Greta Garbo, the glamorous Swedish American motion picture star of the 1920’s and 30s, was to be one of my mother’s first customers when she began work at Saks Fifth Avenue, the high end department store in New York City. It was the 1940s and, despite the outbreak of war,
My mother – she had many names over the years, and she grew into each of them elegantly and with style. Born Tatiana Pavlovna Woronoff on 9 November 1922 in Nice, France to Olga and Paul Woronoff, refugees from Russia, my mother was to live in various parts of France
Among the many postcards my mother and grandparents collected over the years is one which definitely speaks of Easter (pictured above). It is of a lady dressed colourfully, with a small red hat on her dark brown hair, an upturned collar and what looks like a green scarf tied around
The photo collage above shows various pictures of the strong women in my immediate family – my mother, and both my grandmothers. I do not have to look very far from these three women to find strength, courage and determination. Although from different backgrounds, both of my grandmothers were refugees,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote, “Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.” If I can make a judgement from this comment alone, my parents, especially my father, left me a very substantial way to remember them. The tub in the photo only holds
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