Saturday, June 05, 2010

Tatiana

My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan. Having asserted that one eighth of her blood was Tartar and only seven eighths of it "ordinary Russian," with a panache that no one else could have pulled off she proceeded to drop a few names in the chronology of our lineage: Kublai Kahn, Tamerlane, and then the great Mogul monarch Babur, from whose favorite Kirghiz concubine my great grandmother was descended, and voilà!, our ancestry was established.

-Francine du Plessix Gray, Them

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