Family Memory: Seen through the (Auto)Biographical Prism of Aegeans

Abstract

This text has been conceived with the aim of, once again, articulate a topic that has been systematically repressed, both internally (personally, within me) and externally (within my/our cultural and social abode). Let us consider the /accords of European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that define the right of each individual and state to its/their own history, culture and tradition, i.e., the right to protect one’s own interests. Along those lines, is Macedonia allowed/afforded the right assured by this same principle? Since questions tied to memory do not necessarily refer to one’s past as they do to one’s current political issues. Kica B. Kolbe’s novelistic autobiography Aegeans (in the Macedonian original: Егејци), which contains also the biography of Efrosina Grezhova Klee, daughter-in-law to the famous Swiss painter Paul Klee, allows us the opportunity to become more than mere observers of all that negates us, while trying to explain who we are and what we are, namely, by placing value to all that is our history, culture and tradition, i.e., all that belongs to us.