The archive, indispensable to the historian, may prove an unreliable ally of the memoirist. This is the case in Alexander Stille’s sprawling effort to comprehend, catalog, and memorialize three generations—including his own—of his family. The author of Benevolence and Betrayal, the most readable comprehensive history of Italy’s Jews under fascism, as well as three other books, and numerous writings on the discontents of present day Italy, Stille here sets out “to regard my parents and their closest relations a bit like figures I had encountered in the archives doing historical research.” The method implies and requires a certain distance, as though he must first forget that these “figures” were an intensely intimate part of his daily life and developing mind years before they took on “historical” meaning through the documents they left behind.

Today, a memoirist is someone who understands the perpetually disputed nature of the past rather than the past itself.

In many respects, Stille’s family made this paradoxical effort of estrangement too easy for him. They preserved letters, photographs, libraries, collections of furniture, published articles, and, in the case, of his father’s sister, Stille’s Aunt Lally, an entire apartment entirely given over to the indiscriminately accumulated materials of a nearly seventy-year polyglot and refugee existence—from a letter penned on behalf of Stille’s Latvian-born, Jewish grandfather by the Italian fascist author Gabriele D’Annunzio to her Korean grocery store receipts—all piled in what Stille, who still seems overwhelmed as he recalls it, redundantly refers to as “a labyrinthine maze” of junk.

Stille’s mother, Elizabeth Bogert, a descendant of Anglo-German WASPs, was more orderly, a collector more than a hoarder, of men, mainly, but also Marcel Breuer design, contemporary art, and experience, generally. He unearths, in their Berkshire country house attic, a trove of letters she sent to her parents along with letters from her various former boyfriends, even a copy of a private investigator report on her first husband. (The report was commissioned prior to their marriage by her law professor father.) This archive is further enhanced by his parents’ love letters during their whirlwind courtship, reprinted here almost in their entirety, and then an epistolary record of their often fractious, even violent marriage. These are supplemented by what Stille calls “interviews” conducted with his mother as she was dying from a brain tumor in 1992. Faced with these riches of embarrassment, what historian or journalist could resist publishing them, and what loving son, grandson, and nephew could avoid feeling guilty, or ashamed for having done so.

Stille has some awareness of this dilemma, and he’s attempted to resolve it by writing in two different narrative voices. Sometimes they share paragraphs and chapters, but more often and for long stretches, like his parents, they end up in separate beds. In one mode, he aims for a straightforward bourgeois biography, somewhat in the manner of Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives, of both “the boring old Midwestern Wasp half,” as his mother puts it, and what she also calls “the exotic Italian-Jewish.” In the other, more memoiristic mode, he haltingly becomes aware that his archive fever is a particular inheritance of his family’s varied urges to collect and contain.

It is easy to see why this indefatigable journalist was drawn to the story of his own family. His father, born Michael Kamenetzki, in Moscow, grew up in Rome, where his parents emigrated after the Bolshevik Revolution. The whole family managed to escape to America, via Lisbon, in 1941, defeating U.S. immigration quotas imposed on Polish and Russian Jews by claiming Latvian ancestry. After serving as a propagandist and “psy-ops” officer in the U.S. Army, Michael resumed his career as journalist for various Italian newspapers. He wrote under the pen name Ugo Stille, “Hugo Silence,” originally a portmanteau byline shared with a friend killed while participating in anti-Fascist resistance. Later he would adopt the “Stille” as his legal name after marrying Elizabeth, in part because it smoothed over both their ambivalences about his Ashkenazi Jewishness. Based in New York as a foreign correspondent, Michael Stille became part of a Europhile, intellectual milieu that included the Partisan Review crowd: Mary McCarthy, MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, and fellow émigrés like Nicolo Chiaromonte and the artists Saul Steinberg and Arshile Gorky. This was how he came to be at a party where he met the married but available Elizabeth and they initiated what his son calls “a marrying—or clash—of civilizations.”