A C. T U. A L. L Y

Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine at 5 a.m. CET this morning.   From everything I’ve read and seen, the invasion will most certainly succeed.   It is painfully clear that Ukraine, while brave and resolute, is no match for Russia’s military might.   No matter how much intelligence and cyber support is furnished, no matter how much military hardware is shipped, and no matter how much financial aid is made available to Ukraine, without military intervention by western democracies---that is, without troops on the ground---Ukraine cannot defend itself alone.   It will be defeated by Russia.   The West will not save it. The syntax, grammar, and vocabulary that will define Ukraine’s defeat have not yet been translated from Russian into Ukrainian, but the sense is already clear.   Whether Ukraine, like Crimea, is annexed by Russia; or like Belarus, becomes a Russian vassal state; or like Finland, is forced to play the pre-scripted role of a...

I recently assembled 15 photo albums from literally thousands of color prints my husband and I had amassed since the 1980s, as well as a handful of black and white prints left to us by our respective families and dating back to the 1930s.   Among the photos I inherited from my father, was a photo (above) of Cousin Andy Sova, Cousin Irene Sova, my father Steve Kalata, and Cousin Emil Sova taken in Garfield, New Jersey, in 1925.   The photo, like a Proustian madeleine, sent me to a file of raw genealogical research materials on my paternal grandparents my mother had compiled in the early 1990s, before her death in 1995.   I have her files here in Berlin. In those files I found a few notes, some funeral cards, and several documents about my father and his parents, as well as my own notes from research on my father’s family I’d done in 2016 through ancestry.com .   It was all ultimately pretty sketchy and inconclusive on who, what, where, and when, but there were a few...