The Round House

The story of our family is a little complicated, like most Jewish immigration stories. My mother was born in 1966 in Riga. In the early 1970s, her family emigrated to Israel. In 1973, my grandparents and my mother moved from there to Berlin.

The two photos I’ve brought along were taken the first year after we immigrated to Berlin. My grandpa had always worked hard. He started working again in Berlin right away so he soon had money to buy a camera. He took the pictures. He was the only person with a camera in the whole neighborhood.

In one of the photos, you can see my mother with her little brother. The other picture shows my grandpa with my mother. The photos were taken where my family was living at the time, in the building where many people from the first wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union were housed. It was a round, white house, and that’s what everyone called it to each other: круглый дом (krugliy dom), in other words, “the round house.”

Ten years later, my grandparents emigrated with her two children to New York, where my mother graduated from high school. After finishing a dentistry degree, she moved to Herzlia in Israel. That’s where she met my father. He’s from Argentina and emigrated to Israel at the same time, also as a dentist. They lived there together for two years and then moved together to Germany. To Stuttgart. I was born in Stuttgart in 1994. When I was two, we moved to Berlin.