein: The family whose history I tell here, which spans roughly a century, is a global history. It follows a family through the dramatic events of the twentieth century, and the development of their own familial global diaspora. In some ways, it is a generalizable Jewish story. In some ways, it is a Sephardic story. In some ways, it is unique to the family whose history I tell.
Let me explain what I mean. It is a generalizable Jewish history in that, I would say, it maps a century of the dramatic world events and personal choices and transitions that Jews faced and confronted and underwent migration, state violence, warfare, shifting cultural and religious norms, shifting gender norms. All of this is prototypically Jewish.
On the other hand, it is a uniquely Sephardic and Mediterranean story, a story that has to do with the end of the Ottoman Empire, the shifting primacy of the Ladino and Judeo-Spanish culture, the acquisition of European languages, even down to the timeline of Holocaust era, which of course is also a generalizable Jewish history, but it still is uniquely Sephardic and its contours.
So it’s a Jewish story, and it is a Sephardic story. It’s a Mediterranean story, and an Ottoman story—and a post-Ottoman story. But I also think it is, as you said, unique to this family. I’ve often wondered, could one pull on the edges of any family and tell an equally rich, multigenerational story? I’m not sure that I know the answer to that question. But I will say that this family enabled that kind of project partly because they were historically a family of letters of editors of printers of teachers of journalists of writers, who, for so very long, treasured the written word, and saved the written word, and shared with one another through letters, the written word, even when the family stopped to hold fast to that traditional occupation of printing and editing. Those documents and also the photographs and the material objects that they were managed to preserve.
They understood that they mattered and they passed through the family. I should mention to those who are listening who haven’t had a chance to look at the book that much of the sources for the book are in family hands. I also consulted many, many archives, but the families still continue to own and treasure their papers.
I think that I was able to tell a particularly rich story, because members of the family played pivotal roles in modern Sephardic history, I made the decision that this was going to be a book that wouldn’t be outwardly driven by argument, as have some of my other projects, I did make the determination to focus on and to employ a means of storytelling. I was really interested in the idea of writing for a new kind of audience, writing a book that would appeal both to scholars and to general readers with an investment in Jewish history or Sephardic history or global history or family history.
I also was struck that there are so many excellent books that tell epic stories of Ashkenazi families that allow us to follow families through the dramatic arc of the modern era, we really don’t have anything like that for the Sephardic world. I was intrigued by a very intimate window into modern Sephardic history that could be understood at the human level, the very personal level and through the really very intimate lives of individuals. I thought that that is not only a narrative goal, but also is really a way of providing a kind of intellectual service to a broad readership.
JL: Part of what’s amazing here about the story is the kind of detail that you can pull out. I understand that it stemmed in part from your work with Aron Rodrigue on publishing the memoirs of Sa’adi Betsalel Ashkenazi a-Levi, who’s the patriarch of this whole family. How did you move from the memoir to this book? How did that shape your approach to this history?
SAS: When I finished publishing this translation with Aron Rodrigue with a masterful translation, glossary and transliteration from the Ladino by Isaac Jerusalmi… we finished this project, which was an attempt to offer to English language readers, and also to students of Ladino, the translation of the first Ladino memoir known to be written—a memoir that offers a very rich and turbulent and intimate view of nineteenth-century Salonica and Jewish Salonica in the Ottoman world.
When we were finishing, I was gripped by the question of, what had happened to this family? My pathway was the actual physical memoir that Sa’adi had written which had extraordinarily made a journey from Ottoman Salonica to Paris to Rio de Janeiro to Jerusalem. I really began with that question of how does flimsy, fragile, vulnerable paper notebook in which something has been written by hand, how does it make that incredible journey in the face of the collapse of an empire, a massive fire, world wars, family migration in many directions? I just began with that question: how did this happen? And what happened to the family? It was really that question that sent me on this nearly decade long journey to provide a detailed and globally wide reaching answer, which was much more complex and interesting and temporally and spatially far reaching that I would have ever imagined.
JL: You are presenting a story that teaches us about the big picture as well as the little picture. But I think that you’re here also making a kind of an implicit argument about how we approach and how we understand history and also our own lives, which is to say that you’re showing ways that all people in all families, and all communities have histories that intersect with broad historical trends.
