Malke died around 1915, before the end of the First World War. She had remarried after Felix’s death. With their mother gone, the three siblings —Alejandro, Marcos and Aida— moved to the province of Entre Ríos.
All three had gone to primary school in Buenos Aires. Alejandro and Marcos then completed their studies at the Antonio Bermejo School of Commerce, where they qualified as bookkeepers. With that diploma in hand they found work in rural Entre Ríos.
Alejandro
Born on 11 March 1897, in Berdyansk. He was the first of the three.
In Entre Ríos he found work in Maciá, Rosario Tala department, in Elías Loyber’s general store. There he met Isabel Loyber, the owner’s niece, who was in Maciá on holiday. They married in mid-1920.
Around 1926 Alejandro left the Loyber firm and set up on his own, with a general store and grain-collecting business, and a house of his own, opposite the railway station. He died in 1959, aged sixty-two.
Marcos
Born on 25 January 1899, in Mariupol. His birth record is the most important document in this whole story: it is what made it possible, a century later, to learn who his father and grandfather had been.
He found work in Aranguren, Nogoyá department, in a general store owned by the Jozami brothers. Around 1922 he married Esther Klaiserburd. He lived in Aranguren and in Ramírez. He died in 1951.
His gravestone, in Paraná, preserves his Hebrew name and his father’s. It is the piece that joined the two halves of this story.
Aida
Born in the last week of July 1904, in Berdyansk, she was only six months old when she crossed the Atlantic. She was the only one of the three who never really got to know her father.
She lived in the home of Alejandro and Isabel. In October 1926 she married Pablo Freiberg, a nephew of Elías Loyber’s wife and an employee of Alejandro’s store. Aida died in 1992, aged eighty-eight. She was the last of the three siblings to die, and one of the voices that told Rubén much of what we know today.