Estera Wechsler

The photo was taken in Ploiesti, in the 1910s. This is my mother, Ester Letzler, with my marternal grandmother, Eva Letzler. The photo was taken with the occasion of Ester Letzler engagement. I hardly met my grandmother [my grandfather's first wife]. She was slim. She was a very nice woman who had received a moral upbringing; she was very quiet too. She was a housewife who had been raised in the strictest spirit of the Judaic religion. She got ill and she died approximately at the end of the 1920's. My maternal grandparents had four children. The youngest died because he was sick. I can only remember the names of those who lived. They were: Simon Letzler, the older son, Pene Letzler, the younger boy and Estera Letzler, my mother. Estera Wechsler [nee Letzler], my mother, was born in 1888, in Ploiesti. She attended a boarding school and spoke German and French. She would have liked to go to the Arts Academy [in Bucharest], and her teachers had encouraged her about going to college. My grandparents had had a religious, bigot upbringing. Religious Jews believe that girls should get married at an early age, and, if possible, to a rabbi - which is considered to be all that a young girl could wish for. This was my mother's fate. My parents met through a matchmaker. It was probably someone from Ploiesti who saw that my grandfather had a daughter who had reached the proper age for marriage and who thought about finding her the best match. She agreed to this match with my father knowing that they both thought they would make a happy married couple. And so they did.