A book is making waves, a new genre has been invented: the metaroman. Love stories and travel reports, reflections on photography, memory, and trauma merge into a compelling essayistic narrative through the author's voice. At the center is an extensive Jewish-Russian-European family of doctors, architects, librarians, accountants, and engineers, who wanted to lead a quiet, unremarkable life in uncivilized, violence-ridden times. Maria Stepanova traverses a space of memory, where the lines of private life sharply trace the edges of the landscape of epochs. She examines items from the library of another, vanished visual culture, left behind by people who made little effort to stand out: For everyone else, the family consisted of participants in history; for me, only of their subordinates.