I think it’s a powerful message of social history… one that we can talk about in methodological terms, but I think, has a perhaps even broader importance, which is to say that how can we understand how everyday people’s lives and everyday developments within their lives tell us about all sorts of historical events and developments, which take place around them and around us. I think that it tells us something about the historicity of our own lives, and about the recent past in ways a standard narrative history that focuses on the structural issues focuses on like you said, states, laws, etc, perhaps, doesn’t really force us to confront.
SAS: Yes, I think you can have access to these broad questions through seemingly myopic human details. The fact that a man who is a Jewish community leader in Thessaloniki, known as Salonica in the ’20s, distinguished a community leader who is second only to the chief rabbi in power. I’m speaking of Daout Effendi Levy, that he should write his son in Rio in the ’20s, begging for financial assistance because his suit is threadbare to an embarrassing degree. It is a kind of speck historical piece of dust that would be so easy to overlook. But in fact, lets us understand what that period felt like that pendulum between cultural vivacity and strength and vulnerability, really how its manifest on quite literally in the shirt on one’s back.
JL: I think the part of what you are presenting here is an implicit argument about the way in which all people and all families have histories which intersects with broader historical trends.
SAS: I would add to that that to me, it’s extremely important that women are driving the story forward as persistently and as actively as do men. Not always because they have left the same quantity of a paper trail. But always because I believe that their stories were of equal importance, and I wanted to flesh them out as richly as I could. Sometimes there were women who left more documentary residue, let’s say, than men. But sometimes, there were those who had a very light touch on the archive but whose stories I really had to attempt to inhabit, through a sparser paper trail, in order that the story of children, the story of women, the story of family life would be the engine of this book.
JL: It feels like the main character here is not even the people but the archive. Literally, the book is titled “family papers.” It places the collection of historical materials at the forefront. As you just mentioned, you came to this project in part from thinking, not just how did the people make a path through history, but how did files get from one place to another, and ultimately to a position where you could study them as a scholar. I just think it is so fascinating, your laser focus on this particular archive in a certain way, on the dispersion of the archives, and the family papers around the world, as a way into the dispersion of this family and of Ottoman Jews, Sephardi Jews, broadly speaking.
SAS: First of all, I should say it’s actually not really an “archive,” in a sense. I mean, the book is equally concerned with the history of a family over time and space and migration and interested in the letters that they exchanged and preserved and which is a point I’m making the book. The letters which I have come to understand keep them a family, even when other forces pulled them apart, especially the forces of distance and time and acculturation. That act of sending and receiving that the fibers of the paper are actually binding together this family.
As I said before, in a way, it’s not really an “archive.” I want to explain what I mean. Of course, these are issues dear to your heart because of your own research. The family papers, as I mentioned a moment ago, are mostly in family hands. They aren’t, as you said a moment ago, files. They are jumbles of treasured objects that the families themselves can no longer read or understand or contextualize. But they preserve quite faithfully, and supplement those many family collections of different sizes and shapes and natures.
I did need to turn to formal archives and formal files, 30 institutional archives to help me fill in holes, which without which I would never have had a full understanding of the family papers.
There’s something really important here, and that’s something is that until recently, the documents of the Sephardic past have been not been systematically collected, or preserved or pursued. There are not enough people who have the desire to read them who have the language skills to read them who have the context, understand them. Jewish archives, institutional archives, I would say are largely guilty for not respecting these materials. Therefore, there is much more in family hands for this cultural world. I would say the same is true of North African Jewish families and Middle Eastern Jewish families, much more as in family hands, astonishing collections than you would find of Ashkenazi Jewish families.
JL: I agree with everything you just said. I think people who have been writing about Sephardic Jewish history, and particularly I think about The Jews of Salonica, Devin Naar’s book, for instance. He has also reflected on these challenges of following the archives, following the papers of the group of peoples whose papers have not been systematically collected in the same way as German Jews.
SAS : The tide is turning, I would say, that has been the case.
JL: I think part of what I was trying to say before was not to say that the papers are the central character, but through the thread through which you trace everything, and you really emphasize so much the physicality, you talk a lot about the handwriting. At one point, you talked about a letter that was written kind of outside. Also a lot of photographs.
