My friend Jill Kandel has just released her second book, The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir (North Dakota State University Press). Her new book is a memoir that tracks a couple different aspects of Kandel’s life. It is about her cross-cultural marriage, Jill from North Dakota and Johan, her husband, from the Netherlands. It is about living in other foreign cultures, with Johan’s job taking them to live in Zambia and Indonesia. (If you’ve read my blog for awhile you may remember that I wrote a post about her first book, So Many Africas: Six Years in a Zambian Village.) It’s also about Jill’s difficult relationship with her father-in-law, Izaak, a “judgmental and arrogant” man who made a controversial final decision about his life. This is the thread that interested me the most.

Years after her father-in-law died, Jill set about trying to learn more about who he was and why. She spent years researching, traveling, talking to relatives and family friends. She uncovered the story of his life as a teen and young man as Nazi Germany took over the Netherlands and the years of recovery after Germany was defeated. She learned of her father-in-law’s heroism, his generosity of spirit in those dark days. Although the hurt she experienced from her father-in-law never completely went away, she came to see her father-in-law in a new light. She came “[t]o see him as human, both frail and strong, with foibles, faults, quirks, and grace.” She came to see her own judgments and arrogance in relation to him. Her story made me wonder about the unknown stories of people with whom I’ve had trouble relating. The stories of people whom I’ve judged. The stories of people I haven't paused to consider.

Just this last week my father and I have spent time thinking about and discussing a woman in our family ancestry about whom we only knew a bit of story. We started probing those few lines of story. We started wondering about and talking about what that story would have required of the woman. The shape of her life has now grown in substantial magnitude in my mind from what it was before. Whereas this woman had been little more than a name on our family tree, now she was a woman of great strength and bravery. We spent a couple hours; Jill spent years.

In the final pages of The Clean Daughter, Jill writes, “I’m learning to value mercy and to extend grace to both Izaak and myself.”