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Family Affair / The Samsons By Avner and Reli Avrahami Tags: family affair, Israel news Ein Iron * The cast: Rami (53), Iris (50), Peleg (27), Marina (24), Seurat (22) and Yuval (16). * The home: Red roof, orange walls, green grass in front, also a bell and an iron bird, oaks and palms in the back jutting from a large garden, the back of which fades into the distance. They live on four dunams (one acre), part of a 26-dunam plot on which someone in the moshav grows chickpeas, sunflowers and apricots. Advertisement * Evening falls: Entering through a glass and wood door, we arrive in a space with yellow walls and dim light, and, as we stand next to an old sewing machine, are confronted with a dilemma: left or right? * Left: To the left is a purple velvet screen, behind which is a high-ceilinged living room, the furniture in which includes a sofa (Ikea), floor cushions, a grandfather clock, a drawer unit of bent iron, Buddha figurines, a tall-speakered stereo and two old easy chairs. * Old easy chairs: The red one is from Sweden, where Rami's mother found refuge during the Holocaust, the other from Lemberg (now Lviv, or Lvov, Ukraine), Iris' grandmother's hometown. On to the tour. * The tour: Beyond the sewing machine lies the rest of the house, with a dining area (round table), spacious kitchen (pale Formica), bathroom decorated with inscriptions (example: "Love is everything") and a labyrinth with a television corner, private living area for Yuval and two studies crammed with file folders and books. There's also the master bedroom. * Master bedroom: On Iris' side is "Handful of Leaves" (a collection of Buddhist teachings, translated into Hebrew); on Rami's side is a Hebrew translation of John Banville's "The Untouchable." * Real estate history: They moved here in 1984, paying $55,000 for the plot (and a small "Jewish Agency house"), and are still repaying the mortgage to the tune of NIS 4,000 a month. In 1991 they added 100 square meters (living room and bedroom) and in 2006 built a house in the yard, to rent out. * The story in a nutshell: Iris and Rami have three children. Peleg, the eldest (who will marry Marina next spring) is "biological"; Yuval and Sera are adopted. Also living in the house are two dogs they took in, Packer, a mixed terrier ("extroverted") and Muki, (as in "Shuki," of Israeli TV fame - "mysterious"). * Livelihoods and occupations: Iris "leads meditation and mindfulness workshops" within the framework of the Inner Circle (in Isfiya, a Druze village, and in Herzliya, among other places). Some of the workshops are part of billionaire Shari Arison's "Essence of Life" project ("I haven't met her"). She works four days a week (on average), also organizing (with Rami) workshops abroad, mainly in Tuscany (for Israelis). She teaches people "to open up to joy and happiness" and achieve "inner balance." "After six sessions," she says, "people report that they feel better." Drives a Peugeot 206, 2001 model ("for sale"). * Rami's occupations: Divided into daylight and dark hours. In the morning he is a sales manager for a company that makes disinfectants for food factories, in the evening he gives different types of massages (Swedish, deep-tissue, Shiatsu, medicinal herbs) in his studio in the wooden hut in the yard. At his day job he visits manufacturers in the north of the country (Strauss, Tnuva, Neviot, Mei Eden) and advises them about disinfectants. He calls his work interesting. In the evening he treats people ("including conversation") for a variety of physical problems "that fundamentally originate somewhere else." * Peleg: Software engineer, self-taught, works for Finjan Software, an information security company located in the Netanya industrial zone. Lives with Marina in a rented apartment in nearby Kiryat Nordau (3.5 rooms, NIS 2,700 a month), visits his parents on weekends. * Seurat: Named for the Impressionist painter Georges Seurat ("I decided to change my name at 13"). She enters Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design this fall, studying visual communications, after working as a graphic designer in Tel Aviv ("in post-production of commercials and promotional films"). Health problems kept her from being drafted ("although I wanted to serve"). She has lived on her own in Berlin and Dublin, working in graphics. Now, despite her international experience, she feels she must study in order to develop. Her focus at Bezalel, she says, will be on digital art, photography and animation ("That's what interests me"). * Yuval: In eleventh grade in a high school at Kibbutz Ein Shemer (NIS 500 a month), busing by the regional council. She is also a group leader in the Bnei Hamoshavim youth movement (grades four and