And the story of Isabelle starts...

My mother was born the 9th child of a poor family in Szentendre, Hungary, on February 8th 1928. She was a child of Second World War, who survived the bitter cold and the hunger of 1944-45. She 

 was also a bright young woman who made it to Medical School and graduated summa cum laude in 1957. She had a rich and adventurous life, lived in Cuba and Algeria, married three times, had oodles of admirers and many friends. And she loved to work: she taught for many years, was known for her excellence at physiology experimentation, and even in her 60s and 70s she was still active as a the head of the Clinical Lab at a Budapest hospital. She was, in summary, larger than life.

My mother and grandmother

After she died in 2009, I had to go through her belongings. Turns out, she kept everything- each and every paper, bill, picture, postcard, note- from probably the past 50 years. Finally, I just put everything that seemed personal in boxes and brought them with me to California. The boxes have sat there now for almost 2 years, and I know the memories they contain have to be sorted out. And as I embark on this journey into the past, I want to share this experience (or at least part of it) with others: mainly family and friends. This way, I hope to have an incentive to keep scanning pictures and commenting on them: an Ariadne's thread back into the labyrinth of the past. I do not intend to go in a strict chronological order, for the simple reason that the pictures and papers are not organized. I have started with those pictures that look the oldest, but I may find others later in small envelopes and inside folded papers. 

This one seems to be among the oldest. I just confirmation from a cousin living in Canada that indeed, this is my mother and grandmother after the first communion. I never met my maternal grandparents, as both died in the 1950s. According to my mother, my grandfather came from Serbia and my grandmother was Swabian, part of a German-speaking population in Hungary. He had some small land, and she was a homemaker. That is all I know about my maternal grandparents. They had nine children, two of them girls: Mary the oldest and my mom, the second youngest. I do not recall meeting any of my uncles: some died during the war, one emigrated to the US, and I do not know about the others. The only cousins I have contact with are the descendants of my aunt Mary. But she deserves her own posting, my next one.