Felix’s wife went by many names. In her son’s birth record she appears under her Hebrew name, Ester Malka. The family called her Malke, or Molke. In Argentina she was registered as María Esther Noel.
All of them are the same name. Malka means “queen” in Hebrew. That is why Malke was rendered interchangeably as María, as Reina or as Reina Esther, and also why the names María, Esther, María Esther and Felisa recur so often among her descendants.
The Noel family
We know far less about Malke’s family than about Felix’s, and what we know comes mostly from what the family used to tell.
Family tradition · undocumented
According to that tradition, the Noels were Sephardic Jews: that is, descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs. They lived in Spain, presumably in Toledo. After the expulsion they emigrated to Turkey, and from there —perhaps from Istanbul— they eventually moved towards Ukraine, where there was a large Jewish community. They settled on the Black Sea coast and, more precisely, in Berdyansk, on the Sea of Azov.
It is a beautiful story and there is no document to support it, nor any to contradict it. It is recorded for what it is: what the family said about itself. If a paper ever turns up to confirm it, it will be one of the most interesting findings of this whole research.
Berdyansk
Malke and Felix met in Berdyansk and married there around 1896. Berdyansk was a port on the Sea of Azov, with an active Jewish community and a great deal of trade. The family lived there, and Alejandro and Aida were born there.
Malke had been born around 1874, so she was considerably younger than her husband. She died around 1915, still young, some six years after Felix. She saw her three children grow up in Buenos Aires, but did not live to see them as adults.