Thank you for your card and especially for your letter,
which I received yesterday. I was so glad to have met you
at the end of May, for now I feel I know you even if our
visit was brief. Perhaps I can best express my appreciation
for the friendship you extended to my mother—right up to the
end—by giving you some idea of who and what she was before
she became the tiny, frail person you knew, though there
were still hints visible in the invalid.
Mathilda was born in September 1895 in Kolozsvár, in the
eastern province of Hungary that is called Transylvania
(today in modern Romania). My father was born in March 1894
in Győr, in western Hungary. They met during World War I.
There was a distant marriage connection between the two
families, and it was hospitality for the soldier on
convalescent leave in Budapest that provided the opportunity
(he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army). Mathilda
was learning to be a milliner, and was staying with
relatives in Budapest. Their courtship was extremely
formal, and of course mostly long distance. They intended
to wait until the war was over to get married, but as the
war dragged on they finally were married in July 1918. My
sister was born in September 1919.
My father had had a very difficult youth, having for the
most part to fend for himself once his father had died, when
Dad was twelve. He never spoke of those years, even to my
mother, except to indicate that they were difficult. He was
willing, however, to talk a bit about his life as a
university student. He managed to find the means to finance
his education by tutoring boys with learning disabilities,
and was teaching in a boys’s school when he was called up
for service in late 1914/early 1915. Thus, he never
finished his university degree. In contrast, my mother had
a comparatively affluent life, but even so she received the
job training in millinery. Once her training was completed,
she set up her own shop in Kolozsvár. If you know what
women’s hats looked like in the period 1910-1920, you
realize that this was akin in its complexity to being a
custom dressmaker.
My father was once again on leave after their marriage in
1918, when mutinies occurred in the Hungarian army.
Transportation back to the (now the western) front was
difficult, and officers were being killed, which made it
impossible for my father to return to his unit when his
leave was up. Then the political system in Hungary
collapsed and soon the war was ended.
Kolozsvár was the capital of Transylvania, which in the 16th
Century had been a major kingdom. Romania, which had been
on the Allied side in the war, coveted that rich and fertile
province, for Hungary was their enemy, being part of the
Central Powers. With the transfer completed, those
Hungarian-speaking natives of Transylvania were simply made
inferior Romanian citizens, but my father being from western
Hungary became an alien in Romania, without hope of
returning to any kind of teaching job. A revolution in
Budapest made it questionable to go there, and so Dad simply
faded back into civilian life in Kolozsvár, and tried to
help Mother with her shop until things settled down.
Life in Romania was difficult for them. The Romanians were
strongly anti-Semitic and corrupt; petty officials were the
worst offenders. Mother had an uncle, a tailor, in the
United States (Chicago), married to a dynamic little woman,
Eugenie (Jennie). They had been in the United States since
about 1910 if not earlier. Jennie, who was skilled in
embroidery, was the major link back to Europe, and she was
the one who encouraged my parents to immigrate under under
husband’s sponsorship. This they succeeded in doing in
1923.
In Chicago Mother had no difficulty in immediately finding
work, as a European trained milliner; Dad, on the other
hand, had to take menial dead-end jobs that made the
relocation seem futile. He was ready to go back, but Mom
was convinced that things would get better. One of her
aunt’s daughters was married to a furrier. Their store was
literally a mom and pop shop, for they worked together, with
Rose the sales person the customers met, while her husband
dealt with the shop work. They hired Dad to provide them
some assistance in the shop during one of their busy
periods. Dad found that he had the necessary skills and
quickly learned the trade. And once he learned enough
English, he was ready to set up his own shop.
I was born in January 1925. By the time I was two years
old, Dad had learned enough about the fur business and had
mastered enough English that he opened his own shop, and
Mother was right there to help him besides her duties as
housewife and mother. This was a time when there were all
sorts of small neighborhood stores and shops, often family
run. Mom and Dad made an interesting team. Dad was able to
use his inherently gentlemanly ways (and accent) to impress
customers. For that matter, so did Mother. She had been
raised very much to be a lady, and always behaved that way
in dress and deportment.
Dad was obviously a product of rather courtly European
values, despite his difficult youth. He put a premium on
proper behavior and, alas for me, seemed in those days to be
rather authoritarian. Yet he was a fundamentally shy
person, rather embarrassed by his inability to speak or
write English as correctly as he could Hungarian. He did
have a good sense of humor, and did his best to protect this
family from a rather difficult world. He overprotected his
daughter, but his son was at heart a bit of a rebel.
Mother, on the other hand, despite her European-based sense
of proper behavior, was fearless about speaking and writing
English at whatever her proficiency, and was remarkably
outgoing. It was Mother who sat with me to review my
spelling lessons, or my other lessons while I was in grade
school, thus also teaching herself. She readily joined the
PTA and did all of those things that connected us to our
neighbors; Dad was the reserved one.
Together they ran the shop, with Mother’s needlework skills
used in all sorts of ways. I might add that in the rather
small community of the few relatives and Hungarian-speaking
friends of which we were a part, almost all of the women
worked at some sort of job, typically in a family business,
and the daughters were encouraged to learn something by
which they could support themselves, or help support their
families. Thus my sister was directed to become a teacher,
and in 1941 she began her career as a high school biology
teacher.
