Olenka frenkiel biography examples

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Why write an autobiography? Either one thinks of oneself as someone whose life is of such importance that it should be preserved in a subjective version to ensure that others do not present it otherwise - or, as in my case, that one has lived through extraordinary times and events and witnessed unusual happenings, worth recording from that first person singular point of view; or perhaps that one has experienced strange things in strange times and to try to understand them better.

When I have told people what I saw or what had happened to me, my listeners doubted my stories, dismissing them as highly coloured versions of otherwise prosaic events.

I often wondered how true are my memories?

Olenka frenkiel biography examples

did they really happen? So, I have set out to describe them in a simple way just as the historian Ranke once put it – “what actually happened”. To limit myself to facts rather than to attitudes; to description rather than to interpretation.

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