Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 5

FINDING THE BEGINNING of the thread was not easy. As is often the case, my search began much too late, long after my grandparents and their generation were gone. By then I was living in the United States, busy with family, work, and other commitments. But starting in 1978, various projects brought me back to Israel several times a year, and each time I was there I interviewed some relatives. First I questioned my mother’s siblings and a number of her Berman cousins. My mother Leah’s oldest brother, Moshe Berman, confessed that he once owned a copy of our family tree that went back many generations, to the family’s origins in Europe. In his twenties at the time, Moshe was not interested in family history and he lost the tree. He told me that he thought that the first person in our family settled in Palestine in 1777, but he was not sure.

It was my great-grandmother Esther Ashkenazi’s side that intrigued me the most since they had lived in the country for seven generations. As a child I often went with my mother to visit Esther’s surviving siblings—her brother Yoel in Tiberias and her sister Hinke in Safed—and I remembered their children’s and most of their grandchildren’s names, a great asset in the search for roots. Above is a “guide for the perplexed” with the names of the Ashkenazi descendants whom I eventually interviewed printed in bold, as is my name at the bottom.