The past is another country, and all the more so when it actually transpires in another country.  When writing one’s own family history, the problem of identification with the subject matter seems trivial, but in fact building bridges between one’s own subjective pulsations and one’s family’s past is complicated by the fact that those pasts are set in places and times with which one has little familiarity. In this paper I raise the question of authorial identification with collective processes of the past, when one is writing one’s own family history.