Posts about both sides of my family
This morning I attended one of the Melbourne Writers Festival “Therapy Couch” sessions where author Cate Kennedy was in conversation with Krissy Kneen. Krissy, an award-winning writer whose books I have never read, is in the process of writing a memoir and Cate, whose books I have also never read,
I’m fighting off whatever it is which is worse than a cold but not as bad as flu, so this post might ramble a bit. It started last Friday with a sore throat, floored me on Saturday and today I’ve been feeling a bit more like myself, albeit constantly mopping
My mother’s family were not the only ones to have suffered the effects of history. My father’s family, who lived at the time in Courland, were also thrown into turmoil in the years after 1918. I find the history of that time in Courland, which is now Latvia, difficult to
The day I Googled my grandfather’s name in both it’s Russian form (Pavel Voronov) and in English (Paul Woronoff) I could never have predicted what I would discover. Apparently, my grandfather, who I knew as Dadu, was one of the love interests of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, daughter of the
These were the siblings of my grandmother. In this picture her eldest sister Clair and her brother Dima are shown performing a Russian dance. Cleopatra was called Clair as she detested her given name. She was, according to my grandmother, sensitive, kind, straightforward and truthful. She acted older than her
In this picture my maternal grandfather, Pavel Voronov (Paul Woronoff), is 13 years old. He is a naval cadet in Russia. Years later he would be an officer on Tsar Nicholas II’s imperial yacht, Standart and the love interest of Grand Duchess Olga, eldest daughter of the Tsar. I know