I’ve written in prior columns about the personal satisfaction that comes from living in Israel and the meaning that I have found in being part of Israeli society. To be honest, as much as I feel at home here, I will always be an immigrant. I will always eat and dress like an American. And even my name, Clifford, sets me apart and frequently prompts questions.

I would say that I speak Hebrew with a slight accent. My two daughters, who are now in their 30s and moved to Israel from Ohio at the ages of 5 and 6, would say it’s not so slight. One of the many payoffs of aliyah, however, is that I do speak Hebrew and that my children are completely bilingual.

Last November, my first grandchild was born – a new generation and the first to be born in Israel, I think to myself. That’s not quite true, but it requires some background about my family. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was born in what is now Ukraine, along with her four sisters and a brother, prior to World War I. The girls in the family immigrated to the United States, to Cleveland, but the brother, my father’s uncle, Itzik Hersh Reisberg, remained – and was murdered there.

Following Itzik’s death, his son Ze’ev, my father’s first cousin, moved to British-ruled Palestine and later managed to bring his own brother and sister and mother to pre-state Israel. On my first visit to Israel from Cleveland, when I was in high school, I received a warm welcome from my father’s three first cousins – and later from the younger generation. But it was only when I paid a condolence call last month in the Tel Aviv suburb of Hod Hasharon following the death of Ze’ev Reisberg’s son, Yoram, that I got a better understanding of how rooted my family’s history is in Israel.

We parked around the corner from Yoram Reisberg’s family home near a sign stating that Ze’ev Reisberg had acquired the site in the 1930s and later planted an orchard in what was then a small farming community. As the Tel Aviv area expanded, the community was consolidated into a suburban municipality – Hod Sharon. In the 1990s, the orchard was replaced by single-family homes, including three for the Reisberg family.

At the condolence visit, I asked Yoram’s brother, who lives in one of the three houses, about the family’s connection to the site. He explained that a Bedouin sheikh from the Abu Kishk tribe had gotten himself into trouble with the British authorities in the 1930s after three Jews were murdered on or near the sheikh’s land. In order to pay a fine in the case, the sheikh was forced to sell off some land.

Ze’ev Reisberg had come to Palestine with nothing and initially didn’t even have enough money to send a postcard to his mother in Ukraine to inform her that he had arrived in Palestine. But he later managed to scrape together the small sum necessary to buy some of the Abu Kishk land, which is now in Hod Hasharon, a thriving and sought-after community of 67,000 people.

The family’s connection to the area mirrors the growth and development of Israel itself. And the Reisberg family has done well for itself. There are now at least three generations of native-born descendants of my grandmother’s brother, Itzik. They include people who have distinguished themselves in law and academia and one of his great-grandsons recently retired as a major general in the Israel Defense Forces.

I may always be a new immigrant, but my family isn’t new to the country.

Cliff Savren is a former Clevelander who covers the Middle East for the Cleveland Jewish News from Ra’anana, Israel in this bi-weekly column. He is an editor at Haaretz. To read more from him, visit cjn.org/savren.