‘When the soldiers came, we hid in the woods’ Alexandra Jones, 28, was born in Romania and came to England aged six, with her mother and English stepfather. Her grandmother, Elizabeta Moldovan, 80, was born in Bistrita, Romania.My grandmother was eight when the second world war passed through her village. With her father and brother fighting, soldiers swarming the village and bombs raining down, her mother decided to pack up their cow, pig, some clothes and polenta flour, and head for the nearby woods. They lived there, in the middle of a freezing autumn, for a month until the fighting subsided.“I wasn’t afraid,” my grandmother tells me. “I had a child’s bravado and, more than that, my mind was occupied by something else: a calf …
Stories
A Friendship With Mrs. Ivory
My maternal grandfather was a college professor. In the 1950's he decided to go to England for his sabbatical. He and my grandma went by sea (He never trusted airplanes, and had never flown!). This was my grandma's first trip overseas, and she was very excited and intrigued by everything.Once in England, while grandpa was involved with his research activities, grandma busied herself with craft classes. In one of them, she became good friends with an Englishwoman - a Mrs. Ivory.Even after my grandparents returned home to (then) Ceylon, grandma and Mrs. Ivory kept up a correspondence. They wrote back and forth several times a year, until the late 1970's. By that time Ceylon was Sri Lanka, and I was in the picture.Then, the letters …
“The Lovers”
Like many love stories, it started with a letter. Six years ago, Lauren Fleishman discovered a book next to her maternal grandfather’s bed. Inside were a series of love notes. He had written them to her grandmother during the Second World War. Her grandparents Joseph and Doris Kalish had met on a blind date and married in 1944 in Goldsboro, N.C. They were together 59 years. Other than the basics, Ms. Fleishman didn’t know their story well. But the passionate passages she read from the couple’s early days inspired her to share the enduring love stories of other couples. After all, any romance that lasts for more than 50 years is probably worth talking about. Ms. Fleishman has photographed couples who have been married for half a century …
Ghost on an Italian River
When my grandfather was a little boy in Italy, he and his father were walking home to their farm at night on a dark and lonely road. My great-grandfather was carrying something as they went (I never asked what it was he was carrying, but I always got the impression it was a sack of seed or flour).At one point the road crossed over a river, and as they walked across the bridge a dark stranger approached them. The stranger asked my great-grandfather for a match to light his pipe. As my great-grandfather put down the sack to retrieve the match from his pocket, my grandfather saw the stranger jump over the side of the bridge into the fast-moving river below.But they never heard a splash. When they looked over the side, they saw the …
Grandpa Mark’s Famous Professorship
AFTER lunch one summer with my grandmother, years ago at her Connecticut farmhouse, she asked me to retrieve an inconsequential item from a closet in my grandfather’s study, and something else caught my eye. At first it didn’t look like much: a set of three slim ledgers with marbleized covers, perhaps a journal of expenses or a record of household bills. But in it were pages and pages of names, methodically scribed in pen and ink. I had found a roster of my grandfather’s students over the more than 40 years he had taught at Columbia University, each name with a grade meticulously recorded next to it. At the top of each page was the year and course title — “The Narrative Art,” “The Poetry of Thomas Hardy,” “Literature Humanities,” …
“I Loved My Grandmother. But She Was a Nazi.”
My grandparents were Nazis. It took me until recently to be able to say — or write — this. I used to think of and refer to them as “ordinary Germans,” as if that was a distinct and morally neutral category. But like many “ordinary Germans,” they were members of the Nazi Party — they joined in 1937, before it was mandatory. My grandmother, who lived to be almost 100, was not, as I knew her, xenophobic or anti-Semitic; she did not seem temperamentally suited to hate. Understanding why and how this woman I knew and loved was swept up in a movement that became synonymous with evil has been, for me, a lifelong question. She and my grandfather grew up in a working-class suburb of industrial Dortmund, where unemployment was rife; it had been …