The Perils of Memory

In the next few weeks I'm going to continue the exploration into the European side of the family by adding some sound files so you can hear my aunt and uncle, Guido and Silvia Roetter, playing the piano. This part of the story cannot be told without music because it is essential to it, it is the base on which it was built.

They also need a wikipedia page so that means I need to get people involved who knew them, who studied with them, and who can help edit this growing project that I haven't even started yet. Here is the page of one of their friends who also spoke and played at my uncle's memorial service. He is part of their story too as are hundreds of people who knew them, who were part of the music culture, all aspects of it, in both Las Vegas and Trieste.

For the last year I've been working on a book about their lives, but it is a slow going project because so many of the people who knew the stories are now gone. Many of their students are scattered all over the world. It is my hope that this blog and the wikipedia site will serve as a gathering place for information that can then be added to the book.

For now I'm writing short stories from each memory. It is my solution to the lack of precise dates and memories. Fiction maintains the integrity of the story without having to be exact in what is remembered and how the story was told.

As with many worthwhile projects, this one will take time to complete and because they had so many students and friends, it will be a project that grows throughout time.

So, if you knew my aunt and uncle, please do leave a comment and I'll see how I can weave it into the fabric of two very remarkable lives.

The Perils of Memory

Gathering Family Histories

I'm one of those people who never knew ordinary. Even the most degenerate of my ancestors had some shining quality that made them stand out among the rest--usually long enough to get singled out by those organizing such things as firing squads. I'm not saying that many of them didn't have it coming, but I also know that a lot of the fire in my political soul was birthed in the foolish and passionate idealism of those who shaped my genes.

So I'm doing what a lot of people do at my age. I'm trying to put together a family history of the European side of the family. It's proving far more difficult than I ever imagined because I'm running into the classic problems of memory, facts, how we remember because we have something at stake in the final memory, and facts as mutable and passionately birthed isms.

Tomorrow I'll post the first story about a concert my uncle gave at the end of the war in Trieste. He played Gershwin.

Gathering Family Histories