In 2020, amid Covid and nation-wide protests in Belarus, I stumbled into old family files that my mother kept in a shoebox. They were our ‘inheritance.’ Now that all the grandparents were gone, the box contained what was left of their memories. I bought a pretty album and started completing it with my parents, organizing the pictures and recording the stories that my parents remembered. The more I learned in that exercise, the more questions I had. How did my grandparents end up in Siberia? Was it really the war that made my poetry-writing grandfather an orphan? Who was my other grandfather: an artist who died young, yes, but what else?At school, we learned history through the prism of what our teachers knew (and most importantly – didn’t know): they were educated in the Soviet Union and spoke its indoctrinated narrative. With my father considering himself Russian (even though he never lived in Russia), for the first twenty-five years of my life this is what I also thought of myself. In my first poetry book, my Muscovite editor wrote: “Lena Zinski considers herself a Russian poet and is trying to prove that with her work.” For years, I kept coming back to the phrase pondering on the question of where it is that I belong. Completing this album has helped me to grapple the complexities of my origin, all the words and faces I contained.