My grandmother’s photo album was filled with pictures of relatives I’d never met in real life: there was my great-grandmother in a tailored 1920s-style suit, my grandfather looking dapper in a midcentury fedora and trenchcoat, and various long-lost aunts and uncles in their sepia-toned holiday best. There were photos of strangers, too — and I was fascinated by these people no one seemed to know, who had somehow earned a permanent spot in our family album.
Take the photo above, for example. That’s my grandmother on the far left, posing with a group of friends from boarding school in 1936, in what is now Moldova. (Back then the area was a province of Romania.) “An obstacle in the path of forgetting,” one of the girls had written on the flipside. In a way, the photo has become just that.
I sometimes wonder where each of those girls ended up in life, and where their families are now. Within a few years, World War II would turn all of their worlds upside down as the Soviet Union occupied the region. Many Moldovans were deported to Siberia or Central Asia while others fled to neighboring Romania or elsewhere in Europe. Those who remained endured famine and other hardships. My grandmother’s family was deported by Soviet authorities in 1941 — her father to Siberia and her mother and sister to Kazakhstan — but she managed to escape to Romania, where she got married and started a family.
I was born decades later, in Bucharest, where I lived until I was nearly 12. I spent much of that time with my grandmother, who instilled in me a love of history that is rooted in her stories about people, places and ordinary moments. My grandmother’s anecdotes taught me that everyone and every thing has a story; years later, after I became a writer, I learned that every story rests on a scaffolding of structure, detail, plot and context.
This is where your story beings. Start with an outline or simply an anchor: a word, a photo, a memory. The rest is part of the journey.
~ Alice
