Lithuania, Belarus, South Africa and Israel.

We owe much of our characteristics and way of being to our ancestors.

We bear both DNA and ways of being from all our ancestors. We inherit customs, humor, gestures and many other characteristics.

I was born into a Jewish family. My father, Chaim was the youngest of 10 children all of whom were born in a Shtetl (village) called Ivye in what was known as the “Pale of Settlement”, an area in Czarist Russia, where Jews were permitted to live. This area, situated on the border would pass from being Russian to being Polish, Lithainian, Ukrainian and Belorussian. 

My mother too, Lieba or Lily was born in a shtetl called Lechowitch that is situated about 100km South of Ivye.

My maternal grandfather, and grandmother, Max and Sima, met in a town called Astrakhan after both their families and hundreds of thousands more Jews were exiled from the Pale of Settlement during WW-I. They returned and settled in Lechowitch after the war.

Max had grown up in the town of Keidan, Lithuania where his parents ran an hotel and supported a family of ten children. Sima’s father, Yehuda Leib Loss was a well-off pelt merchant and supported a family of 10 children. His first wife, Esther died young. Their daughter was raised in Leibs new family after he married Basya.

Sima liked to tell my brothers of how fine their family was and I how she once attended a speech from Lenin.

After the great fire of 1929 in Ivye, my father and his family emigrated by ship to South Africa.

Max and Sima, also emigrated in 1929 to South Africa. Both families settled in Johannesburg. My maternal grandfather, Isaac was a ritual slaughterer and Max worked as a painter and contractor.

Chaim was hard of hearing since childhood. Being the youngest he was called the “muszikin” or “kleineker”, young one in Polish or Yiddish. His sisters would also call him a “taibe loch” (deaf hole), typical Jewish irony, if you ask me. He joined the Left-Wing, Jewish youth movement, “Hashomer Hatzair” (The Young Guard) and left Johannesburg for Cape Town where he helped in establishing a branch of the movement. He had finished an electrician’s course by this time.

In 1944, Chaim went to Israel together with a group from Hashomer Hatzair to join Kibbutz Eilat in the town of Netanya where he stayed for a year and a half. This kibbutz, then established a new kibbutz named “Shuval” in the Negev. Chaim, having returned to South Africa, was not a member of Shuval but had made many friends during this period and would always visit them on his numerous trips to Israel through the years. I do not know why he left Israel. My feeling is that he had fallen in love and had been rejected. He once told me that he had been “jilted” before meeting Lily. He lived for 3 years in Durban where he started a clothing factory.

Lily, was a brilliant student who matriculated at the age of 16 and graduated in Medicine at the age of 22 in 1948. She too, was a member of a Jewish youth movement, Betar, that was right wing. Her brother Leib, after whom I am named, died at the age of 19 in a shooting incident. After she married Chaim in 1949 they both went to live in Israel where Lily did her internship at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva. Chaim worked in real estate and became rather successful.

Chaim’s family were very close to each other and family concerns and the imminent birth of Chick, my older brother, caused them to return to South Africa in 1951. Chaim states in a letter that he was “forced” by family situations to partner with his brother, Meishke in the clothing business. Meishke is often referred to as the “godfather”  by the later generations of Goldsmiths. He was a religious person who believed that Jewishness and Family were the most important things in life. Needless to say, Meishke was almost like a second father to me, my siblings and my cousins. We would meet for Shabbat dinner every Friday evening, on festivals and at family celebrations and everyone in the extended family were very close. We also had close ties with many friends who had also come to South Africa from Ivye.