Tamara Tchinarova

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.

Her mother, Anna, studied nursing and served with the Red Cross during World War I.

There she met an army captain of Ukrainian and Georgian descent, Yevsevy Rekemchuk, and married him in 1918.

Tamara Tchinarova (tr. Chinarova, Тамара Чинарова), also known as Tamara Finch, (18 July 1919 – 31 August 2017) was a Romanian-born émigré Russian and French ballerina who contributed significantly to the development of Australian dance companies and was a Russian/English interpreter for touring ballet companies.

She was a dance writer and author, as Tamara Finch, of a number of non-fiction books.

She was the first wife of actor Peter Finch.

Born Tamara Yevsevievna Rekemchuk (Тама́ра Евсевиевна Рекемчу́к) 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 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.

She describes him as "idealistic" and wanting to help build a new society.

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.

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.

In Paris, choreographer George Balanchine noticed Tchinarova and her classmates, and chose them for dance performances in operetta productions, notably, Orpheus in the Underworld.

Following the death of impresario Sergei Diaghilev a number of successor ballet companies formed in Europe.

In 1932, she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and quickly gained prominence.

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."

They included Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, Les Ballets 1933 and Colonel Wassily de Basil's Original Ballet Russe.

While still in her teens Tchinarova joined various of these companies.

In 1936, she travelled on tour to Australia with de Basil's Monte Carlo Russian Ballet.

During that tour she was elated when the critic, Arnold Haskell, described her performance in Léonide Massine's Les Présages, as "brilliant" and "outstanding".

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.

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.

In 1939, at the conclusion of the Covent Garden Russian Ballet tour, along with a number of her colleagues, Tchinarova and her mother opted to stay in Australia.

Tchinarova taught at the Frances Scully School of Dancing while her mother worked in a factory, stitching women's underwear progressing later to making ballet costumes.

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.

At age 10, Tchinarova began training in Paris with renowned ballet master Olga Preobrazhenskaya, formerly of the Imperial Russian Ballet.