4/2/2023 0 Comments Father finds long lost twins“The Soviet Union wanted to present itself as a nation of healthy individuals,” the charity’s website notes, “and those with disabilities were hidden away behind closed doors and high fences. In 2004, Natalia applied her influence and determination toward the launch of a charity, the Naked Heart Foundation, a response to her country’s entrenched attitudes toward people like her sister Oksana with disabilities. “Natalia Vodianova’s story is so romantic,” wrote Vogue in 2003, “she’s already a girl on the brink of legend…the heroine of a magical Russian rags-to-riches fairy tale.” Natalia had revealed just enough of her hardscrabble life to fuel the myth: At the age of 11, she recalled, “I used to carry tens and tens of boxes, each of which weighed 30 kilos, without even thinking it was heavy!” She was known for her hard-bargaining techniques: To avoid being cheated by suppliers she would bring her own scales to establish the correct weights. Her preternatural elegance and composure veiled any thought of a complicated history. In Paris, she was borne by her Cinderella story and the celestial beauty that would see her cast as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Annie Leibovitz’s legendary December 2003 Vogue portfolio. “Only something better could happen to me.” “I had nothing to lose,” she told Vogue’s Sarah Mower in 2003. Anything would be better than toiling away at her mother’s fruit and vegetable stand. Revealing the steely drive that would steer her through life, Natalia did exactly that. Scouts told her she could go to Paris but would need to learn English in three months. Natalia Vodianova-“Supernova” as she was dubbed at the height of her runway and print celebrity-began her modeling career in Nizhniy at 16, soon after a boyfriend introduced her to a local modeling academy. When there was no reply, Jenna assumed that that was the end of it. I just wanted to let you know that I’m fine, if you’ve been wondering, and I hope you are too.” “You don’t even have to reply to this message. I hope you’re doing well too.’ ” Jenna recalls. She sent a message through the site, mentioning her birthplace and name. And yet, in 2019, Jenna was notified of a match via the DNA service she’d subscribed to, and after some internet sleuthing she discovered that she had a half sister with a very public profile. Russian adoption law, meanwhile, made it more or less impossible for any Russian relatives to track Jenna down. Jenna and Ethan were raised practically as twins in rural North Carolina, a childhood that, by Jenna’s account, was a typical all-American small-town idyll. In 2000, she and her husband, Chris, were approved to adopt two Russian babies, and though they planned on bringing only one home, a boy they called Ethan, at the last moment they added Jenna. When Jenna’s American adoptive mother Marybeth was young, she had always prayed for the children behind the Iron Curtain, and the impact of those prayers resonated. Jenna was born Maria Mashinka in the grim Russian industrial city of Nizhniy Novgorod and given up for adoption as an infant. “At that point I’m kind of freaking out,” she remembers. “A new DNA relative has sent you a message,” one notification read. Then she noticed the source: a DNA site she’d subscribed to several years earlier. Jenna, a mechanical engineering undergraduate at the city’s university who’d been shopping for a simple dinner with her roommate, remembers thinking the timing was “weird”-it was after work hours after all. One evening in July 2021, 22-year-old Jennifer Burns-“Jenna” to her friends and family-was sitting in a Walmart parking lot in Clemson, South Carolina, when a flurry of email notifications appeared on her phone.
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