Apparently my grandmother kept a diary. It was brought to my attention last week when a friend, who speaks Russian, was kind enough to look through the documents I have. With her help I have been able to label and sort the various papers. Now I know what I should
Fear lurked in the background of my childhood. It was never named when I was a child but, as I grew older, I learnt its name was Communism. Both sides of my family feared Communists and especially Bolsheviks, with good reason. In her book, Upheaval, my grandmother wrote of traumatic
If I could turn back time… I would go back to the time just before I was born. Those couple of months just before the birth of their first, and ultimately only, child when my parents were presumably discussing how they would bring me up. I would try to infiltrate
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 remember a friend once telling me that, after the deaths of her parents, she found only an empty envelope in their safety deposit box. I found rubber bands and paper clips in the safety deposit box my parents had, although I admit that wasn’t all that was in there.
These two photographs are amongst countless I have inherited from my mother’s side of the family. So many of them are not identified at all. Luckily my mother wrote on the back of these two, unluckily she only gives half the story. The photograph on the left has the least