Hani Izsak

Hani Izsak

My paternal grandmother, Hani Izsak, nee Steiner. The photo was taken in Budapest in 1912. My grandmother gave birth to eleven children, five of them died before the age of 2. She became a widow at the age of 47, she still had to support the four younger children. The youngest one, my father, was only five years old. The oldest one, Ignac helped her in this, the other grown-up, Eszter, couldn't, because she also had children already. Hani Steiner managed a kosher household in Szatmar and in Budapest, too, where they moved after her husband's death. He observed the main religious rules, but he wasn't bigot at all, she didn't raise her children in this spirit either. In the 1920s, when my father lived in a big service villa as the chief gardener of the HICAA and was still single, Hani lived there and managed the household. My father went on field trips abroad, at these times he sent a card to his mother every two to three days. When she needed care because of her bad health, she moved to her younger daughter Flora, to the house with a garden in Rakosszentmihaly. I didn't know her, unfortunately, because I was one year old when she died. She could hardly see me, because in her last years her eyesight deteriorated very much. But my mother told me many times that she loved me very much and was proud of her youngest son's child.
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