KUPFERSTEIN Giza (Gizella)^[1]

Agi Story: Giza was a beautiful vivacious woman

Agi's Story

My grandfather on my mother’s side was Samuel Fischmann.  He married Victoria Salzberger and they were very religious orthodox Jews.  They lived in the northern part of Hungary and had four children, and  my mother, Cecilia, was the next to the youngest.  Victoria died suddenly perhaps of pneumonia and my mother, only seven years old at the time, was in the room when her mother expired.    This experience affected Cecilia profoundly  and she grieved the early loss of her mother all of her life....

     Samuel quickly arranged a second marriage for himself to provide a mother for his four children.  He married Gisela, a beautiful and vivacious woman half his age.  She came from Újfehértó , the same village from which my father’s family hailed....

     As the story goes,  smart and spirited Gisela was  interested in a man outside of her faith.  Her family owned and operated a pub at the railroad station so she had opportunities to meet many men.  This  romance so horrified her folks that they quickly married her off to my grandfather.

     The marriage produced two very bright offspring Eva and Paul,  but Samuel and Gisela did not get along and the household was fraught with dissent.  My grandfather, Samuel,  had trouble making a living.  First he was a traveling salesman representing an Austrian chocolate factory.  Later he opened a grocery store in Budapest.  The store was located between two convents in an anti-Semitic neighborhood  so it did not take him long to go broke.  After that Samuel opened a haberdashery but unfortunately, that failed too. 

     Gisela helped to support the family by taking in sewing.  They also let a room to help with expenses.  Arguments constantly erupted about the lack of money.  The four children, including my mother,  from my grandfather’s previous marriage gave their young stepmother a hard time. I heard a lot about their wicked stepmother from my mother and her siblings,  but  I liked and enjoyed Gisela and kept up a correspondence with her until years later,  her vision failed and she was unable to write back to me.

     When my mother was seventeen years old and an uncommonly pretty girl, she went to visit her step-mother’s family in Újfehértó  and met my handsome father, Miklos, whose family also lived there.  They fell in love and a whirlwind courtship ensued complete with gypsy musicians surrounding my father as he stood under my mother’s window serenading her with heartbreakingly sentimental music.