There’s so much to delve into in terms of thinking about the role of the family papers, which you place front and center, just in terms of the title. Again, it’s not just methodology, but it’s, I think it really important set of critical issues about history itself.
You talk about how that the members of these families don’t really understand their own papers, they look at a letter, they don’t speak the language. And I think it raises questions about why these objects were so important for them, that they held on to them, even though they couldn’t read them themselves. The role of historians and scholars is to help people understand the broader context of the histories that they themselves have been a part of. I think, for me when I think about why history matters, all sorts of big picture issues that one can talk about. But it’s also a question of how we can help people understand their own place in history and their own histories. And I think this is part of what you’re talking about here to some extent.
SAS: There are many things that I can see in these materials that the families that own them cannot see. But they mean something different to them that I had to struggle to understand. And it was very important to me to pursue the story and until the present day, and in some sense, the story is still unfolding for me. As we sit here right now, there is a gathering in Manchester of two branches of the extended Levi family, who have never met before but who met because of the book because of my research. I have introduced them, they’re coming together so they have a relationship to their past. They have memories. They remember people they remember, smells and sounds and the way people comport themselves. I’m thinking of someone who told me about how somebody held their body and they have memories that I could not pull from the paper. It was, in that sense, an instrumental partnership, where I can bring them a story, especially for the older members of the family, but not only their connection to the past also brought me closer to the story itself.
JL: I think it’s a very important point. But I want to go back to something I asked a moment ago, which is just—so why is it so important to them? Like you said, they held onto these things. They didn’t catalog them, they didn’t organize them or donate them to an institutional archive. But they held onto them. When you talk about why history matters—and we can talk about, again, the big picture issues—but also, clearly, this family’s own history mattered to themselves. So why do you think that things like family papers are so important and so valuable? And why does this matter?
SAS: Well, I really end the book with a reflection on this point. And the point that I reach, after following this family and their documentary and visual and material object trail, the conclusion I reach is that for them, family papers were an inheritance.
They were their culture. They were their history. They didn’t just tell the history. They were the threads that connected them to their past. And I end with that rumination partly because I think it presents a challenge for the present, at a moment when letters have become an endangered art. And, needless to say, we produce lots of information and lots of words and text, broadly defined, but it is a fundamentally different nature. The letters this family exchange over the course of a century, were letters written over hours and days and sometimes we weeks that took days and weeks and sometimes months to reach one another, that were sometimes stained with tears that they waited for that were incomplete, as are all human narratives.
So they were incredibly precious. And we must remember, too, that this is a family that was geographically separated from one another, and that suffered fantastical losses in the Holocaust, which was, of course, typical of the Salonica and Jewish community.
JL: I think part of what makes this story so powerful, besides all the things that we’ve discussed so far, is that this is just such a very personal story. You really use these papers in a particular way, emphasizing their physicality and bringing the reader into close contact, not just with these people and with the events, but with their perspective through them. I think this is especially true through your use of the photographs throughout the book, which is really just phenomenal. It gives a visceral sense of who these people were, and their relationship to each other.
For instance, you talk about the Olympics in Germany in 1936. You have a photo from Karsa, one of the members of this family who was there, who took a picture in from his place in the olympic stadium. And that literally is his point of view, that you’re allowing us as readers to embody, and to look through his eyes, in a way. When we think about it in these terms, how is it that looking at these kind of family papers, and telling this kind of story allows us to get a personal perspective on the past?
SAS: It strikes me that historians do use family papers quite a lot, but not necessarily in the fashion that I have chosen to here. I think, partly, the decision was not a decision about sources that produced the book that I produced, but a decision about narrative. I make the choice to organize the book chapter by chapter, person by person. There are, for the most part, characters—we follow them through their lives and they repeat. But there are several characters who appear only once, who command one chapter and then for specific reasons they disappear from the story.
What I mean to say is, I do not think that the source base necessarily dictated the tone. I think it was rather a process of shaping a narrative strategy of a desire to storytelling through people and to let individuals whom I found compelling, move us forward in time and move the drama along in a way that illuminates what it was like to experience all of these things to experience shifting legal regimes to experience the development of the passport state to experience the shifting boundaries in southeastern Europe over the course of twentieth century.
