Blogs which describe moments in my life, or the lives of my family.
Once again I have found something interesting in my quest to sort through the paperwork and documents I inherited from my parents. The picture above shows the front and back of a small card, around the size of a business card, I found tucked away in some of my father’s
Is writing in the blood? Are writers born and not made? Can the desire, if not the talent, for writing be inherited? I write, my parents wrote – my mother authored a couple of non-fiction books – and my maternal grandmother was a published author of a memoir, Upheaval. I
I love Berlin. I wish I could say, like JFK did, “ich bin ein Berliner”. Except I guess I would have to say “ich bin eine Berlinerin” as I am female – but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Perhaps a German speaker could enlighten me on
Despite the common assumption that only children are spoilt, I cannot remember that being the case. I was definitely lucky though. As the only child of a Baltic German father and a Russian mother, I celebrated both birthday and name day, Christmas on 25th December and Orthodox Christmas on 7th
I am lucky that despite war, revolution and immigration, old photographs from my maternal family have survived. I do not know how some of these photos made it through the Russian Revolution. I do not know who grabbed them and threw them in their luggage as they were fleeing Russia.
I was excited when I found several books at my local library on the Russian Revolution, including a few memoirs. I recently began to write a historical novel, set during the Russian Revolution and loosely based on the last couple of years of my maternal grandmother’s life. As some of