Inklings 2025

Personal Statement Alexander Kazumoff ’25 Since the day I was born, something has differentiated me from my family. It isn’t a superhuman talent, or unique genetic make-up. It’s just three letters. Three letters at the end of my last name don’t seem like much at all. In fact, they didn’t seem like much to me either when I was younger. In elementary school, Kazumoff was just a name to be shaped into a nickname by the other kids, a name to be mispronounced and sometimes given up by the teachers. It was a novelty to me, having a different last name from my parents. I would keep showing it off to my friends like the kids with double-jointed thumbs, but grew tired of all the teachers who would ask questions about my last name, such as where it’s from or why it’s different. The thing was that I didn’t know either. Why Kazumoff? Why me? Was I special, destined for something great, or were my sister’s jokes about me being adopted really true? The answer was right in front of me, however, in the picture of a solemn old man with a cigarette in his hand hung on the wall with an encased bottle next to it. The bottle with the name Kazumoff labeled on it. My father explained to me who that man was; Narik Kazumoff, my great- grandfather. When Armenia became part of the Soviet Union, his father, Bagrat, had changed the family name from the Armenian “-ian” ending to an “-off” ending to avoid persecution. Like all industrialists before him, Bagrat was branded as a kulak, an enemy of the state, and had to flee to escape persecution. Narik had rebuilt the family’s 200-year winemaking traditions that had disappeared during the beginning of the Communist regime, and despite the challenges he faced starting from scratch, he Loophole Zachary Myones ’27 17