All of this, needless to say, and this is the kind of argument, of course, that women’s historians, historians of gender, and others have been saying for a very long time: we can flip the script and tell history through the story of individuals. We learn no less about these macro phenomenon. But what we do learn is a great deal more about how abstract processes were experienced. So what does it mean in terms of the clothing one wears, the emotions one feels, the way one speaks to a loved one? The objects that you preserve, or you lose, the very physical experience of migration of being the one who was left behind when all the siblings and cousins have left? It’s a different window.
JL: I think especially when we think about this book in connection with the earlier book, the translation of the memoir—in a certain way, they’re about the same thing, but they tell a very different kind of story. I don’t want to be too reductionist or too materialist about the relationship of the sources that we use and the histories that we tell, but I would argue that memoirs and papers tell very different kinds of stories, where they allow us to access history in very different kinds of ways. One might say that memoirs and autobiographies are self-constructed narratives about a person’s sense of their own life path. And they often leave things out on purpose, or they emphasize certain things to make a point about something. They want to tell a story that they want other people to know. Whereas, in a certain way, one can say that papers, archival materials, broadly defined, hold a lot of secrets, things that maybe they didn’t want people to know, but they’re still there. I think about in this particular instance, this the whole story of Vital, the family member who was a collaborator during the the period of the German occupation, in the Nazi regime. I think that part of what’s happening here also is that there’s just this very interesting contrast that one can say about the different kinds of stories that we can tell.
SAS: I’ll explain a bit about this rather horrific chapter of the family history. There is a descendant of Sa’adi Betsalel Ashkenazi a-Levi, the patriarch with whom the book begins, who is a collaborator of the Nazi occupiers and is ultimately arrested and tried by the Greek state after the war and becomes the only Jew in all of Europe to be executed for complicity with the Nazis at the the insistence of the state Greece. It’s a horrific episode to uncover.
I did not uncover that in the family documents. The only way I knew about the trial of Vital Hasson was because I found the trial transcript, which is located in two versions in two different locations; and there was yet a third version, which I knew once existed in an archive and is no longer accessible there. They can’t find it.
The trial transcripts supplemented by a lot of testimony tell a very complete story of the very grotesque excesses of this man, Vital Hasson, who serves as the head of the Jewish police of Salonica and abets the deportation of the Jews of Salonica, as well as many more crimes, including a great deal of sexual violence. The family papers, as I say, ellipsize this history, not because the people did not know it happened, but because they didn’t want to write it in letters, even to family members, who also knew it had happened.
It was only after discovering this history in other documents that I could reread the papers and understand that they were referencing him so obliquely and referencing conversations about him that they would have in person but they would not put in print. So letters lie. Letters conceal, letters deceive. But so does everything. So do documents of state, so do memoirs, so do any kinds of sources that we examine as historians.
This is obviously an emotionally explosive matter for the family. But I think at the very deepest level, the point remains true, that no matter the source that we are setting out to interrogate, however intimate or however, seemingly official, that fundamental challenge is always there of trying to tell as complete a story as we can, by suturing together, messy and diverse and contradictory, and elusive source space.
JL: I think a part of what you’re talking about here is methodological, right? And part of what you’re talking about here is about how we encounter and understand the past as historians and trying to pick apart the pieces and try to find what’s hidden might be because people didn’t want us to find out about it. They maybe perhaps wanted to conceal things, or maybe for any other reason. It’s just not accessible so directly through the sources, no matter what kind of sources those are. I think it brings us to the broader question of how you have written this book.
I Iove the the family tree that you have at the beginning of the book. It’s a really useful resource for readers because it’s kind of like a map. You’re reading through chapters and you’re thinking, who is this person again? Well, you can go look and see how they’re all related. But it also highlights the kind of work that you had to put into it: The footwork, the research, the many conversations, I’m sure many research trips all over the world to gain access to this history and to be able to parse it all together.
SAS: The family tree is by Andrea Ventura, an artist I worked with very closely. And it was apropo of what I just said about how sources are selective. The full family tree that I have spreads over eleven pages and couldn’t possibly be manifest in a book. So this is the book family papers view of the family history.
JL: As you talk about this horrific episode in the history, you have a relationship with these people with the historical figures through the people who are their descendants, in a way that I think that a lot of historians don’t necessarily think about. I’m thinking of my own research here. Looking at twentieth century figures, their families are still around. I’ve tried reaching out to some of them about access to things they might have, but they don’t have anything. The point being that I think that as scholars and as people who think about the past, probably speaking, even people who don’t do it professionally, we often kind of forget that some of them don’t have descendants, but most of them do. How is it that we can think about the relationship of the past that we are telling as historians with the present?
