ABSTRACT
Of all historians invited to write about how I ended up in the profession, I should have the fewest problems fulfilling the assignment: in 2005 I published a book on History, historians and autobiography, based on my reading of several hundred autobiographical books and essays by members of my own profession.1 Furthermore, I come from a family with a habit of autobiography: my father, his mother, and her father wrote about their lives.2 How could I improve on the opening line of my immigrant great-grandfather’s account of his childhood in Poland: ‘The first years of my life was useless’? (He suffered from paralysed legs.) Yet this double background, professional and personal, also creates obstacles to writing about myself. Other historians have turned to autobiographical writing as a welcome escape from the constraints of academic prose, but I know that first-person narrative can be just as demanding and difficult as scholarship. Looking at the personal stories crafted by my three generations of ancestors, all of whom I knew, I can also see that such creations are always controversial interventions in family dramas. Some relatives called my novelist grandmother Zelda Popkin’s autobiography ‘her greatest work of fiction’.
