Travelling: New York (5)

[liv]

Sociable shabbat, part a

Friday evening, I was invited to dinner with a cousin. Now, my dad has upwards of thirty first cousins, but by far the coolest of them is B.

(To simplify things, I'm going to call her FCORB, short for 'first cousin once removed B' and describe everyone else in relation to her. If you think this is complicated, you should appreciate that I'm scarred by childhood experiences of several relatives lining up to look me up and down, conclude that I don't look like [my dad's side of the family], and then quiz me: so how am I related to you, then? And all Dad's female relatives look alike, even the ones who are only related by marriages. Anyway.)

FCORB lives in New York (obviously) with a husband, who is also a great guy, and and a son and daughter of about my age. I had met FCORB's daughter D only once previously; there have been rumours flying round since that time that I have a crush on her. Said rumours are entirely false, but anyway, she is lovely. And I'd never met FCORB's son G.

FCORB's nephew M and M's wife of a few months were also present; I hadn't met either of them before. FCORB's niece-by-marriage is originally from Hyderabad, and had offered to cook an Indian meal for everyone. Tasty, tasty Indian food; more on that when I get round to writing the post entitled 'food'. But I shall add nephew and niece-by-marriage (they are my second cousins, if you're keeping track) to the list of cool cousins. Oh, and FCORB's husband A has a very cool Arabic accent in his Hebrew. There's a perfectly good reason for this, but I had never heard him speak Hebrew before.

Anyway, we had a lovely, lovely evening. It's been too long since I had a proper family Friday night, lots of chatting about random subjects; it's so reassuring that FCORB's family are just as noisy at the dinner table as my own! And FCORB showed me some old photo albums, including pics of my grandmother (who isn't directly related to FCORB, but never mind) when she was my age. Many people have commented that she looked like me, but since I only knew her as an old woman I had never seen it. Actually there's a photo that could be a photo of me, it's quite amazing; my grandmother was rather darker than I am, but that doesn't show much in a b&w photo. I am strangely pleased to think that I take after her so much, not that I can really take credit for genetics, but anyway, I was fond of her.

The other guest was a friend of FCORB's from Liverpool, which means she also knew my Dad as he and B were inseperable as kids. FCORB's friend happened to mention that her mother had talked about Dad's family coming from the same town as her in the Ukraine. And I really pricked up my ears at this point, because Dad has always had a theory, based on linguistic evidence, that his family originally came from the Ukraine. Only we've never had any direct confirmation of this; in the immediate term the family reached England from the Pale of Settlement, somewhere in the region of modern day Latvia I think. So now I have the name of a village not far from Kiev (which apparently no longer exists) and the first real support for Dad's hypothesis. Which is pleasing.

Yay for excellent cousins!

Comments

[ajollypyruvate]

I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on your relatives and their relative coolness (cool relatives are always a bonus) but I do need to comment on your choice of music. Love!

[liv]

Ooh yes, one of my all-time favourite songs. It's all doseybat's fault in the first place for including it on the Spider says hello compilation she made for me let's-not-count-how-many years ago, which I've been listening to to get me through the boring bits of cell culture late at night.

And it's also rysmiel's fault for quoting the lyrics in a .sig, because I'd never entirely deciphered them before that. Words tend to fix a song in my head, particularly words as clever as those of Some kind of stranger.

Yay Sisters!

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Dad has always had a theory, based on linguistic evidence, that his family originally came from the Ukraine.

my mother's father grew up in Ukraine. i have always had very stormy strange frightening images of it.

apparently my great-grandfather was the agriculturist in charge of a load of wheat in a ukranian collective farm around 1930(1920?). and one day he looked at the fields and realised that the crop was going to fail that year. he also realised the party chiefs would make him the scapegoat, and he would be executed as a traitor to the communist cause. so in the dead of night he took my granddad (about 7 then) and they walked for miles without stopping, and all the next day, and granddad had to be carried most of the way. and then they reached a railway station, crossed most of russia and he managed to find a job somewhere much further north.. and sometime later my great-grandmother with her daughter came to join in too.

another thing my granddad likes to remember about ukraine are the fields of watermelons, and watermelons being the main food. i am still obsessed with watermelons because they are so special to him. he springs to life whenever somebody brings in a watermelon.

[liv]

That's a pretty amazing story. I think about the sum total of my knowledge about the country my ancestors potentially came from is:

• There's a city called Kiev there.
• There's generally a lot of agriculture.
• It's somewhere to the east of Russia.

Not very impressive really.

This is not the first time your ancestors have turned out to have something in common with mine. I wonder if out ancestors ever encountered eachother. Not very likely, I know, but it's interesting to speculate.

[midnightmelody.livejournal.com]

Came across the following in Science of the Discworld II and thought of you:

"The universe is so big, sir, that it obeys all possible laws," said Ponder. "For a given value of 'teapot'."

[liv]

Thanks! That's really very cool indeed. Maybe it is time for a new tea-related .sig.