This obituary is lovingly assembled from various accounts given by her children, friends and various relatives and acquaintances. But no single piece of writing could possibly do justice to this complex, exasperating, and disturbed adversary.
Liselotte J., known throughout her life as “Lilo”, died on August 28, 2007, at the age of 88 or maybe 78, at the Jewish Home in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She was born in Prague in either 1919 or 1929. There is evidence for both dates. Most people usually only fudge a couple of years here and there, but Lilo never settled for less than what she thought she deserved. Actually, a close examination of one of her Brazilian passports, still extant, reveals that the second “1” in 1919 may have been altered and made to look like a “2.” She executed this forgery around 1960, so she would have been about 31 years old at the time. Her oldest daughter was in fact 18 in 1960, indicating that Lilo gave birth to her at the tender age of 13. This is highly improbable. The astonishing thing is that no one, especially not her children, ever challenged her on the matter of her age. In fact, no one, especially not her children, ever challenged her on anything.
The splendid irony of the fact that Lilo died in a Jewish nursing home did not escape her children, as they knew her to be a life-long anti-semite. No doubt this aspect of her character came from having grown up in Budapest, Hungary, between the two world wars, the Great War and the even greater subsequent war. She was raised in a well-to-do bourgeois home, with nannies constantly in attendance, and sent to the best schools. In her first ten years, she lived apart from her older sister, Anne, who had been sent to Munich to provide companionship for their grandmother, Teresa. This exile and separation lasted at least ten years. By the time she was eighteen, Lilo had become a member of the Budapest social scene and, by all accounts, quite beautiful, appearing regularly in newspapers and magazines. She was courted by artists and journalists, and handsome men of the minor nobility. She and her sister were sent to the Sorbonne in Paris for finishing, giving her a lifelong love for France.
Alas, Lilo’s timing on this earth could not have been worse, for in 1939 the war enveloped her fabulous world, and it wasn’t long before it all ended. In 1942, she had a daughter, by a husband twenty years her senior, after a very short pregnancy. Within a year, she had left her husband and returned home to her parents with her baby. After the divorce, life in Budapest was simply not the same. She remarried, to the son, János, of a furniture manufacturing executive who had taken over a Jewish business, according to the laws of the period. Later in her life, she explained that she married János because she thought he would have money. He was drafted and sent to the Russian front in a Hungarian unit. The war ended with the arrival of the Red Army in 1945. János eventually found his way back to Budapest, his release by the Soviets having been obtained by means of a bribe. According to some observers, fifty years with Lilo was arguably worse than fifty years in the soviet gulag.
In 1947, Lilo gave birth to a son, and six months later the family was on its way to Brazil, by ship via Holland and England. In Brazil they established themselves in a hardscrabble São Paulo neighborhood, about as alien a place as they could ever have imagined, the gaiety of pre-war Budapest now only a memory. For ten years they tried to make a go of it, but were unable to adapt to the language or to the tropical mayhem. By some mysterious means, János managed to get a job working on the line at Caterpillar Tractor in Peoria, Illinois, USA, and the papers to go with it. In February of 1957, the family arrived in Peoria and Lilo promptly gave birth to a daughter, since no doctor there would perform an abortion, as she later admitted to her unaborted daughter. Another job led them to San Francisco, in 1960, where they bought a dingy little box house in the Sunset district and settled for the next two decades.
In about 1980 Lilo and János followed their youngest daughter to Gaithersburg, Maryland, where they settled definitively and where they both died. In all of that time, from 1947 to János’s death in 1996, for half a century, Lilo actively cheated on her husband. And yet he never left her, choosing instead to tolerate her infidelities by screaming and throwing furniture, heaping his own form of abuse on top of hers. Their children were trapped in this extension of World War Two that Lilo and János carried with them to their graves. Once, when mildly challenged on this, Lilo replied blithely, “Why, we never fought,” smoothly rewriting history. Spoiled brat that she was, she rarely told the truth about anything. With refined irony, she insisted that she stayed with him for the sake of the children.
Lilo’s children were able to document fourteen of Lilo’s lovers; no one will know how many she really had. But it was a lousy business model, yielding little return. She was actively looking for a buyer/husband while still dependent on the old one. Since her kids had to pay the price of her cheating, they felt entitled to know how many infidelities their suffering had bought, but no one dared challenge her on her behavior. During her entire life, she skillfully and successfully portrayed herself as the victim. Oddly, many her lovers were Jewish, in spite of her professed anti-semitism. She believed that all Jews were rich. Unfortunately, perhaps, and against all probability, her two children by János actually look like him!
Lilo is survived by her three children, two of which had children of their own. Her son married a Jew from Brooklyn, if not on purpose, then certainly much to Lilo’s dismay; she tried for many years to block this union, giving up only when their first son was born. She met her three half-Jewish grandchildren only once, when they were teenagers; she would have been pleased, no doubt, that the boys had intact foreskins. Her older daughter married a Brazilian and had two sons of her own.
Lilo’s body was cremated and her ashes placed alongside her husband’s in a crypt in the chapel of a rich boys’ school in São Paulo that had been founded in the thirties by János’s brother, Emil, a Benedictine priest, himself not known for obeying the priestly vow of chastity. The Hungarians are a funny race of people. Alas, we have never met a Hungarian that we liked. There is always hope.
