What do you know about your family history?

Family. Like an invisible beard of bees you wear when you enter every room, it buzzes and reshapes your appearance and occasionally stings. There is an episode early in Aziz Ansari's new Netflex series Master of None where, playing aspiring actor Dev, he tells his dad he is too busy to help him fix his iPad, and we follow his father's choleric stare to a flashback of his own childhood. Sitting on the kerb in 1950s India, playing with an abacus; an older boy, smashes it underfoot. 1980: landing in America to work as a doctor, the sight of him eating dinner with his wife in an empty hospital cafeteria. 1993: the proud joy as he presents his son with their first computer. And now here, today, his kid a first-generation American, unaware and selfish, his privilege the fact he doesn't have a story like his father's.

Later Ansari explained on Instagram that his parents played themselves. "My dad took off most of his vacation this year to act in Master of None," he wrote.

"Tonight he said: 'I liked acting, but I really just did it so I could spend more time with you.'" Aside from the heartswell at the rare public affection between man and son, I'm sure I wasn't the only one for whom it felt like the stories - both on screen and off - suck little pins into the swaddlings of my life. How little I know about my family's history before this. Russia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, then a cloudy leap to Manchester and Whitechapel, where the curtain rises and stories start.

On Monday my mum hauled a book on to the table and showed me evidence of her dad, Michael Landau. I say Michael - that was a name he gave himself, along with, at various points, Mayer, Ludwig - there's a mysterious initial, too: A. He gave himself a name, and on arriving in Leeds (maybe Newcastle, maybe Wales) around 1938, he gave himself a birthday, too

There is a photo of him, clearly posed, 30ish, smoking, where he looks like an academic Marlon Brando. The things I knew were about his parenting, his "wise and gentle love" - about the copy of the Female Eunuch he sent my mum, and his popularity in Manchester, his beautiful alto voice. But what of before? He lived on a farm in Czechoslovakia, but sometimes he called it a vineyard. And when he or his brothers were bad, they were sent to sleep with the cow, Roszy. On the journey to the UK he learned about opera and literature; he wrote a lot of letters. He and two brothers were living in Llandudno, where his parents visited when the brothers married who sisters. But war broke out, and his parents returned home quickly for the rest of their children.

They died, of course, taken by train to Thereisenstadt and then the gas chambers of Auschwitz. I googled Pictures of the camp looking for Landau features in the awkward portraits of families lined up in awkward lines, but saw nothing except that familiar of teeth-clenched doom, snow.

Growing up in Manchester, my mum's family spoke little of war. Like cancer or debt, this bit of history was silent. We read clippings from the Shields Gazette, a speech her dad made in the early 1940s: "When there are no more Jews to loot, there are always Poles, when there are no more there are Czechs, when there are no Czechs there are Dutchmen, and Belgians, and Englishmen, and Latin Americans..." As he was dying, aged 57, She remembers him comforting friends at his beside, telling them: "It's OK, because I should have died back then"

But that's all. On the phone to my uncle she had a horror moment, worrying what they'd forgotten. Except it's not that her memories have faded. It's that her dad created himself in Britain, where he'd decided his real life began. Besides, where would he have started, in the true story of him? The dates were hazy and change across documents, as do the names and his age. The things that remain are the foods he taught his children to enjoy, the long English words.

Over time these lives, especially immigrant lives, become shaved down to a point. But the sharp edge remains, poking into the family, and the family's family. Even if we don't know much, we know something - these stories were new to me, but they felt impossibly familiar. The bees - the various histories, the single memory about the cow - they buzz around us whether we choose to hear them or not