Tamara Tchinarova

Born Tamara Yevsevievna Rekemchuk () in 1919 in Cetatea Albă, Bessarabia to a Ukrainian journalist father with Georgian antecedents and a nurse mother of Armenian descent. Her maternal grandfather, Kristapor Chinaryan, was an Armenian landowner who survived the Hamidian massacres by the Ottoman Empire. In 1895, Chinaryan fled to Bessarabia, where he adopted the Russified surname of Chinarov. He married a Ukrainian woman and eventually became prosperous, owning three vineyards, three houses and a hotel. Her grandfather, she wrote, "would achieve success in business even on a desert island. He was practical, quick, receptive, generous, envied and loved." During the Kishinev pogroms, he sheltered Jewish families in his basements. In the 1920s, the family moved to Paris, where her father had sought a journalistic career and one day took his daughter to see a performance of the Ballets Russes. Young Tamara made up her mind then to become a ballerina. She soon began her dance training with émigré ballerinas from the Imperial Russian Ballet. In 1926, her father resolved to return to the Soviet Union. Tamara's mother, however, was resolutely Anti-Bolshevik and decided to stay on in Paris with Tamara and neither ever saw him again. Tamara took her mother's maiden name, Chinarova (transliterated in French as "Tchinarova"). Unbeknown to his abandoned family, her father married again in the USSR. His second wife was a Ukrainian actress, Lidia Prikhodko, and in 1927 they had a son, Alexandr Rekemchuk (d. 2017), who went on to become an accomplished author. Meanwhile, Yevsevy worked for the Soviet Secret police but was arrested, imprisoned and finally shot in 1937 during the Great Purge. He was posthumously rehabilitated after Stalin's death. In 1940, Tchinarova's grandfather, Kristapor, 88, and his wife were murdered by Soviet troops, who stormed their home and bayoneted them. Other family members were exiled to Siberia, where several of them died. ==Ballet career==

At age 10, Tchinarova began training in Paris with renowned ballet master Olga Preobrazhenskaya, formerly of the Imperial Russian Ballet. In 1931, while still twelve, she went on tour to Algeria and Morocco where she was introduced as "the littlest ballerina of the world." In 1932, she performed in Romania, including a show in her home town. Roma musicians accompanied the tour and Tchinarova learned complex gypsy dances, which she later used in Petrushka and other dances. Tchinarova and classmates Irina Baronova, who became a fast friend, Tatiana Riabouchinska and Tamara Toumanova were dubbed Balanchine's "Baby Ballerinas" and known as the "Russians who have never danced in Russia." Two years later in 1938 accompanied by her mother, she returned to Australia with another de Basil troupe, the Covent Garden Russian Ballet. She was admired for her portrayal of Tamar the Georgian Queen in Michel Fokine's dramatic ballet Thamar, and was praised for her dancing in demi-character roles in ballets such as Le Beau Danube. ==Later life==

Having retired from performing, Tamara Finch initially worked as a Russian interpreter for trade delegations to and from the Soviet Union, but this gave way to a return to the world of ballet helping many English-speaking dance companies, including The Australian Ballet, during tours to Russia, and for Russian companies touring in the West. She also developed a writing career contributing to a range of dance magazines, notably in the Dancing Times. In 1958 she was co-author, with Hector Cameron, of a collection of Russian fairy tales for children, entitled The Little King: The book of twenty nights and one night. In the 1980s and 90s she published a number of biographies of dancers and an autobiography in 2007. ==Personal life==

During World War II, Tchinarova was first engaged to the Australian photojournalist Fred Breen who was in the Royal Australian Air Force. Breen died in a bombing raid over Germany in 1942. Some months later, she met the English-born Australian actor Peter Finch. Although Finch was in the forces, they were able to marry in 1943 and she continued her dancing career. Tamara Finch continued living in London until 2004 when she retired, at age 87, to Spain to be with her family. In 2006, she met for the first time her half-brother, Alexandr Rekemchuk, eight years her junior, who visited from Moscow. ==Bibliography==