SAS: You said a moment ago that you write about characters of the twentieth century and they have descendants and they don’t have anything. So, I move forward from the assumption that families always retain traces of the past, whether it is documentary, or whether it is something more ghostly, personality traits, the physical traits, the inheritance, the emotional inheritance of their ancestors. So, I always believe there is something to find. And it is out of that persistence of going to seek people out who told me, they had nothing, they knew nothing… Many of the people I spoke to said they knew nothing, or they had nothing, and ever more I would be yielded with time. And I did indeed become really close with some of these family members. We correspond all the time, and it’s very moving. Now, just this very week that they are receiving the book and reading it and understanding their past and their present. And these are their words in different ways.
JL: We spoke a bit before about how you’ve written in different kinds of genres. Your focus for such a long time has been global history. And this is true whether we look to your very first book on the history of yiddish and Ladino press, whether we’re talking about the trade of ostrich feathers, in your book Plumes, which is really about global trade, commerce and industry. Here, you’re also taking a global perspective on history. How does looking at a family allow us to tell an important global history, even though it’s a small scale?
SAS: Well, my work has been peripatetic. I would say the throughline is an interest in crossing boundaries of state, of polities of geography. One of the formulations that I latched on to when I wrote Plumes was that I was interested in writing globally and thinking locally. And I think that too, has been a kind of driving agenda for me through a variety of diverse projects.
A family history takes that endeavor to some rather new extreme, because the local isn’t just a spatial local. It isn’t necessarily a communal or a state, local. It’s also an intimate local. The bookends that you are toggling between, the grandiose contexts that shape the lives of people of the twentieth century, and the most domestic personal details of what someone’s living room looks like or what they’re eating for breakfast, or what mood they’re in, when they write a letter to their sister, what have you. That movement back and forth between those registers is a dramatic one. But it is still, I think born of that desire that I have been struggling with through many projects and through many years to integrate histories, intimate and global and worldly.
JL: I think an important element here is just the nature of dispersion and diaspora. We’ve talked a little bit before about how this is true, both about the people also about the artifacts, the family papers themselves. I think that this is a really important element here, you’re not just comparing different places are talking about how they’re related to each other. You’re exploring the phenomenon of dispersion. This, of course, is people who are moving of their own volition and also they’re forced to in many cases, but if we talk about the history of the twentieth century, as a whole, the most important theme is understanding global dispersion. I think here you’re really bringing it forward in a very personal and human way.
SAS: Members of this family move for so many reasons. They leave home at times in shame and failure. At other times they leave home, a flush with opportunity and to seek greater opportunity. They leave as refugees, they leave as prisoners. They leave as opportunists.
But, as you say, movement becomes inextricable from their modern history, not only movement away, but visits back, the relationship between those who left and those who stayed, which I think actually came to realize in the course of writing this book is something that we perhaps haven’t, as your historians given, do heed to what is that experience of being the one who stays when so many people leave? And what is your own relationship to the others who are there with you and the others who have gone away? Yes, they are taking part in a modern Jewish wave of mass migration, they’re taking part in a twentieth century, endless cycle of displacement. But within the family, the stories of migration are really various. And that is also really intriguing to me to think about a family diaspora being shaped for all kinds of reasons.
JL: I think that part of what’s happening here as well. I want to say simultaneously how I love the way the book is organized. It also has some issues, right? Which is to say, you’re talking about many stories which are taking place, and you have really so successfully captured the diversity of this in the way the book is organized. It was fabulous, but it also creates the impression of a singular pathway, as you move from “Ottomans” to “Nationals,” to “Emigres,” to “Captives,” and then “Survivors,” and “Familiars” and “Descendants.” Now, I’m not just listing them to list them. It illustrates a kind of a trajectory, almost, from the Ottoman history to something else. It creates, I think, a very important sense, on the surface level, of the historical shifts and the diffusion over time. To what extent here are you telling a single story, when you look at the family as a whole? Or are you really bringing together many different stories that go in all different directions just as much as all the people went in all different directions?
