These are my mother's brothers. Emmanuel Grinberg is on the right and Joseph Grinberg is on the left. The picture was taken in the early 1920s in Jurbarkas.
Mother's brother Emmanuel was one year older than my mother. Since they were of the same age group they got along very well. Emmanuel immigrated to the USA in the mid-1920s. We didn’t hear from him for two years. His Aunt Beila, Grandmother Grunya’s sister, was looking for him. She went to the USA to see her brothers: one of them was called Gersh, Gary in English, I don’t know the name of the other. She didn’t find Emmanuel there. She turned things upside down and finally found out that her nephew was working in Canada as a security guard. After that they found a job for Emmanuel and took him to the USA. He worked for the company of Grandmother’s brothers.
Emmanuel had a wife and two children, whose names I don’t remember. He had a modest living, but in spite of that he helped out his siblings, our family in particular. During the Soviet times we didn’t keep in touch with my uncle’s family as we feared persecution and exile. All I know is that Uncle died in 1965.
My mother’s middle brother Joseph, born in 1890, worked in the store with Grandpa Morduchai. He had an accident and became disabled: one of Joseph’s legs was shorter than the other. In 1920 Joseph got married. His wife, Zhenya, was from Riga. In the 1930s Granddad was ill, and Joseph managed the business. He ran the store. Joseph, his wife and their small child were exiled with Grandpa Morduchai on 14th June 1941. Joseph was the only one of the family who survived. Zhenya and Robert died on their way to exile. Joseph was sentenced to eight years in camps for having been a member of the Shaulist Council. It was a kind of a military and sports organization. Joseph was charged with counterrevolutionary Fascist activity because he regularly paid a membership fee to the organization. Having gone through this ordeal Joseph came back to Lithuania in the post-war period, then he immigrated to Israel, where he died in the 1970s.
