My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My family's from Eastern Europe.
My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.
I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.
My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.
The thing that interests me most about family history is the gap between the things we think we know about our families and the realities.
My family is from Russia and Poland. We never had that thing with the German Jews.
I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.
I grew up in a world that was clannish - old Tasmanian-Irish families with big extended families.
Few people know that I grew up in Germany and that my family still lives there.
Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.