Jeanette Torok and her siblings

This picture was taken in Rozsnyo in 1883. The first one from the left is my maternal grandmother, Jeanette Torok (nee Gluck) at the age of 14. Next to her Dezso Gluck and Juliska Gluck are standing. On the right, the boy sitting on the small chair is Izidor, and the girl seated on the bigger chair is Toncsika (Antonia) Gluck. My grandmother's sister Irma isn't in the picture. The six of them were the Gluck siblings. Adolf Gluck's two youngest children immigrated to America at the end of the 19th century, around the age of 20. Izidor Gluck was an electrician, and he went to the New World to escape army service, in fact. He had three sons, several grandchildren and grand-grandchildren. His sister Juliska followed him and got married there to one of her cousins, Miksa Kohn. They had two children. Their son Elias had two sons, one of them has an Afro-American wife. Juliska's daughter, Edith was in Hungary two times and she was very much interested in the houses where her mother used to live. My grandmother's other brother was called Dezso, he became a doctor, their sister Irma became a dressmaker. She was successful, she had her own shop and two seamstresses worked for her. Both Dezso and Irma died of tuberculosis, just like their mother. My grandmother, Jeanette Gluck - it says Janka in the register, but she wrote her name in the French way and was also called so - was 16 years old when her mother died. Soon after that she moved to Vienna, to Mor Gluck's. Her uncle and aunt didn't have any children, but they had several elegant shoe stores. That's where Jeanette learned the shoe merchant trade. This was really a trade at that time. Grandma, even when she was old, knew exactly the different kinds of leather for shoes, the heel shapes, she could take measure for the shoes made on order. So she lived in Vienna until the age of 30 to 31, and then she came home to get married. She wanted to get married to a professional, so that they could have their own shoe store in Budapest.

Photos from this interviewee