"My grandmother had only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes on weekends my parents would drive down from Iron Range to Duluth and drop me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe.
The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My grandmother's voice possessed a haunting accent—face always set in a half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn't been easy. She'd come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.
Originally, she'd come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea—the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine—the one that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather's parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers" (Bob Dylan - Chronicles Volume One)
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