An Excerpt From My Grandfather's Diary
It won a magazine award back in the 30's
The $500 prize is what they lived on.
Like all youth so with me, I fell in love with a young lady in whose parents home I lived. But after a certain time she fell out of love with me, and then I left for Zurich in Switzerland, there I worked for a couple of months. I longed to see a little of the world and I left for Berlin, from Berlin to Venice in Italy, to Paris in France, from there to Bucharest in Rumania, and Bulgaria. From Sofia to Hungary to Budapest. Here I worked with the first class workshop. The Master was a German Jew, he paid me well, only this whole misfortune was that he had a very pretty daughter who was a year younger than I, and what more important she fell in love with me and herself admitted to me her love in German.
She was a beautiful blonde -- hair plaited in two braids -- which fell below her hips. Two blue fascinating eyes looking into mine, everything melted in me under her gaze. . . embracing her it seemed to me that I am pressing to me heated iron bar. . . I thought that myself I am made of ice. . .
This romance lasted barely a couple of months. On the last Sunday we went for a walk over one of the highest hills beyond the city, named "Margarett Shigat" and here on its summit embracing me she admitted her longing to marry me. When declaring myself, I said I was too young, and on the other hand she was Jewish and I a Catholic and that this is not and never can be possible, that someday we could sometime marry.
Then she presented a plan, that she will take enough money with her and we depart to America, and there no one looks on ones appointment and religion, there one can marry in court, while her father will do nothing to her when we are married, for this is free America. We made plans to escape (elopement).
I departed for Cracow; she was to depart after me in two weeks from Cracow we meant immediately to depart to America. Unfortune willed, that she confessed to her girl friend of her (our) plans, this one had a Jewish fiance who worked with me, and confessed before him our secret. He then "poured it on" to us in front of her father, who exited my beautiful young lady somewhere distant to his relatives, and whom now I never more did see. I continued to work in Cracow and I made up with my first love, Miss Anna Jachmiakourna.
One Sunday we went strolling on Cracow's common where were Gypsies spread out in encampment. An old Gypsy drew us that we allow fortune telling. She foretold each alone. Behold here are her words fortune telling from the hand:
" You will not marry this young lady. You will go into the army. You will meet a chestnut-haired young lady from the south. You will marry her and with her you will have four children.
Awaiting you is a very long journey. It will be bad with you, later good, and again bad, and again good, after which worse and then very good after a short journey."
To this fortune telling I did not attribute much importance.