Memory speaks.

Fireman, Janet

Just about all of us wonder, at one time or another, about our origins. Who am IF What is my past? Where do I come from? How did I get here?

Some people make a particular point of searching for answers. Some resolve their questioning by recalling elders' conversations and oft-repeated stories from long ago, probing the smiling faces on old photos pulled out of disheveled boxes and overloaded scrapbooks, and pondering haunting phrases written in an elegant hand--or scratched hurriedly--in frayed letters and ragged diaries.

Such searchers construct their family history--the biography of a family over time--amassing social, economic, professional, and cultural morsels, erecting a structure for each life, and backfilling their forebears' context and color. A family's homes, workplaces, and travels; its successes and failures; its hard work and resilience; and also its shortcomings and failures are both quest and reward for grueling and exhilarating efforts.

Like moments recollected, places rebuilt, and events relived in Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant and artful autobiography, the three family memoirs in this issue show that the smallest details and the strongest emotions create the keenest memories. Each account is written by a highly accomplished, former California resident whose family moved to the Golden State seeking secure and salubrious surroundings as well as career and business opportunities. All three families thrived, encountering and achieving one or more facets of their California dreams and making their marks on the land.

In "'Boes in Facultate: The Short, Creative Life of Franz Rickaby," Gretchen Dykstra uncovers the story of her unknown grandfather, mined from letters, diaries, and other family treasures, declaring, "I fell in love with my grandfather during this process, happily saw him clearly in my own father, and sobbed as if I were present on the day he died." In "Love Among the Redwoods: The Story of Margaret and David Paddock," Daimar Paddock Robinson proclaims her mother's romance with San Francisco, from her journey across the Pacific in 1916, to the 1930s--when she was "embracing life with the zest of someone discovering the power of simply being alive, young, and happy in the freewheeling City by the Bay"--to the loving warmth of her husband and family. And in "'We Dye for the Stars': Los Angeles Remembered," Alan B. Sielen's "excavations of the mind" reveal his family's interactions with one another and with their carpet-dyeing business, "a working man's ballet punctuated with the dirt and grime of small industry," during Hollywood's golden age.

For these searchers--and perhaps for you--memory speaks.