Monthly Archives: June 2005

Mother and child

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divingintothepast.jpg

Mother and child
Mother and child, a photo taken in Bolivia around 1975 .
I have been busy trying to carry out one of my projects, which is to digitize a bunch of slides that Roland, my husband, and myself took while we were traveling around the world.
From 1973 to 1984, every year, we packed our rucksack and went for trips to Asia, Africa and South America. We took lots of photographs but watching slides was too much work somehow, so beyond watching, ordering and classifying them right after the trip, we hardly ever watched them. I don’t even think my daughter has seen them.
So lately, I started scanning my slides, a time-consuming job!
I have uploaded the fifty slides that we kept from our trip to Bolivia and Ecuador to flickr and you can watch the slideshow here. The slides from Peru seem to have disappeared, maybe I’ll find them later.
One thing I find frustrating is the fact that I seem to remember the photos, but not where they were taken or sometimes why I took them and kept them.

Happy days

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divingintothepast.jpg

Guest poster, my cousin Léo.
His father, Victor, married Ruth Rathaus, my aunt whose parents and eldest sister are proudly posing in this photo, outside their Leipzig (Germany) shop circa 1920.
Léo reports

Rathaus family, From left to right, Friedel Rathaus, my aunt,
Moses Rathaus, my grandfather, Rifka née Schmarak, my grandmother.
The window reads
Downtown Ironing – Clothes Repair Shop – Men and Women’s Cloakroom – Phone 10270

Family background
Originally from Tarnopol/Ternopol, Ukraine, Opa (Grandpa) and Oma (Grandma) were “Galizianer�?. They came from Galicia, that south-eastern region of Poland that once belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. This is why Opa served, much to his discontent, as level-crossing guard in the Austrian army during World War I.
Opa and Oma’s story
In 1933 when Hitler “urged�? foreign Jews to leave, they fled to France leaving all their belongings behind, but two cases. As refugees they rented a miserable apartment at 16 rue Pascal in the 13th arrondissement (district) of Paris. When France was invaded in 1940, a neighbor of theirs, a truck driver, offered to drive them as far down south as possible. This part of French history is known as “l’exode�? (the exodus). When they found themselves blocked with thousands of other refugees, relief organizations dispatched them into villages.
They were welcomed at Le Pescher, a remote village of Corrèze, in central France, which happened to become one of the strongholds of French resistance.
Until the end of the war, they lived there, under false identities with forged documents made out for them. They even received refugee allowances. Above all they enjoyed the protection and loving care of the village “mayor�? and of all the villagers.
After the war they returned to Paris, but in 1961 my Oma managed to see her lifelong dream come true and they emigrated to the United States to live in Forest Hills, New York, next to their second daughter Henni. Alas! Oma soon died. In 1965, Opa, who was homesick about France, had come to visit his youngest daughter, Ruth (my mother) in Deauville. I was an exchange student in the States at the time and Opa wanted to get back to NYC for Easter so that we could meet up over the school vacation. He never made it: he had a stroke, and died at Caen University Hospital.
As he wanted to lie by his wife’s side, his body was flown back to NYC and a cemetery in Queens was Moses and Rifka’s terminus.

Nature

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Nature, a poem by Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

A    sepal, petal, and a thorn
Upon a common summer’s morn,
A flash of dew, a bee or two,
A breeze
A caper in the trees,

– And I’m a rose!.
This photo was taken a week ago or so, at the Luxembourg gardens in Paris. And Emily Dickinson’s poem is so refreshing!

D OUOSVAVV M

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D OUOSVAVV M, originally uploaded by richardr.
This photo on Flickr puzzled me. I had never heard of the Shepherd’s monument, or about the fact that it had unbroken code on it. So I googled it and got the following information from BBC News

An inscription etched on a marble tablet at a stately home could be a hidden message from an 18th Century Christian sect, code-breakers say. …
The code has baffled great minds for years and had been rumoured to point to the location of the Holy Grail.
Experts now think the code is a message from a sect called the Priory of Sion.
The encoded ornament is located in the grounds of the ancestral home of the Earls of Lichfield.

Templar History states

This monument, based on the famous painting Shepherds of Arcadia by Nicholas Poussin, features an inscription at its base that has riddled people since its construction in 1748.
What is interesting is that the monument depicts a mirror image of Possin’s painting. The reason for which has never been understood, but if the code breakers are successful, we may just understand not only the reversed image, but the meaning behind the letters, “D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.” found beneath the carving.
The National Codes Centre at Bletchley Park have been brought in to attempt to do what nobody has been able to do in 256 years. Bletchley Park were instrumental in cracking the enigma code during the Second World War, which enabled the Allies to launch the D-Day Invasion 60 years ago.

A real story, more mysterious than a lot of murder mystery novels…

Dreams

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Feet, originally uploaded by Schemie Radge.
Dreams, a poem by Langston Hughes

H   old fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

I love this photo taken by Schemie Radge and discovered on flickr. For some reason, it reminded me of Langston Hughes’s poem Dreams