Family is Family

I'm in Rehovot right now, staying with my step-family, Eva and Yossi, along with their daughter Tal (25) and son Doron (15). How I am related to these people is a fascinating story.

My father's father, Arnold Weinfeld, a native of Poland, survived the war. He was never in a concentration camp, but his story of survival is still incredible and deserves to be told again, but at another time. In any case, after the war, he married my grandmother, Irene, also a survivor. They moved to Montreal and had a son, my father Morton.

Meanwhile, a woman named Hanetchka, my grandfather's childhood sweetheart from Poland, also survived the war. She too had married, but lost her first husband and son to the Nazis. She married a second time after the war, and had a daughter, Eva. They moved to Israel, where her second husband died of a stroke, leaving her a single-mother. Eva would eventually marry Yossi, a wonderful Iraqi-Jewish doctor, and have two children, Tal and Doron.

Throughout these years, though both have been married, my grandfather and Hanetchka remain in contact through occasional letters and cards.

Flash forward to the 1970s. Irene, my grandmother, died of a heart attack, when my dad was still in his early 20s. A few years later, though he was in his 70s at the time, my grandfather picked himself up, moved from Montreal to Israel and married Hanetchka, his childhood sweetheart from Poland.

My grandfather, Arnold Weinfeld, died in 1990. Since he lived in Israel and I in Montreal, I never really got to know him, and saw him only a few times in my life. I knew him mainly through my father's stories. Now Doron was too young to remember him. Tal, on the other hand, knew him quite well. After all, to her, he was a grandfather, married to her grandmother from the time she was born. Thus, though he was my biological grandfather, he was just as much of a grandfather to Tal. For this reason, Tal and I have a special connection. Hanetchka passed away at a very old age in the Autumn of 2004, but that connection lives on. Tal visited me last summer in Washington DC. I had not seen her since April of 1999, the last time I was in Israel. I hadn't seen Eva and Yossi and Doron since that same time. But I am in their house now. They are family, and it feels like home.