In German the word ehrlich means honest or honorable,
and I was taught “to live up to my name.” My father put a
great premium on making sure that his word was his bond.
Thus when he obtained machines and materials on credit to
start up his own shop, he made certain that all of his debts
were paid off by the end of the year regardless of how tight
a bind that left us in. This was the way he could be sure
once again to obtain credit, and thus somehow he survived
despite some truly difficult times. By the time World War
Two was upon us, Mother and Dad had endured more than twenty
years of coping with difficulties, of making do but doing it
as right as they could. They did this despite both having
serious illnesses during the 1930s. Both had become
citizens, and as it turned out, neither ever returned to
visit Hungary or Transylvania.
It was only after I was called up to military service in
1943 that they could finally begin to put money aside in
savings. Dad planned carefully for retirement, and always
counted Social Security as a great blessing. He was able to
take retirement in 1959, and he and Mother moved to St.
Petersburg, Florida, a place they had known from the 1930s,
when each in turn had gone there (by bus) on doctor’s
instructions to convalesce during the harsh Chicago winter.
In Florida, Dad told his mostly retired neighbors that he
was a retired school teacher, which in one sense he truly
was, since he had taught me algebra, and helped start my
sister on her musical lessons (the piano). He just erased
away the many years of being a furrier, which was how he had
to make his living, but which never controlled his spirit.
Unfortunately, in Florida Dad’s illnesses caught up with
him. In addition to diabetes and other ailments, he
suffered from Parkinson’s disease. The latter got so bad
that in March 1963 he insisted that they sell the Florida
house and furnishings and move to Los Angeles, where both
Rose and her sister Margaret (Jennie’s daughters) now
lived. My father was determined that Mom be near family
when he died, which occurred in July 1963. Also by then my
sister Martha and her husband Nick were teachers in Mojave
High School.
After Dad died, Mother and her cousin Margaret, also a
widow, shared an apartment until 1981. In that long
interval Mother was involved in various senior citizen
clubs, and she took advantage of almost every opportunity to
take group sponsored trips in the far west. She regularly
came to visit us in Kansas City. Of Mom’s siblings only two
still lived in Europe, a much younger sister in Paris, and
an older [sic] brother in Romania. He finally succeeded in
relocating to Israel.
Mother paid for her sister to visit her in the U.S., and
then later she went there [to Paris] to visit her, and
continued on to Israel to see her brother. He died a few
years ago.
Nothing seemed to daunt Mom for very long, and whatever
grief she held concerning the fate of her relatives she kept
very private. Indeed, throughout the extended family that I
knew, death was treated as something that happened, with no
public mourning, nor any real evidence of distress. I
cannot explain the why or how of this, except that the
emphasis was on making the most one could of what life
provided, while trying to remain as moral and ethical as one
could. To remember the best things of the life as lived is
what is to be treasured.
One of the special things I think worth remembering about
Mathilda was her skill as a pastry cook. She was on the
whole just an ordinary cook, and she never received special
instruction in pastry making. She claimed she got the
recipes from American women’s magazines. However, she had
an intuitive understanding of how to adjust those recipes
to produce at times truly extraordinary pastries, of the
sort she remembered from her youth (for the Hungarians can be
remarkable in their baking). Many of her choicest recipes
are now in the possession of my sister’s daughter, who is
gaining local fame among her working friends in Seattle, and
is actually doing some custom Christmas baking.
When long ago I suggested to Mom that we set her up as
Matilde’s Custom Pastries, she scoffed. She said she
just did them for family and friends. Alas, she never knew
the true power of them. When I was in military service and
I received a box of “cookies” from home, everyone gathered.
They knew that out of that plain box would come an
incredible assortment of delicacies, such that few had ever
seen much less tasted. She was a truly creative person.
She also made exquisite woven baskets while in Florida,
using long pine needles; she learned it in a senior
citizen’s craft class, but they were also special after she
got done.
So once she had her stroke in 1981, and Martha moved her out
to her home in California City, she had to leave that life
of travel and craft behind. Then as she continued to fail,
and she required care that could not be provided by my
sister and her husband, we knew she had to be placed in the
convalescent hospital. She was sufficiently incapacitated
when she went there in January 1983 that everyone was
certain that she would not live out the year. She made it
clear that she wanted to die, and was at first quite bitter
that she did not.
When Martha’s illness got so advanced that she no longer was
able to visit Mother, Mathilda wanted even more to die; she
felt it wrong that her child should die before she did. Yet
she had to find a way to cope, and she did. After all she
had survived a lot of difficulties in the past and had
learned to adapt to what life gave her. When things evolved
to where I assumed the principal responsibility of her
affairs, my being so far away was a nagging problem for both
of us. But as I wrote you earlier, there was no way we
could find as good a place for her near me; of that I am
certain. For better or worse, the Lancaster Convalescent
Hospital was her home, and the staff were her neighbors.
Then, providentially, you came on the scene in the last
months of her life. You brought her far more than you can
imagine, for you were a friend. I have no idea of how she
might have expressed that to you, but you see you are about
the same age as her granddaughter, and for her the children
of all generations were special. I know you enriched the
last months of her life, and for that gift you gave to my
mother you are now special to me.
