a well-watered garden

Lysenko comes home

Sunday afternoon we had 4 students from the Music School (high-school level) over for an early Christmas dinner with music, games, and a reading of the Christmas story.

Here's a short clip of Angelina playing Grieg's Concerto in A Minor (I only recognized it because my brother Craig played it, or part of it, once for a recital long ago):

It's just too bad I didn't get the beginning - the famous 'dum, dum, da-dum-dum'.  She really sounded great!  But I only caught the calm parts in the middle.  The three on the floor in the foreground are building a Jenga tower  :)

Buried memories

It's been another long lull in writing, and it seems strange that I come back to the blog with such a bleak topic:  the Ukrainian Jewish Holocaust.   But last night, as we had small group (very small - one lady came - so with me and my roommate - that made three!  but you know, 'where two or three are gathered...')   Somehow the topic of the Jews came up (we were looking at OT prophecies related to the coming of the Messiah), and I noticed again how people tend to be a tad suspicious or jealous (at best) and downright anti-Semitic (at worst).  Then I got online this morning and one of the stories on the Ukraine RISU site (a web site dedicated to things religion-and-nation related) had to do with the way the murder of Jews during the War is virtually ignored in Ukraine.

For more, read here about a French priest who is trying to uncover the tragedies of the past...