Welcome To

Family Is All That Matters 66 Isabel. Mark's brother Leonid married Yelena Saks on April 16, 2005 in Brooklyn, New York. They have two children, Abby and Ben, who were both born in New Jersey, where Leonid still lives. The third of Klara and her husband Leonid's surviving children, Esfira (Fira), lives in Boston. Her earliest memory is of the one- room apartment in which her family lived. "My mother and my grandmother were good cooks and the house was always filled with the smells of wonderful food. The best cooking happened during Passover," she says. To buy kosher food, Esfira's mother and grandmother went to the market in Malakhovka, where they always waited while the rabbi blessed the chickens. Then they spent two days in the kitchen preparing the Passover meal for the 35 people they entertained. The women and children spent many hours cleaning the house to eliminate all evidence of bread (hametz). "For a whole week, we ate only kosher food; no bread, no non-kosher meat." Even at an early age, Esfira knew that what went on in the apartment during Passover was a secret. "When I went outside, I made sure I didn't tell anyone what we did inside," she said. "My parents spoke Yiddish when they didn't want the children to understand what they were saying. But little did they know that we could understand and we knew how to keep secrets, too." Esfira is married to Boris Grinev, whom she met and became engaged to aer a two- week courtship in 1969. They were married on February 28, 1970 in Moscow. Boris is trained as an economist, but he worked in the construction industry in Russia. In the United States, he worked as an accountant before starting a travel business in 1987. When Boris and Esfira decided to leave Russia, they received support om Iosif and Lyubov. They first went to Portland, Oregon, because they received an invitation and support om Jewish Family Services there. Boris was amazed at the apartment his family was to occupy. From someone who grew up in a one-room apartment, sharing a kitchen with another family, the apartment in Portland was as big as a palace. "The apartment had more than one bedroom, closets, a bathroom we didn't have to share with anyone else, and a kitchen with a big reigerator. It was everything. It was an unbelievable experience, and I wrote about this in my letters to Russia. Later I learned that my letters were passed around om one family to another because they had so much information," he said. Boris remembers a funny story: On New Year's Day in 1984, for the bar mitzvah of Faya's son, Mark (Boris and Esfira's nephew), Iosif and Lev Volsun visited to celebrate the happy day. There had been a big snowstorm

• Cover