SAS: Just to explain, those titles that you provide are section titles. And within each section, we have chapters under the name of individuals—Esther, Karsa, Daout Effendi, Sam, etc. I am telling an arc of a story. The book doesn’t lead with it’s arguments that have gone into its construction. I think when I step back from this family’s twentith century, it’s really their ninetenth and twentieth century, perhaps the most important fact beside the incredible depth stage of the Holocaust. The most important fact is that over time, they are becoming more and more distant from the cultural concentrate that had bound together the Judeo-Spanish diaspora in the Ottoman lands for centuries.
That is the defining cultural quality of their Sephardic-ness. Even though everywhere they go, they continue to be Sephardic Jews. Well, sometimes they’re not Jews and sometimes they’re not Sephardic Jews, but they continue to carry the history of Sephardi Jewry, which ebbs and flows. I don’t mean to say the story of loss, but it’s a story of the dilution of that once extent cultural solution. So yes, those headings do tell a broad arc of modern Sephardic history and I am trying to classify, even though the book is very individuated and it takes this sort of let’s call it classification is not meant to be apparent to any reader But it is still I think a mapping that that moves the scholarly conversation forward.
JL: I think alongside all of these things you are making a really important point about the nature of the papers, about the the family papers themselves. You reflect on this a little bit in the introduction, you have a really remarkable statement that concludes it. I’ll just read. It says, “what have we relinquished along with family papers?” I think that part of what you’re doing here is you’re contrasting a sense of how we don’t hold onto things anymore, while this family that did.
Perhaps this is a book that more people are going to read who are not professional historians. I think that on the one hand, they’re going to learn about the events themselves. They’re going to see it through a very personal perspective. But it’s also about a sense of history and a sense of the importance of history in their own place within history. So when you say, “what are we relinquished along with family papers?” What is the takeaway that you want people to gain in terms of understanding the importance of kind of like what we leave behind for history to find and have our own place within history?
SAS: Well, there is an obsession with family history today. Actually, genealogy is alive and kicking. DNA tests have infused it with new dimensions. I think today, people who are interested in their family histories are, for the most part gravitating to this question of bloodline, which of course is complex from the perspective of Jewish history, bloodline, and therefore as I say, in the book spit and a computer become your crucial tools to determining your past.
I’m really trying to make another point, which is that for so long, it was other things defined a family, especially a family that was geographically separated from one another, including letters that came to tie them together. I’m not a pessimist. I don’t think that we are jaundiced because we aren’t writing letters. I don’t think we lack in family culture because we aren’t writing letters. I don’t think that we have lost some cultural apex.
What I do think is that the nature of connections have shifted the words that we exchange today, families and people, friends and colleagues and strangers. They are many, but they are not measured in the way that letters were measured. So we have drifted from a meditative mode of engagement to a more centripetal one. Again, this isn’t meant to be a decline narrative. It’s an observation that the nature of the sources we hold dear has shifted and our time the energies the thought, the care that it takes to produce that conversation is simply different. So I think by looking to a different moment, when letter is not only mattered, but to this family in a way, where everything, we also gain some tools to assess where we are today. And whether the things we understand to bind us as individuals and as families and as communities and again, as networks of strangers, whether they are satisfying.
JL: You’ve talked about the ways in which this family history has mattered to the Levi family. And you’re also talking about the way in which family history matters to so many people today that the genealogy DNA testing whatever is a phenomenon.
When we think about history through the lens of this family history, how does it illustrate the reasons why history matters to all of us the way in which we build our own sense of self, from our sense of our family history from whatever things that we hold on to whether that’s an heirloom, or a set of letters, whatever that might be? I think that it raises important questions about why history matters, not just the historians but every person out there.
SAS: I would say that in this book, Family Papers, history matters to the people because it was their lives. It wasn’t an external reality. They are the engines of their twentieth century. They are the actors. They are shaping their history entirely, although they’re also prone to it in moments of vulnerability. So it teaches us that history is about relationships and people that historians have often ignored children, relationships between parents. And children or grandparents and children or cousins or that people are our agents of their time. So I think that this is a broad lesson that if we not only use the intimate papers of a family, but if we read them with a thirst to understand their world to inhabit their, their historical persona, we come away with a richer vision of the past.
