My grandfather was born in a shtetl, a Yiddish term for a small town with a predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish population, which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The shtetl he came from is called Dukla. Back then, it was a small town in the region of Galicia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today, it is still a town called Dukla in south-east Poland, near the border with Ukraine but no jews live there at all anymore.

His family ran a business cutting and selling firewood, and they did quite well. However, as Nazism was rising in Germany, they decided to sell their business and flee to Tel Aviv in 1938. Schneebaum is a family name meaning 'snow tree', passed down through the generations. The name was related to their family business, as they dealt with trees and lived in an area full of snow.

In 1946, when my grandfather was only 18, he decided to change his name to a Hebrew name. It was common back then to 'Hebrewise'
a name and adopt a similar-sounding Hebrew name, a complete Hebrew translation of it, or a name with a Hebrew association.
My grandfather decided to take the name Livne, meaning 'birch' in English. The Livne tree is not at all common in the Levant.
Ironically, I was diagnosed with an allergic reaction to the pollen of Livne trees.