My grandfather Kostja Zetkin had an extremely interesting life. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time talking to him when I visited him at his home in British Columbia when I was younger, by that time he would speak mostly German to me with a big smile on his face completely forgetting that I didn’t understand a word he said. He was my step-grandfather as my grandmother Gertrude married him well after my father had been born.

This is a picture of Kostja as a young man on the left and as a much younger man on the right with his girlfriend Rosa Luxembourg. Kostja’s mother was Clara Zetkin, one of the leaders of the Weimar Republic and a staunch working-class feminist and advocate for women’s rights.