Q&A with Sasha Colby

 

 

 

Sasha Colby is the author of the new book The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance. Her other books include Staging Modernist Lives. She is the director of Simon Fraser University's Graduate Liberal Studies program, and she lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

 

Q: Why did you decide to write The Matroyshka Memoirs, and how was the book's title chosen?

A: A matryoshka doll, also known as a nesting doll, is one of those wooden sets where one brightly painted figure inhabits the next. You can see just one, or you can line them up, each doll slightly smaller than the last.

 

In addition to the fact that my grandmother always had a matryoshka in her house, it seemed like the right metaphor for an intergenerational story, especially one where secrets are gradually revealed.

 

The “decision” to write it was driven by the same impulse I have unpacking one of these dolls - you glimpse something you haven’t seen before and are compelled to find out what else is in there.

Q: How much did you know about your grandmother’s life history as you were growing up, and at what point did you decide to research her story?

A: We essentially grew up with the Cliffs Notes version of my grandmother’s story - that she had been swept up in a Nazi raid on her Ukrainian village, worked as a forced labourer in the Leica camera factory in Germany, been selected to work as a domestic in the Leitz family mansion by the factory heiress, Elsie Kühn-Leitz, and that Elsie Kühn-Leitz had somehow “saved” her by enabling her journey to Canada after the war.

 

The details - and the most dramatic revelations - really came as she neared her 90th birthday and began to tell us more. Her late-in-life willingness to speak the unspoken - and the resulting research that allowed me to ask more specific questions - each really fed the other.

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

A: I did a lot of reading about Hitler’s forced labour campaign that brought over 12 million people to Gemany for labour purposes, about the advent of portable photography via the invention of small negatives to make larger pictures, and the Leitz family’s smuggling of Wetzlar’s Jewish community out of Germany by sending people to work for foreign branches of the company.

 

There were lots of surprises, lots of things I didn’t know or hadn’t fully understood.

 

I think the most surprising dimension was how one family’s story - something I always thought of as family mythology - was deeply caught up in the tumultuous history of the 20th century: Stalinism, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War, the Yalta Agreement.

 

All had profound implications on the lives of millions of individuals, implications that continue to be felt in families worldwide, including mine.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book, and do you see parallels with today's events?

A: The parallels between our own moment and 1930s Germany were really laid bare by the research, particularly inflation, dwindling living standards, a certain fragmentation and lack of focus on the moderate left, and the way this led to public anger and the rise of strongman leaders.

 

The similarities - both in broad strokes and small details - are deeply startling.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: The Leica story continues! I am currently working on a project about French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: My name on the book probably belies how collaborative the process really was. The book describes how I harvested stories from my mother and grandmother. My editor, Susan Renouf, is a legend in the field and really grasped the heart of the story and where the focus should be.

 

I also benefited from the help of my German-speaking research assistant, Kerstin Stuerzbecher, who made contact with the Wetzlar Historical Society and the City of Wetzlar Historical Archives.

 

Both of these organizations supplied photos and we were put into contact with Oliver Nass, Elsie Kühn-Leitz’s grandson, who read the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback and history from the Leitz family’s perspective and still more photos.

 

My daughter, mother, and I met with Oliver and his family in Paris in June. It was a great evening 80 years after our grandmothers met under the most difficult of circumstances. I can only imagine how happy it would have made them to see us laughing over tiramisu.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb