Hesped (Eulogy) for Magda Muller
by Jerry Muller
December 16, 2009
I’ve known for a long time that I’d be giving a eulogy for my grandmother, Magda Muller, at least since her husband, Nandor, died in 1988, and I gave the eulogy at his funeral. But it was only after she died on Monday that I sat down to actually write it. That may seem odd, to put off writing a eulogy for someone who was one hundred years old. But when her husband died, she was only 78 years old. And since Magda’s mother, Lilly Herzog, lived to be 104, there didn’t seem to be any great hurry. Then, when Magda hit 100, she seemed to be doing so well that she might live longer than her own mother had. And so, thinking that I might have a few years to go, I put off writing her eulogy. I mention this because I think it mirrors an experience that many of us have had, long knowing that she was bound to die fairly soon, yet slightly surprised when she actually did.
But I’ve been thinking for a long time about what I ought to say at her funeral, since she was not an easy person to characterize. Her characteristic virtues were those of self-sufficiency, considerateness of others, loyalty, generosity, frugality, fortitude, a certain worldly realism: qualities of character that do not leave us in awe, but with a sense of quiet admiration.
Magda was someone who felt a quiet gratitude for her life, and for the people around her: people who were living and people who were dead. She had lived a life that was more eventful than she would have wanted, a life that took some unanticipated turns, some of them painful and tragic. But I think it was a life that she judged to have been full, a life for which she was grateful.
Let me take a moment to survey her life, and I’ll explain what I mean. Magda was born in Slovakia in 1909, at a time when it part of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Born to Lilly and Jacob Herzog, whose lives to that point had been quite a success story. Jacob, Magda’s father, was a physician who worked at times for the imperial railroad, and then established himself as a doctor in the town of Hlohovec where Magda and her sister were raised. She grew up in a home in which German and Hungarian were spoken. The family made frequent trips to the capital cities of Vienna and Budapest. After high school, she spent a year at a finishing school for Jewish girls in Frankfurt am Main, where she learned skills such as dancing and sewing, and improved her French and her piano playing, and even her tennis game.
Tennis turned out to be important. Because not long after she returned to Hlohovec, she was dressed for tennis, when she met a man almost ten years her senior, who had recently moved to town. That was my grandfather, Nandor Muller, who fell in love with Magda, and married her when she was twenty and he was almost thirty. A year or so later, their first child was born, Henry, and not long after that, their second child, Alice. Magda worked in Nandor’s business; they lived over the shop, and thanks to Nandor’s commercial acumen, the business prospered. They lived a good life, with vacations at the sea and in the mountains. By the time she was 29, she was happily married, a mother of two, with a prosperous husband, and parents who lived nearby.
If the first three decades were marked by happiness and success, the next decade and a half were marred by setbacks and tragedy. When the Nazis dismantled Czechoslovakia in 1939, Slovakia, where the family lived, came under the control of an authoritarian government allied with Nazi Germany. And like Nazi Germany, the government of this new Slovakia was anti-Semitic. Nandor was beaten up by the local fascists. That led to him to decide to leave Slovakia as quickly as possible, taking with him his family and the family of his brother, Lajos. They got into Canada in the fall of 1939, at a time when the Canadian immigration authorities were bent on prevent Jewish immigrants from coming to the country. So the Mullers could come to Canada only as farmers, a way of life that was utterly foreign to them. Most of their savings were invested in the farm that they had to buy to immigrate to Canada. At the age of 39, Nandor came to a country whose language he didn’t speak. Magda, who knew some English and French from her schooling, at first spoke on their behalf, even going to Ottawa to try to raise the small wartime quota of pigs they were allowed to slaughter. Magda and her sister-in-law went from being the wives of merchants to plucking chickens and other tasks for which they were utterly unprepared by their background.
After eight long and arduous years, they were able to move off the farm, to Niagara Falls, where, with their son Henry in the lead, they slowly built up a meat business, becoming merchants once again. She discovered that her parents had survived the war, in hiding in Slovakia, and brought them to Niagara Falls. Life on the farm had been hard, but they had made some new friends that were to last them a lifetime, including a few other Jewish refugee families, such as the Weiszes and the Jeremiases, and the Rosbergs from Niagara Falls, an established family who helped out the newcomers.
But just when things were looking up, she was struck with the greatest tragedy of her life, when her daughter, Alice, fell ill and died just before she was to go off to university. This was the sort of event that can be endured, but not overcome, and the pain of it remained a permanent part of Magda’s life thereafter, a wound that could be covered over but never quite healed.
And then, slowly, things got better again. Henry turned out to be a good businessman, and built up Muller’s Meats, which was the quintessence of a family business. When I was young, Henry, Bella, Nandor and Magda all worked in the store, often in the same office, except when they were out front helping customers. We lived above the store, literally, which meant that my sister Alice and I could go downstairs and see our parents and grandparents, almost at will. Magda’s mother, Lilly Herzog, lived next door to us. Magda and Nandor lived close by, and so did their in-laws, Magda and Lajos, and Gyula and Iri. Not all of the family has escaped the Holocaust, but enough to reconstitute the family in the New World.
