They married in 1863 and by 1876 Mayer Samuel Weisz had set off for a new life in America. This verbal expression was followed with a formal written marriage proposal, a letter in which, according to family legend, Mayer Samuel documented his whole life history, “telling Her everything, so no one could ever come to Her and relate things.” Somewhere in the middle of his loquacious address, he realized that he was no proxy he was expressing his own heartfelt sentiments. Mayer Samuel, who knew Cecilia’s mother and her three daughters well, took on this assignment and called upon Cecilia at the small apartment that she shared with her family. His friend was in love with a pretty young maiden, Cecilia Steiner, but he was too shy to make his intentions known to her. In Pest a friend of his, in obvious homage to his charisma, asked him to intervene for him in an affair of the heart. Perhaps to escape the memories, he moved from the Hungarian countryside to Budapest, a thriving, tolerant, cosmopolitan city destined to become one of the great showpieces of Europe. Weisz had been a recent widower, his first wife having died during or shortly after giving birth to their son Armin.

Mayer samuel weisz