A History of the Grandparents I Never Had

A French historian chronicles his meticulous efforts to document the lives of his Polish Jewish grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust.

Ivan Jablonka’s grandparents’ lives ended long before his began: although Matès and Idesa Jablonka were his family, they were perfect strangers. When he set out to uncover their story, Jablonka had little to work with. Neither of them was the least bit famous, and they left little behind except their two orphaned children, a handful of letters, and a passport. Persecuted as communists in Poland, as refugees in France, and then as Jews under the Vichy regime, Matès and Idesa lived their short lives underground. They were overcome by the tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalinism, the mounting dangers in Europe during the 1930s, World War II, and the destruction of European Jews.

Jablonka’s challenge was, as a historian, to rigorously distance himself and yet, as family, to invest himself completely in their story. Imagined oppositions collapsed—between scholarly research and personal commitment, between established facts and the passion of the one recording them, between history and the art of storytelling. To write this book, Jablonka traveled to three continents; met the handful of survivors of his grandparents’ era, their descendants, and some of his far-flung cousins; and investigated twenty different archives. And in the process, he reflected on his own family and his responsibilities to his father, the orphaned son, and to his own children and the family wounds they all inherited.

A History of the Grandparents I Never Had cannot bring Matès and Idesa to life, but Jablonka succeeds in bringing them, as he soberly puts it, to light. The result is a gripping story, a profound reflection, and an extraordinary history.

Praise for A History of the Grandparents I Never Had

“A deeply mov­ing, poignant, and sad book, but one also filled with hope, light, and inspi­ra­tion.” —Jewish Book Council

“Ivan Jablonka is a tremendous writer—compassionate and searching, intimate and ambitious—and A History of the Grandparents I Never Had is a painstakingly researched and profoundly heartfelt book that teaches us new and necessary things about family, history and the extraordinary power of storytelling. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in years.” —Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

“An extraordinary book—at once a breathtaking work of historical investigation and a deeply personal meditation on the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge. By uncovering the traces left behind by people who literally vanished into thin air, Ivan Jablonka sheds new light on the Holocaust as well as on our own desire to grasp what cannot be grasped.” —Maurice Samuels, Yale University