Ted Seymour - Explorations of Truth
It’s quite powerful the pull that a land, a place can have on us, and how unabashedly quickly that can develop. When I left Ukraine by train a few weeks ago for a few days, 7 am departure towards Bulgaria, I was very strongly feeling the pull to stay, and the loss that comes from […]
I’m a little upset lately, in seeing life going on here in Ukraine without many Jews being present. This area used to have many, many Jews and now they are largely gone. As I mentioned in my last post, Khotyn used to have 24 synagogues and now there is barely one. 18,000 Jews reduced to […]
Life is good, and then it gets better, and then better yet, and then…. Hard to explain this one, but its how it feels. I remember years back, there used to be a popular expression, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” Talk about a miserable perspective. I think that what is happening for me […]
I returned again to Khotyn yesterday evening. I’m not exactly certain as to why, but perhaps that will unfold as I am here. The excuse I told myself in planning to come here was that I wanted to photograph more of the remaining Jewish people here in town. I’ve been itching to put together images […]
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 […]
(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 […]