A Heartwarming Thanksgiving

It all started in Savram, a little Jewish town outside Odessa more than 100 years ago.

Gisya Veintraub bore 13 children. Eight survived, each having three, four, five children of their own; the dozens of cousins and their children formed a close-knit family, where cousins were like siblings and aunts like parents. That was until the 1970s, when the first of the family moved to America, where most of the 300 Veintraubs have ended up.

This Thanksgiving Gisya’s great-granddaughter, Anna Volkoff, has decided to reunite the clan here in Los Angeles.

Volkoff, 42, who emigrated from Odessa to Los Angeles 14 years ago with her three children, husband, mother-in-law and father, came up with the idea last year when she brought her daughters to a family wedding in Dallas.

“I saw their excitement at meeting all their cousins, people that we haven’t seen since we left Russia. My kids never met them,” Volkoff told The Journal. “Older people, they keep in touch consistently. But the younger people, a lot of the time they don’t even know that they have so many cousins.”

More than 100 people — from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Dallas, San Diego, San Francisco — will meet or reunite at Monte Carlo, a Russian restaurant on Fairfax Avenue, this weekend. Volkoff has planned a slide show of photos from the turn of the last century through current times, as well as a candlelighting ceremony to commemorate each of the eight branches of the family. They will also unveil a huge family tree, from Gisya down to the latest birth a few months ago.

But it won’t all be serious. Volkoff asked members of the older generation to share funny stories of their immigrant experiences in America. When Volkoff arrived here at 28, she redirected her career as an engineer to become a CPA, with the help of the Jewish Vocational Services and The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, Volkoff says.

At one of her first days on the job, her boss asked her to fax a letter to him. She tried to mail it to him and call the number on the letter to confirm it. After an hour or so of frustration, they finally figured out what happened: the new immigrant never heard of a fax.

“We all had to start over here,” Volkoff says. “We want to show our kids that our life here was not so easy as their life.”

She is excited that they made the reunion for Thanksgiving. “America is our home,” she said, noting that she doesn’t want her children to forget their roots. “We want the children to be aware, we’re just afraid that if the older generation is gone … we might lose contact.”

“My understanding is that there is nothing more important than family.” — Amy Klein, Managing Editor