 His father Shlomo Dov Steinmetz lived in the village of Brister in the Carpathian Mountains, on the border of Galicia, but Zvi Yair was born in Budapest (1915), where the family was living temporarily because of the upheavals caused by the First World War.In 1940 he married Devorah Isenberg and was hiding in Budapest during World War II thanks to a family friend, Eleonóra Sipos, which he later awarded a tree in the Yad Vashem museum.After the war he lived in Vienna, Austria, till 1952 when he immigrated to New York.