Ted Seymour - Explorations of Truth
This morning I went to the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, where a large massacre of Jews took place in September of 1941. I wasn’t quite sure why I was going, but I went anyway, open to whatever I might find. What I found profoundly surprised me. I found Beauty. The ravine is a lovely […]
Tomorrow, barring unforeseen emotional breakdowns or interventions, I am going to visit Babi Yar, a place in Kiev where over two days over 33,000 Jews were killed. Not gassed, but lined up in groups of 10 along the ravine to be shot, and then tumble in. Horrible, horrible, horrible event in human history, and somehow […]
Noticing all sorts of things about myself today. I wrote to my cousin Riva today, (my father’s cousin actually) and in the message I wrote that “travels seem to give my mind a chance to expand and gives me fuel for self exploration and discovery, and to feel the edges of my life that haven’t […]
To be fully awake to life is to be Joyful. I realized that while eating a meal with a dear friend I’ve made here in Europe. As we were about to start the meal, our last meal together for who knows how long, I was feeling many different things: Thankful for the time we’ve had […]
(A few thoughts from the Bulgarian Express, a 23 hour train ride from Chernivtsi, Ukraine to Sofia, Bulgaria) Romania is depressing. Simple as that. Everything seen from the train appears to be in slow degradation towards uselessness, or already there. I can only imagine that the outer ruin is either reflective of an inner hopelessness, […]
Once again ancestral grief rears it’s pain again through me. If you’ll recall from a recent post about bringing some of my mother’s ashes to rest with her first husband Joe at a military graveyard in France, I discovered then how much grief I can carry for something that I have not personally suffered, but […]
This Precious Meal Can I make you some fried eggs? Simple words, a simple gesture really. I eat the words, the offer, more hungrily than the eggs, Though I languor over them to slow this precious meal, For it isn’t this aging Jewish woman, Holocaust survivor from and in my grandfather’s home town of Khotyn […]
So here I am back at the shtetl. Khotyn, Ukraine, home of my grandfather and his family and who knows how many generations before him. We arrived in Khotyn, interpreter, driver and I, and knocked on the door of Srul (Alexander) and Fonya Weinstein, 2 of the remaining 29 jews in Khotin. Srul is the […]