Over time, Magda became a pillar of the Niagara Falls Jewish community. As a teenager, she had been active in a Zionist youth movement, and she now helped found a chapter of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization. She was also an active member of the synagogue’s sisterhood. Her English got better and better, and she sometimes gave speeches on public occasions.
She was an engaged grandparent, and she was once so foolhardy as to take Alice and I on a three-person vacation to Ottawa and Montreal, where we scared the hell out of her by vanishing into the hotel elevators of the Chateau Laurier.
As their economic circumstances improved, Magda and Nandor again began to take vacations once again, first to Florida, then to Israel, and to various parts of Europe. But by and large they were frugal, and used some of the money they earned and saved for charitable purposes, funding a youth orchestra in the Israeli town of Kiryat Ono, and quietly helping children in Niagara Falls to go to camp or to college.
So the next thirty-five years, roughly from the time of my birth, were years of increasing contentment and satisfaction. I don’t mean that it was because of my birth. No doubt there were many sources of satisfaction.
Ultimately, I think, her satisfaction was rooted in her in marriage to Nandor. The nature of intimate relationships like marriage are not fully transparent to outsiders, but I think it is fair to say that I know of few men who loved their wives as much as Nandor loved Magda. And their marriage was a partnership in which they seem to have discussed everything of importance. If anything, their marriage seemed to grow happier during their years of retirement, spent partly in Florida and partly in Niagara Falls, with occasional trips to Europe and even to Alaska. They looked after one another, physically and emotionally.
The last period in her life was in some ways the most remarkable: I’m referring to the 22 years or so from Nandor’s death in 1988 to the present. These were years in which, on the surface, Magda did less and less. True, for much of that time, she continued to drive, indeed well past her 90th birthday. For a while she continued to go to Florida in the winter, where she developed new friends. Seven years ago, she made a major move, from Niagara Falls to Dundas. She remained quite active for someone her age, playing Scrabble and other board games, participating in a weekly gathering in her building, and so on. But time takes its toll: one by one, her peers died. She was still visited from time to time by old friends from Niagara Falls, and by people in Hamilton who made a point of coming to see her, and by her great-granddaughter, Tali, who lived closest to her.
Though she did less and less, and had contact with a shrinking circle of people, she had a surprisingly rich inner life, based on memory. Magda had a memory that was remarkable, both in terms of the range of life experience she could remember and the vivacity with which she remembered them. She could describe in detail the structure of the courtyard in her grandmother’s home where cooking was done during the summer, when the weather was hot. She knew the names of her elementary school teachers. When I visited Frankfurt, she gave me the address of the finishing school she had attended in the 1920s. She could recall the layout of buildings and rooms in Hlohovec as they had existed in the 1930s. She could recall a vacation to a spa that she had taken as a young woman, and the names and backgrounds of some of the other guests, including a male couple who she realized in retrospect were gay.
Some of her memories were of course painful. But she often recurred to happy experiences she had had with Nandor, and these remained fresh and vital for her in the decades after his death. She would frequently speak of the places they had visited together, and of the operas they had attended, often recalling who sang the leading roles. This storehouse of memories kept her supplied with mental nourishment in the final decades of her life.
She was also anchored to the wider world through her family, local and international. She had four grandchildren and then eleven great- grandchildren in several countries and on two continents, together with their spouses. That was, objectively, a lot of people to keep track of, and Omama did so by focusing on the one most pressing issue in each of their lives at any given time. She was in frequent contact with most of them. To be able to observe the several generations of Mullers that she had spawned was a source of achievement and pride. Once she moved to the Hamilton area, she was adopted by the larger complex of Zucker, Yellin and Leibtag families.
People who got to know Magda were often struck by her sober sense of realism. She was not easily seduced by fads or causes, religious or secular. After a certain point, she took it for granted that the world was changing. That sense of realism left her more open than most aging people to changes in mores. I think that many people, including her grandchildren and great-grandchildren were surprised at the ease with which they could discuss sensitive matters of health, finance and romantic relationships with her.
I mentioned that one of Magda’s greatest virtues was the character trait of gratitude. Some people take for granted the good turns that others do for them, or the good fortune that fate bestows upon them. Not Magda. She was genuinely grateful to the many people who cared for her and cared about her. That included the people who had kept house for her over the years; it included her doctors; and in the final years of her life, it especially included Francis Murray, who took care of her in a quite extraordinary way, a fact that Magda never took for granted.
I won’t say much about the relationship with living people that was most important to her in those years, namely to her son, Henry, and to her daughter-in-law, Bella. In her relationship to her own mother, Lilly Herzog, who lived until Magda and Nandor were themselves objectively old, Magda and Nandor had shown a respect and concern that was a model of filial duty. This filial duty, was demonstrated in turn by Henry and Bella. And Magda was grateful for that as well. For her part, Magda tried her best to be as self-sufficient as her circumstances would allow, to minimize her dependence upon them.
There were many reasons why Madga Muller was able to live for more than a century, not least good genes and the wonders of modern medicine. But another reason was her will power, and the fact that she wanted to keep living. That was in part because of the store of happy memories to which she could recur; in part because she felt a real satisfaction in keeping up with the fortunes of her many descendants and their spouses; and in part for the real gratitude she felt for the relationships she had with those around her.
In all these respects, may her memory be a blessing.