Ted Seymour - Explorations of Truth
(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 […]
Today I hired an interpreter and went off in search of some records which I believed to exist in the town I am in now, Kamyanets – Podilsky, records of the people in the town of Khotin back in the mid/late 1800s. We got to the archives, Iryna and I, only to be told that […]
I just read a Wikipedia article on Bessarabia, since no one seems to use the term anymore, yet if you had asked my grandfather, Bessarabia is where he would have claimed to have come from. It’s an area that has been populated since at least 2,000BC. at some point after Maurice left, Bessarabia became part […]
So now I’m off in search of my ancestry, more specifically to find the roots of my paternal grandfather Moise Zeldman who came from a town called Khotin (pronounced around here with more of an implied K rather than a firm one). The photograph you see to the left is one of my grandfather before […]