Arditi family

This photograph has a special memory. Because it is a picture where the whole Arditi family is together. My father's name was Nesim Bensiyon Arditi. My mother was Fortüne Saranga. How my parents first met could be considered romantic. My father had a walking stick; it was fashionable to use one then. Kooperatif had a franchise store on the European coast of Istanbul, where my father worked for a while. He used to take the tram to get to and from work, and would frequently see my mother in the tram. One day, soon after my mother got off the tram, he dropped his walking stick right in front of her, and that is how they first met. In those years, the general convention in the society stipulated that dating was a serious matter, and others expected relationships to result in marriage after a short dating period. My mother's father had already passed away. My father, also a kid at the time, had lost both of his parents. La Tia Dudu (Aron Saranga's sister), who was taking care of my father at the time, was knowledgeable in matters of love and marriage. She asked him "Are you going to marry her?" "Yes, I will" my father replied. Not long after that, my parents got married at the Ortakoy Synagogue. Fortune and Nesim Arditi preferred to live on the Asian coast. I was born in 1923, at the address of Recaizade Ekrem Sokak No'95. In 1926, my brother Henri Arditi was born. He married a lady named Lizet. Henri Arditi had two sons named Bensiyon and Eli. Henri died in 1987 in Istanbul. Bensiyon married a lady named Suzan in the United States and had 3 children. Later he divorced his wife because of jealousy and faliure to get along. When they separated his wife was pregnant with her 3rd child. Later he married a Christian lady for the second time. Eli, on the other hand, married a lady named Luna. He had three children. Aron Eˇli and Alison. Henri Arditi graduated from junior high and continued with his father's career. He continued with the business. In 1932, my sister Viktorya was born. Viki (short for Viktorya) went to the St. Benoit Lycee [a high school in Istanbul founded and supported by the French]. Viki got married to one of Henri's friends. And she immigrated to Israel in 1942. When Viki left for Israel, she took my mother's sewing machine with her as a souvenir. The couple had two children named Lea and Hayim. Lea ended up getting married to Rafi Azuz, a man from Bursa [a city in the Marmara Region, Turkey].