I admit, I never thought I would find anything written by my grandfather which included the Russian Imperial Family. After all, it was my grandmother, Olga Woronoff, formally Countess Kleinmichel, who was known to be the writer in the family. She had written her memoir, Upheaval, detailing her life in
Booth Tarkington, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1919 and 1922, wrote the Introduction to the original edition of my grandmother’s memoir, Upheaval. Upheaval was originally published in 1932, some four years after my grandparents migrated to America. I often wondered how it was that my grandmother
If you have ever wondered why I wanted to update my grandmother’s memoir, this post will explain all. When my father died in 2012 I inherited many documents, letters and photographs which were relevant to both sides of my family. For a couple of years they languished in boxes in
Several years ago I reread the book my grandmother had written in the early 1930’s, her memoir Upheaval. I have always been curious. From the moment I could formulate a question, I wanted to know “why”; why some things happened and others didn’t, why people made the decisions they made,
As some of you might know, or remember, I have been working on updating my grandmother’s memoir Upheaval to include explanatory notes and her diary from 1919. Upheaval describes my grandmother, Olga Woronoff’s life as a young aristocrat in Imperial Russia and details the impact of the Russian Revolution and
For the most part it has been easy for me to find family documents. I am lucky to have inherited birth certificates, school reports, identification documents and death certificates, amongst others, for both sides of my family. Documents I haven’t inherited, I have found online. The difficult part is trying