A New Family – not quite fiction, i.e. most of this truly happened.

It all started with a phone call from my late dad, Boris. We were a young family living in Jerusalem then. I’d done two bouts of miluim reserve duty with my unit in Lebanon just before that. Gorbochev had become the ruler of the Soviet Union at the time. The Russian regime was easing up its restrictions on Jewish immigration from there to Israel. Natan Sharansky had been released from prison that year after an international campaign led by his wife Avital. That puts the time somewhere in 1986.

Nevertheless, the phone call and its content surprised me.

I had always known that my father’s family had been wiped in the Holocaust, shot in their shtetl by the Nazi S.S and their Lithuanian henchmen. I thought that all that was left of the very large Grenimann clan was one brother, my uncle Fima, and a few distant relatives in Bnei Brak.

I don’t remember the exact words spoken then but it was something like the following:

“Hello, Jon (my name growing up in Australia)”

“Hi, Dad”

“Listen, my son.  I want to ask you to do something for me. It’s very important.”

“OK. What’s up?”

“Get a pen and paper…”

“I have both here next to the phone.”

“Write down this number…”

“Why?”

“Just do as I say, Jonny”

“Alright.”

He proceeded to dictate a phone number to me which I obediently recorded.

“It’s a Moscow phone number. I want you to call them. Speak to my cousin Rosa, her husband Lev or their son Alex. They know English.

“But why? I didn’t know you had family in Russia.”

“Well, I do. They need your help. Call them. They’ll explain.”

I called. Rosa answered. Her English wasn’t very good, and she was obviously very excited. She handed the phone to her son, who sounded calmer while commenting on how incredible it was to be speaking to family in Jerusalem. I agreed, of course. He said he could speak a little English but if I knew Yiddish that would be easier. We conversed in our “Tzebrochene Yiddish” adding words in English here and there. He explained the procedure. They needed to prove they had family in Israel. I was it. They would need a letter from me inviting them to come. He explained our family connection.

Rosa, it turned out was my father’s first cousin’s daughter. There was also a brother called Vladimir. They had been evacuated by the Soviets from Vitebsk during the second world war, getting out by train just before the Nazis conquered the area. That was how they’d survived. It was only recently they had learned through Yad Vashem that her uncle Yehiel’s family had not been completely obliterated, that there were two brothers who had survived in the forest, their cousins now living in Melbourne, Australia. They had corresponded with Boris and learned that he had a son, named after his father Yehiel – their uncle – living in Jerusalem.

I wrote the letter and did what I could to help them with the Israeli and Sochnut bureaucracy. My dad sent money, and, in a few months, their two families arrived in Israel.

We have shared simhas together since, including weddings, britot, bar mitzvahs, and, sadly, also funerals. We are indeed family but somehow the relationship has always felt awkward. I suppose this is because of language and cultural gaps. They are very secular and politically quite right-wing. We are religious and left leaning liberals.

Things changed when, at Alex’s son’s barmitzvah Debbie and I were introduced to another relative we hadn’t heard of or met before- Evgenia, usually referred to as just Genia.

Genia came out later with her aging mother (my dad’s first cousin) – a husband and two sons. They had somehow managed to become religious despite the Communist repression of religion, having returned to Vitebsk rather than settling in Moscow like Rosa and Vladimir and their families.

We quickly connected with Genia who was warm and enthusiastic from the first. We visited them often in their crowded but cheerful little apartment in Beit Shemesh with its menagerie of dogs, cats, and sometimes other animals as well as a well- tended little garden in the back. Our relationship with Rosa and Vladimir meanwhile cooled. I have often wondered why they had not told us of Genia and her family before they came.

Unlike Rosa and Vladimir, educated professionals from the big city – she was a physician, he an engineer- Genia was only a teacher of biology in a high school in the relative backwater of Vitebesk. It was she who took care of my dad’s last remaining cousin in her modest home, and she who carried many family memories of which we’d known nothing before meeting her. With her my brother Jack, Debbie and I travelled to Belarus to visit the shetel my dad was from, little Diszna, by the Dvina River in the Vitebsk area. The Dvina river was impressive, deep and wide.

The old woman whose name is a little vague in my memory, but I think it was Zelda (like the famous Jewish poet) was already frail and somewhat senile when he met her. She died not long afterwards.

Zelda brought out a box of old photos to show us, yellowed at the edges, black and white, not always clear or well-focused, mostly posed family groups, no one smiling and shockingly a couple of faces cut out altogether. “Stalin”, they explained, “KGB. We didn’t talk about the ones who were ‘disappeared'” they said, with a meaningful look. The family similarity was strong and amongst them I came across one photo of my grandfather, Yehiel, after whom I’m named. I recognized him from the one photo my dad had somehow saved from the destruction and carried with him through his partisan days, along with a small student photo of his beloved and talented older sister Sonia. I remember thinking that Genia looked a little like a plumper version of her.

It was while looking through those old photos that the penny finally dropped for me, emotionally. They are really family. I held back tears at the time if I remember right.

The old woman did remember living with the family in Diszna for a time where she was billeted while going to the Jewish high school there, I think. She told us they always thought Yehiel and his entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. They were surprised to learn, after someone visited Yad Vashem and filled out a testimony there that there had been two survivors, my father Boris and his brother Fima. They had corresponded after that discovery. Letters from Russia to Australia and back in both Russian and Yiddish. Zelda   remembered and thus confirmed a story I’d been told many times growing up in Melbourne. She called my dad Beryl, not Boris, and uncle Fima was Chaim by her.

Her family lived on the Russian side of the Soviet-Polish border, my dad’s family on the other side. The two adventurous adolescents, who later survived as partisans in the Naroch forest, had swum across the Dvina river, then the border between eastern Poland (now Belarus) and Russia. They wanted to visit the family, especially their grandparents, on the other side. That was quite a family sensation at the time, they were lucky to cross back over safely. The old lady laughed when sharing that memory. They were probably punished for that escapade. It was the only time my mischievous dad had run into trouble when he was young. I’ve since heard a number of colourful stories about his adventures.