Eva Letzler with her children

The photo was taken in Ploiesti, around the 1900s.This is my maternal grandmother, Eva Letzler, with her children, from the right to left side was my mother, Estera Letzler, and her brothers, Simon Letzler (the older one), Pene Letzler and sitting another brother who died as a child. My grandmother was named Eva Letzler. 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. Simon Letzler, my mother's oldest brother, was born around 1885 in Ploiesti. He went to Law School in Bucharest. As he came from Ploiesti, he was hired by an American oil company and he left to America in 1915, just one year before the war [World War I] broke in Romania. He married a local Jewish woman and they had four children: one girl and three boys: Ana, Edy, Alfred and Hary Letzler. These are the successors of the family in America, in the New York City area. Pene Letzler, my mother's brother, was born around 1890, in Ploiesti. He went to college in Bucharest and became a lawyer. He was a famous lawyer in Ploiesti and he was also involved in the Romanian politics - he was the deputy prefect of the Prahova County. He served as a lieutenant in World War I. They only had a daughter, Dora Letzler, who studied Law too. He died from skin cancer in the 1970's. His daughter died in the 1980's. She also suffered from a disease - it was something degenerative, related to the collagen, that couldn't be cured at the time. Estera Wechsler [nee Letzler], my mother, was born in 1888, in Ploiesti. She attended a boarding school and spoke German and French. Naturally, she had also learnt Yiddish at home. All she told me about her childhood was that she used to be a good student and that her teachers thought highly of her, especially because of her skills in painting and drawing. She interrupted her studies. 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. She had three children: Stefania, Sebastian and Aristide Wechsler. She died in 1982, in Bucharest.