Here you can see my grandmother, my mother's mother Etl Birstein. This photo was taken in Odessa in the 1890s, when my grandmother was young.
I know very little about my ancestors on my mother’s side. My grandfather’s name was Chaim Birstein. I don’t know his date of birth, though I guess it may have been in the 1860s, or occupation. They lived in Odessa and had a better education than the Bashmet family. Their children finished a grammar school. My grandmother’s nickname was ‘De sheine’ – ‘the most beautiful’ in Yiddish. My mother’s sister Lisa moved to Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1910. Her older brother Haime moved to London in England in 1912, and we lost track of them for good. I think they must have been born in the 1880s. My mother was a little girl then and remembered them dimly. In 1919 my mother’s parents died of typhus.
