"The year is 1941, and the woman is Lea Ypi's grandmother. Ypi saw the picture after it had been posted online by a stranger, gone viral across Albania, and attracted a stream of abuse. Morally degenerate was one comment."
"Leman's childhood is shaped by the uncertainty of those years: the trauma of wars just ended, economic decline, and blunt, brutal social engineering. As Ypi describes, millions were forcibly moved across newly drawn borders. Leman's nanny, one of Salonica's many Muslim Turks, is barely able to hold back tears as she is packed off to central Anatolia. It is suspenseful not least because Leman's adopted family is so close to power"
A viral black-and-white honeymoon photograph from 1941 sparked an inquiry into Leman Leskoviku, a young woman photographed in Cortina during Mussolini's Italy. Leman was born in Salonica in 1918 into a multilingual, Ottoman-service family facing collapse of empires and the upheaval of new nation-states. Her childhood endured wartime trauma, economic decline, and state-engineered population transfers that sent many neighbors away. A Muslim nanny was expelled to Anatolia. Leman's adopted family held proximity to power, and she navigated ambiguity and social pressures to chart her own path, leaving home at eighteen to escape an unwanted suitor.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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