family history

A Family History Like Too Many Others - Daniel Mendelsohn, Op-Ed (Feb 18th NYTimes)

As with any genre, such letters had their characteristic tropes. There's the uneasy opening, hovering between an emphasis on the writers desperate situation and an awkward acknowledgement that his relationship to the addressee is perhaps not of recent vintage. To an old college friend Otto Frank wrote, " I would not ask if conditons here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse.....Perhaps you remember that we have two girls." A similiar agonizing tension colors the letters on my great-uncle, Samuel Jager. "You'll be wondering...why I'm writing to you after so many years," one of then begins, although he soon gives reason in this and many other letters: "From reading the papers you know a little about what the Jews are going through here, but what you know is just one-hundredth of it."