Romania September 2019
In the summer of 2019 there was a beautiful baby party for the first of the next generation, my great-niece Susanna, Emine and my nephew Andrew’s daughter, at my sister’s house in France. There was a great game of match the baby photo to the adult, there were many amazing feasts. The most remarkable was the meal was the one Emine’s parents who live in Crimea, made for all of us. As I sat at the long table filled with our family members anyone might be startled by the combination—Emine’s family is from Crimea, my brother-in-law’s family, who can trace their French and English ancestry back many generations in the United States, originally from Ohio, my sister and her husband, now French citizens, my family from Canada and my parents, the only great-grandparents present, from New York. Fast forward to the summer of 2022, and I then found myself at my son's wedding to his Indonesian wife, Putri. As I write, it is a sunny afternoon, and I imagine the refraction of light as a prism, the welcome essence of the shifting shape of my immediate family.
It was the summer of 2019, however, and the world felt a little safer than it does now; I was feeling like I had already made it across the Atlantic to the family party and I decided on an impulse to travel to Iasi. I thought I might find traces of Paulina’s family. This visit to Romania was to finally discover and unravel the missing stories. Yet still what I found were stories hidden between gaps and a remaining silence. Let me explain.
I learned a few words in Romanian, and set out to find my grandmother’s birth certificate. The backs of the photographs mentioned different places—Iași, Bucharest, Piatra Neamt. I decided to visit each of the places noted on the backs of the photographs—Bucharest, Iași, Piatra Neamt.
Looking carefully at the verso of Traian Weisman's photographs depicted above, you can see they were taken in Bucharest, and one was signed P. Neamt.