Ted Seymour - Explorations of Truth
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 […]
What an amazing evening. I had met a couple of men in their mid twenties in L’viv while hanging out at an outdoor café near the opera house and they had offered that I could visit them back in their home of Kolymiya further south in the Ukraine. When I realized it was well on […]
Yesterday I was wandering around L’viv, Ukraine and making the rounds of some of the historic churches here. Sometimes when I walk into a church I feel incredibly liberated, uplifted. It’s not easy to explain or understand exactly why, but it certainly happens. Today when walking through these churches I felt exhausted, down, sullened. As […]
(started a few days ago) Leaving Rainbow tomorrow and I really hate to leave. I’ve been having such a wonderful time here. Making so many friends and having wonderful experiences. Noticing that I’m having a little “Aunt Marie Syndrome.” Aunt Marie was the 80+ year old aunt of my ex Nancee who was often known […]