![]() The Latvians I met, all of whom spoke either English or Russian, were sympathetic, friendly, and kind. ![]() Many of them were disturbingly influenced by the Russian state media they were watching and reading (everyone had a VPN), but otherwise generous advising on everything from the best cheap health clinics to where to recycle plastic and glass. My neighbors in the housing complex I settled in - called Zolitude (Solitude) I discovered with some dismay - were almost all Russian, mostly from the older generation who had moved or been posted there during the Soviet period. It's easy to meet people when you have a friendly dog. I knew the routine: Find the grocery shop and pharmacy, figure out the taxi situation, make friends with the neighbors. It seemed at first like the kind of long business trip I used to do. When I left Moscow last March after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I expected to have a difficult time adjusting to living in Riga: it would be a new country, a new language - a new everything. There was clearly a family lesson I failed to learn. So, if you had told my grandparents that a century after they had fled European empires for better lives, their second-generation American, native English-speaking, Ivy League-educated granddaughter would flee a new version of the Russian Empire in the middle of the night with a suitcase and her dog - they wouldn’t have believed it. We were a poster family for the American Dream. My brother and I were two American kids who grew up on cartoons, piano lessons and baseball, and went off from a middle-class home to liberal arts colleges. They spoke English everywhere (except with their parents), baptized their two children in the Russian Orthodox Church but later converted to Presbyterianism. In the American world they were John and Stasia, an electrical engineer and a nurse. She had a daughter Anne and son John, who was my father.Īt home my parents were Ivan and Anastasia. They had four children, one of whom, Anastasia, was my mother.Īlexandra married a fellow Lemko émigré named Joseph. The children took little of value with them, but they did have a painted tin teapot, a bolt of hand-woven cloth and a vyshyvanka (Ukrainian embroidered shirt).įive years later Viktor married a young woman named Helen and opened a small store. ![]() Four years later, two teenage brothers, Viktor and Mikhail, left their village in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, and took a ship from Trieste to New York. Frame closes flat and is self standing.In 1909 two girls, fifteen-year-old Alexandra and her younger sister Fevronia, left an ethnic Lemko village in the Carpathian Mountains, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made their way to Bremen and boarded a ship to America. E-Z Bendable tabs on back for simple access to pictures.Overall outside frame dimensions 9"x14" when displayed open. Holds (2) FULL size Portrait 5x7 pictures, actual photo opening dimensions 4.5" x 6.5". ![]() 5"x7" Double Hinged Picture/Photo Frame ~ Portrait Layout ~ Laser Cut Great Grandkids Are Special Light/Medium Oak Veneer Insert Mats ~ Hardwood Frame.Includes 5x7 Jumbo hinged double frame, glass, two laser cut oak veneer insert mats, E-Z Bendable tabs to access photos, mantel/desktop ready to display. We custom make these frames and mats to fit your FULL SIZE 5x7 photos/pictures. Jumbo 5"x7" Double Hinged Great Grandkids Are Special Portrait Keepsake Picture Frame ~ Hardwood Frame with Two Laser Cut Light/Medium Oak Veneer Insert Mats.
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