note books

“Andy, I’m leaving, I’m going home to Moscow.”  After many years in the U.S. Sasha Nova still spoke with that soft Russian sound, like a zephyr in summer swishing through a Birch forest, like the sound of her name. Sasha Nova.  “Andy, my father found me an apartment and a car and I’ll be in Red Square for May Day.” Sasha Nova left home when she turned twenty-one.  She’d fallen in love with a Russian woman ten years older who’d migrated to America and soon she would follow. She’s not really Russian, she’s Ukrainian, born on the Black Sea in Crimea in the capitol, Simferopol. She was an only child and her parents were intellectuals, art critics and university teachers versed in classical Russian history and art. They were not members of the Communist Party so walked a tightrope between intellectual honesty and supine Party politics. They were Russian realists. As a young girl, Sasha was encouraged to read widely and she developed a taste for all kinds of literature. She rea...

     After all, I was an aspiring   journalist. I used it as a tool to travel and see the world, to understand and get inside some questions that puzzled me from my earliest days. I became a freelancer. It felt better that way, challenged me in unexpected ways and took me to unexpected places.   I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima in East Melbourne, Australia. World War Two was drawing to a close and my  first faint memory is my mother holding me in her arms the day she left. And there’s a black and white picture of me and my baby brother in matching woolen overcoats, sitting huddled on my grandparent’s front stairs looking straight back into the lens of my father’s Leica camera. He was documenting the departure. It was many years before I saw my mother again. And then it went blank. _____ Her name was Miss Moon and she had a kind face and curling white hair and her voice was soft. She  lived on top of a mountain, the highes...