LGMW MAGAZINE

This object is important because it is the only material memory left of my maternal grandmother. She never wore jewelry, not even a wedding band. Most likely, she didn’t have any jewelry to wear. I remember her in the same housedress for all occasions. My maternal grandparents lived their little lives in constant fear of something, a choked-up life of deprivation, one can say. The only sweet memory, the only luxury they had was Grandma’s piano that she played from time to tim

Lajos and Nina Kolozhvari There are two people on this picture thanks to whom I bear my remarkable surname: my grandfather, Lajos Kolozsvari, and my mother, Nina. When I first arrived in Budapest, I was stunned in front of a small church built in memory of those who were lost in the First World War. The bas-relief depicted a hussar falling from his horse, with God catching him like a son. I saw my grandfather in that hussar. His parents and sister never found out what had hap

This dish is important to me because it comes down through the years and has been one of those family ‘members’ that has always somehow been there. These ducks were transported from Nazi Germany to Australia, to England and then to me in France – we have many such objects, and even more photos, in our family - sometimes too many to cope with it feels… This dish sat for decades at Mumse and Michael’s, my paternal German Jewish grandparents’ home, where we would often go and ha

I have always loved trains. Sometimes they say that the genes have memory.  Maybe it is true as one of my ancestors was involved in engineering of railways in 1870s when he moved to live to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro city in the Eastern Ukraine, founded in 1776). He was a German, Baron Von Beck if my spelling is correct. The peculiarity of the industrial development of Yekaterinoslav province was its internationalism.  All this led to a boom in the region in the 1880s.  This

This is my grandfather, Tikhon Basilevsky, my mother’s father (1903–1982). In the photo on the left he is a young man, probably in his thirties. When the Second World War reached the USSR in 1941, he was 38 years old — an agronomist, the father of one son (who is now the renowned Professor Alex Basilevsky, an expert in planetary geology). The photograph on the right was taken on the very first day of the war for him, 22 July 1941, when he was drafted into the Red Army. I am r

I barely remember my grandmother being so carefree and radiant as on this photo (and I certainly can't remember her at that age).   She didn't come across as a sentimental person and didn't laugh very often, but this picture in its special frame was standing in her sideboard for many years, and I got it only after she had passed away in July 2015...   I remember the rare moments when I managed to make her smile, and in those moments I could recognize this childish playful exp

22nd of July, 2008, 03:11 AM …this is what’s written inside the photo album. I am 19 years old, packing my entire life into two suitcases. I have a one-way ticket to Israel, $600 saved, and a few brand-new jeans, because somehow, in my teenage eyes, those jeans were going to solve all my problems in a new country, a place where I didn’t know a single soul and didn’t speak a word of the language. And yet, instead of taking something practical, I chose to pack this huge, very h

Photo by Vlada Teper This fruit tastes like my childhood in Kishinev, Moldova. I remember being eight or younger, standing on Iskra Street with my grandmother, and trying to rescue an exploded persimmon. We laughed as the juice made our hands sticky and I gulped down the fruit before it became a puddle on the sidewalk. Recently, my parents collected their biggest persimmon harvest yet, from the tree they planted in Charleston (a portion of their harvest appears in the photo.)

My grandfather was a card cheater. I don’t know how honest or dishonest he really was. Did he make anyone poor? Maybe not. Maybe he only won from the rich and the crooked — I like to think so. I never met him. I only saw one photograph: a thin man with hollow cheeks, sitting in a hospital chair, dying of tuberculosis. My father looks exactly like him. And I look like my father. So, in a way, I look like my grandfather too. He died at fifty-five, already an old man. That gener

It stands on my dining room table. Tarnished silver-plated top, chunky heavy fluted glass below.  My grandmother’s sugar shaker, with a dusty crystalline residue of caster sugar that hasn’t been replaced since she died in 1984. Nearly 42 years since that January day, with pewter grey storm clouds and fleeting rainbows, when the impossible happened and she died.  Well, it wasn’t impossible, she was 91 years old after all.  But I just had never considered it possible that this