Old family friends and letters from Europe: A story of true love

Interviewer: You mentioned your wife earlier; can you tell us about what she was like?

Stephen: Like I, she was from Vienna. And it turns out that her parents were married in the same synagogue that my parents were in Vienna. We were introduced by her aunt, who was a school friend of my mother’s—they knew each other from age 10.

My mother carried on correspondents very extensively throughout this time, and this included when we were in India. She was corresponding with family and friends who've been scattered to the winds when the Germans came into Vienna.
Among the people she kept correspondents with was with this friend of hers.

When we moved to Springfield, they were still corresponding. And then it registered on her that they were living 90 miles apart and should get together.

So one weekend, her friend and her husband came to Springfield. And they determined, well, there was an unmarried niece, and my mother had an unmarried son, so why don't we get them together?

So that's what they did. I was invited to lunch at her aunt's house. I had been at a seminar at Harvard. I was invited for lunch, and we took the aunt’s mother to Symphony Hall for a concert.

We continued on to the Museum of Fine Arts and spent a few hours there. And then I took her to the train station.

And a few weeks later, we got together again, and we spent the day in Marblehead. And I needed to take her to a train station, and I couldn’t find the car at first, so she missed the train.

She had to take a later train.

In those days, you didn't have a reservation on a specific train.

Later, I got on a trip because I was teaching at Smith at that time. I flew to Europe and traveled there for 11 weeks because I had the academic summer. I kept up the correspondence with this young lady.

I would send her letters, perhaps a postcard, and I'd sign them “Yours, Stephen.”

After several weeks traveling in Europe, I realized that I didn’t want to spend my life without her.

I was still writing to her, but now I was signing it, “Your Stephen.”

At the end of the European trip, I went back to Springfield, and I had a pile of mail and was going through it. Among other things, there was an invitation to the wedding of my graduate school roommate.

So I turned around, went back to New York, to attend that wedding. I got in touch with this young lady, and she was working on Central Park West. We sat down at the edge of Central Park. On that occasion, I invited her to Springfield to meet my parents.

I picked her up at the train station, and she asked me about the wedding I’d been to. 

She asked, “How long have they known each other?”

I said, “It's about a year.”

She said, “Well, that's a long time.”

I took that as a hint.

The next day, we were in this large park. I ventured to say, “Don’t you think it's time we talked about marriage?”

So we started talking about marriage. And we decided that was a good idea. We'll get married.

And it was then arranged. I would come to New York on the day after Yom Kippur. We got engaged just after Rosh Hashanah. 

I would come on Sunday and formally ask for her hand in marriage from her father.
Well, on Monday morning, I was with my parents at the time. My fiance called, said she couldn't hold it in. She had called her mother from the train station and said, “I'm engaged.”

So of course, I told my parents as well at that point.

On Tuesday, the brother of my prospective father-in-law called him and said, “Don't you have something to tell me? Didn’t your daughter get engaged?”

How did he find out?

Well, my aunt was visiting my parents. So when I told my parents, I told my aunt also.

And she went back to New York on Monday. Now, her late husband had a partner in business in New York. This was a friend in Vienna, and they opened the business in New York.

Well, my aunt mentioned to this partner of her husband that I had gotten engaged. And this business partner’s accountant was my prospective father-in-law's brother.

And so that's how his brother found out that his niece had gotten engaged.