People � How a black/Jewish/Polish/Russian/African woman found her roots: Yelena Khanga's family spans four generations on three continents
Author: admin | 30 June 2009 | Views: 1577
Yelena Khanga's family spans four generations on three continents
By Karima A. Haynes - Soul to Soul
Yelena Khanga recalls the day in I February 1991 when she ran her fingers through the rich soil of a farm once owned by her great-grandfather in Yazoo County, Miss.
At that moment, the Black American Russian Jewish African great-granddaughter of a former slave and a Polish rabbi knew in the deepest recesses of her soul that she was connected to something much larger than herself
"I always believed that the only relatives I had were my mother and my grandmother," 30-year-old Khanga says with a distinctly Russian accent. "But when I went to Mississippi and saw the land, I was like, 'Wow! We have roots. This is where we come from.' Now, I feel that I am somebody."
The trip to the Mississippi Delta was yet another personal discovery in Khanga's two-year quest to trace her unique family. The journey has taken the Russian journalist from the post-Civil War South to the Harlem nightclubs of the late 1920s; from a Soviet Union stymied by Stalin's brutal dictatorship to the heady, early days of glasnost; from Zanzibar, a tiny island off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa, to the bright lights of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Russian journalist Yelena Khanga pauses on Chicago's South Side (far left) during her recent journey into her family's past. She is the granddaughter of Oliver Golden, a Black American from Mississippi, and Bertha Bialek, a Polish Jewish immigrant, who moved to the Soviet Union in 1931.
By Karima A. Haynes - Soul to Soul
Yelena Khanga recalls the day in I February 1991 when she ran her fingers through the rich soil of a farm once owned by her great-grandfather in Yazoo County, Miss.
At that moment, the Black American Russian Jewish African great-granddaughter of a former slave and a Polish rabbi knew in the deepest recesses of her soul that she was connected to something much larger than herself
"I always believed that the only relatives I had were my mother and my grandmother," 30-year-old Khanga says with a distinctly Russian accent. "But when I went to Mississippi and saw the land, I was like, 'Wow! We have roots. This is where we come from.' Now, I feel that I am somebody."
The trip to the Mississippi Delta was yet another personal discovery in Khanga's two-year quest to trace her unique family. The journey has taken the Russian journalist from the post-Civil War South to the Harlem nightclubs of the late 1920s; from a Soviet Union stymied by Stalin's brutal dictatorship to the heady, early days of glasnost; from Zanzibar, a tiny island off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa, to the bright lights of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Russian journalist Yelena Khanga pauses on Chicago's South Side (far left) during her recent journey into her family's past. She is the granddaughter of Oliver Golden, a Black American from Mississippi, and Bertha Bialek, a Polish Jewish immigrant, who moved to the Soviet Union in 1931.