five). Until last year she played basketball, but gave it up due to overload. * Iris' bio: Born 1958, Tel Aviv, eldest of three, to native-born parents, grandparents from the Third Aliyah (wave of immigration, 1919-1923). As a girl she wandered with her family in the wake of the father, an engineer in Tahal (water resources, engineering), living in Ghana and Iran ("two years in Qazvin"). After returning to Israel they lived in upscale Herzliya Pituah. After high school (Alliance in Ramat Aviv) she served as an officer in the Women's Corps, did a B.A. in economics at Tel Aviv University, worked as an economist in a Hadera-based fruit products company, and then helped her mother, Ziva Telem, with her leather fashion business, working as marketing manager. She began learning group facilitation in 1997 at the University of Haifa (after exposure to Osho), and has been in the field ever since. She met Rami long before, at the airport. * Rami's bio: Born 1954, Kibbutz Gilad, to Holocaust survivors from Germany. His family left the kibbutz when he was 4 and moved to Be'er Sheva, where his father ran a cooperative carpentry workshop. After completing high school (Alef Comprehensive) he served in the Engineering Corps, and in the 1973 Yom Kippur War was besieged with his unit in the Golan Heights ("No one died"). He studied Middle Eastern studies and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began an M.A. at Tel Aviv University, and supported himself by becoming a security inspector ("selector") team leader at Ben Gurion International Airport. * The meeting: 1980. Iris was a student applying to work (as a selector), he was already a team chief. After teaching her how to ask "Did you pack by yourself?" he suggested that they go for a hike and she accepted. At first they went to a plant nursery in Moshav Bnei Zion, then to Cyclamen Hill near Kibbutz Gilad, later to a Tislam concert at the university, and got married. * The wedding: 1980, at her parents' place. Iris: "We got ten sets of Tea for Two" - a teapot with two cups. * And then: They lived in Iris' grandmother's place in Herzliya Pituah, Peleg was born, Rami began a nursery in the backyard, then became a gardening contractor but abandoned it in 1992 for industrial detergents. * Abandoned gardening: "I was worn out," he says. "I suggested something local to the clients, like an olive tree, rosemary or lavender, but they insisted on going tropical, with a Bird of Paradise." * The adoption: The outgrowth of a medical problem. After having Peleg, it turned out that Iris would have a hard time with another pregnancy. "It was clear to us that we wanted more children" (Rami). Accordingly, in 1986 they went to Brazil, paid $10,000 to Arlette, the owner of a local adoption agency, and met Seurat in an orphanage. She was a one-week-old baby from the Parana area of the Amazon estuary. While they were still in Brazil, Arlette was arrested, the situation turned dangerous and they began to make their escape ("a thriller"). * The escape: Iris, Rami and Peleg (who was 4) took the infant and the documents and fled to Paraguay via the border triangle with Argentina and Brazil ("an area crawling with Nazis"). Seurat underwent conversion in Israel. "I am a sabra," she says. "I had a fantastic childhood and it was terrific fun growing up on the moshav with my parents." She loves Judaism, she says, "although in terms of religion I am an agnostic." She is glad she wasn't adopted by a Swiss couple. * Genetic memory: "In terms of speech, I talk differently." She says she was told that she once spoke a strange language while sleeping. * Roots? She is in no hurry to search ("I have no desire for an unnecessary emotional overload at this time"). Yuval was adopted six years later. * Yuval'?s adoption: She was born in Jerusalem in 1992 to an Ethiopian mother, and was a year old when she was introduced to Iris, Rami, Peleg and Seurat. Peleg: "It was very natural for me. We all went to Holon and simply fell in love." Rami says they told her when she was 3 that she was adopted ("the moment we could"). Seurat: "We are siblings, we fought a lot, we competed for attention, like everyone." * Reactions: "Sometimes in the mall we saw in someone else's eyes that we are apparently different." * Sense of parenthood: "We did not need biological offspring, necessarily," Rami says; Iris: "The psychological bond that was created is more meaningful than genes." * God: Yuval believes; Iris, Marina and Sera believe with reservations ("Not in the God of any religion"); Rami and Peleg are atheists. Sera: "We often give thanks for what we have." * Happiness quotient (scale of 1-10): Rami 8, Iris 9, Peleg 7.5, Marina 7, Sera 7.5, Yuval 6. 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