Pavel's letters

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"Monika Maron, born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, eventually despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents - her grandfather a convert from Judaism, her mother from Catholicism - she questions her mother, whose selective, often censorious memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' story and its horrifying denouement in Polish exile. Asking, probing and haranguing the reluctant Hella to talk about her own parents, Maron unearths their heroic story from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters, reconstructing her family's powerful story in a memoir that has the force of a great novel."--BOOK JACKET