Albert Votaw—for whom I am named—was born in 1925 in Media, Pennsylvania, the first son of my great-grandmother, who had immigrated from Russia, and my great-grandfather, Ernest, whose Pennsylvania Quaker family had been in the United States since the late 1600s. From his upbringing he inherited a rock-ribbed Quaker pacifism, which led him to become a conscientious objector as a young man during World War II. His service to our country was to be a medical test subject rather than carrying arms against his religious beliefs.
After the war, Albert began a career in international aid. This was a heady period for America and our citizens abroad; our expats were helping to rebuild war-ravaged Europe and build what was then known as the developing world. With the Marshall Plan he set off to post-war France, and it was there that he met my grandmother, Estera Votaw, an exotic and charming young Hungarian who had survived the Holocaust and was now studying at the Sorbonne. Despite her experiences losing her parents and much of her extended family to the Nazis, Eszti had an irrepressible spark and a cosmopolitan flair. They married in Chicago in 1953.
Albert and Eszti would go on to have four daughters—my mother their second—but that did not stop them from adventuring. In 1966, Albert was posted to the Ivory Coast as a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) official, where my grandparents spent nearly 15 years. Then it was off to Tunisia, back to Washington, D.C., and then to Bangkok in 1981. My grandparents were an upbeat and flamboyant couple, collecting West African art, shuttling their daughters around Europe for summer vacations, and returning to the States to visit relatives with many stories to tell. Everywhere the couple went, they created wide circles of expat and international friends, hosting parties, and venturing far afield from the path of most Americans, in an era before world travel became the norm for a certain class of people.
In the spring of 1983, the U.S. government transferred Albert to Lebanon, where he was the head of the housing office for USAID.