For months, my mom talked on and on about our unique family reunion in Minneapolis. To my surprise, the event was much more touching than I could have imagined. I was expecting the worst.

Over 100 people in the US, Russia, Israel, Denmark, Cuba, Brazil, and Canada were invited. Thirty-four people assembled from the US, Canada, Cuba, Brazil and Denmark.

I dreaded the reunion and wasn’t thrilled to use my precious frequent flyer miles to get a ticket to the heat and humidity of the Mid West in summer, but I had no choice. Not attending was not an option. My mom was the initiator of the family reunion.

Mom asked me time and time again to help her use the Family Tree Maker software program to make her various extensive family trees. Not knowing how to use the program and not having a manual, I accidentally deleted my ancestors and had their branches cut off into software oblivion. Mom had to retype our ancestors back into existence several times.

What I dreaded most were the annoying aunts and uncles and their stupid questions of “Why aren’t you married yet” and “Why don’t you have a normal job”, etc, etc. (Good Russian girls are not supposed to be entrepreneurial writers.) Looking at the disastrous marriages in my family, I don’t see why anyone would inquire about my single status. Instead, I bet they admire my freedom. Nonetheless, I assumed that I would be in a barrage of interrogation and assumed alcohol would be my vice.

Russian dinner parties for me are like being at a Communist Politburo meeting with everyone staring into the wall declaiming their super long toasts with the excitement and rhythm of a Soviet leader talking about a new five-year plan. No one has yet to bang their shoe on the table like Khruschev, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it will happen someday. I loathe family events like the plague.

After two days of sightseeing in Minnesota, we had our official reception where my mom presented each table with a family tree showing how we were all related. Just two weeks before the reunion, my mom’s distant cousin in Montreal discovered a long lost relative of ours in Ottawa, Canada from the Bronstein side of the family. The man was elated to find out of our existence as his parents had left Ukraine before World War II and had assumed that most of the family had been killed in the Nazi extermination of Jews in Ukraine. Mr. Bronstein came from Ottawa to meet his newfound relatives. He was one of the few people at the reunion who didn’t speak English. When he spoke about how happy he was to meet all of us, I realized that the family reunion was worth all the work that was put into organizing it. It was moving to realize that despite Hitler’s destruction of Jewish communities throughout Europe, those who survived and those who descended from the survivors can still reunite. I accidentally deleted family members from the tree due to my unfamiliarity with the family tree software, but the Nazi regime literally took lives away from people. Here we were together recreating our family.

Others spoke about how close all of our great grandparents and grandparents were in their small Jewish communities in Ukraine before the revolution and how they maintained their close ties after World War II when the families were spread out in different cities and towns in Ukraine and Russia.

I realized that the strength of our family’s solidarity was apparent in the existence of the reunion and that so many people came to be together.

My sister’s kids, who are half Russian and half Ecuadorian, played well with my cousin Vladimir’s kids who are half Russian and half Brazilian. The kids had no common language, but got along well even though my sister’s son Alex liked to steal the Brazilian girls’ toys.

And of course there’s always a good reason to have family nearby: free babysitting. As a true testament to family bonding, my Dad babysat Portuguese speaking four year old Carmen Victoria all by himself for about an hour. They also had no common language, but were family.

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