Today is my grandmother's birthday, she would have been 92 today. It is also my birthday, I am 26 today.

Recently, I have discovered documents that suggest she may have been born in a different year than we know (1913) but I hold to the idea that she was born on December 14th, or the correlating day on the Jewish Calendar, 15 Kislev 5674. Both the US Census of 1920 and the Ellis Island ship manifests suggest that she was born in a different year, 1912 or 1911. An old Russian passport of her mother suggests she was born in 1913.

If indeed she was born in that year, than she would have been around 8 months old when she left for the New World with her mother and some of her siblings in May 1914. This was exactly a month before the assination of Archiduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which triggered the start of the First World War. I wonder then if they had waited only a little longer than they had if my grandmother would have ever made it to this country, and gone on to foster her lineage, of which I am of course a part.