Message of Farewell
I was thrilled to discover a dated message on the back of the photograph, since no names appeared in my grandmother’s album. The message, written in Russian, was a wish to be remembered. “To my dear friend R. Kipnis with his wife, from G. and E. Frein.” Whether the friends were leaving in January 1906 before my grandparents, or whether they were bidding farewell to my grandparents when they left a few months later, I do not know. But conveyed in the words of remembrance was an affinity within a world of people who knew that a new world was coming.