“This remarkable account of the author’s Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory. After the death of an aunt, Stepanova examines family lore and heirlooms that hint at how the family largely survived the atrocities of the tsarist and Soviet eras. She probes gaps in her knowledge, and—drawing on artists and writers including Charlotte Salomon and Marina Tsvetaeva—considers how memories are perpetuated and manipulated.” —The New Yorker

“A remarkable work of the imagination—and, yes, memory.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“In Memory of Memory is a stunning and ambitious reckoning with the fragility of memory, the Jewish imperative to remember, and the unbridgeable chasm separating us from our ancestors.” —Ali Hassani, BOMB Magazine

“Stepanova’s finely crafted debut follows a woman’s lifelong efforts to better understand her ancestors, Russian Jews whose stories fascinated her as a child growing up in the Soviet Union.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Stepanova is] a writer who will likely be spoken about in the same breath as Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and Belarus’s Svetlana Alexievich in years to come… 2021 is the year of Stepanova.” —The Guardian

“[A] daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis… a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century.” —The New York Times

“The hybrid book that Ms. Stepanova has finally produced presents gleanings from her family archives alongside the labyrinthine narrative of her ‘search for the past,’ which she concedes is incomplete and in many ways unsuccessful. And amidst the personal artifacts are essay-like meditations on the tensions that inhere within any act of remembrance. The result is a rich, digressive, deeply introspective work.” —Wall Street Journal