Plagiarism is a hot topic at the moment in the Australian literary scene. Plagiarism is also the reason I have not written a blog post for a couple of months. In late April someone shared with me a Facebook post about my grandfather. Naturally I clicked on the link and
Some of the most difficult decisions I had to make in my life were made in the couple of months after my father died, when I had to sort through the house that he, my mother, my grandmother and I had lived in. If you have read through some of
I have a vague childhood memory of the evenings between Christmas on the 25December and Russian Christmas on the 7 January spent curled up on the sofa next to my mother, who was reading to me from The Nutcracker and The Mouse King. Opposite us was the Christmas tree we
What do a gold mine, a window display and a bookshop have to do with my mother? Well, in 1952, when my parents were living in Colorado Springs, my mother designed a window display for a bookshop which won her the third prize in a nationwide competition. In previous posts
I guess there are many family historians who find strange photographs or documents in the papers they have inherited. I definitely have many photographs which have no details recorded on them and I cannot place, such as the photos in this post from last week. But, amongst the many paper
I often wonder which books my maternal grandmother, Olga Woronoff (pictured above in 1976), read both as a teenager and a young woman. I know she loved books and reading; I have written about her attempts to devour books from a young age here. But which books did she enjoy?