Emigrant ancestors, in memory of memories

Abstract

Like many people, my knowledge and memories of my ancestors are becoming murkier as I get older. As a child, I delighted in the narratives of my forebears and how they arrived in Australia. However, I am losing sight of my ancestor’s displacement from their homelands and their journeys from Russia via Palestine in the late nineteenth century and from Russia via Tokyo and the United States in the twentieth century. I struggle to remember the sound and timbre of the voices of my grandparents and only know of the lives of my great grandparents through sepia-toned photographs. Now that my parents are no longer alive, I am not able to draw upon them to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of our family background and of relatives who left Tsarist Russia to flee pogroms and persecution. This article’s exploration of my family’s displacement from Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth century is inspired by the Russian writer, Maria Stepanova’s examination of the role that family archives, artefacts, photographs and memories have in shaping narratives of our relatives. My family’s migration story is also a memory amongst memories and, like Stepanova, I discuss photographs, artefacts, postcards and notes that comprise my family archive to make sense of the lives and the heritage of my ancestors.