Gemma La Guardia Gluck

Gemma La Guardia Gluck (24 April 1881 – 2 November 1962) was an American writer, of Italian Jewish origin, who lived in Hungary and was a survivor of the Holocaust. Her autobiography, published in 1961, tells of her experience as a survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, but also offers vivid memories of her childhood spent in America with her parents and brother Fiorello La Guardia, the future first Italian-American mayor of New York. Biography American childhood Gemma La Guardia was born in New York on 24 April 1881. Her father, Achille La Guardia, was an Italian immigrant originally from a Catholic family of Cerignola [1]; by profession he was a musician and in 1885 he became director of the 11 US Infantry band. Her mother was Irene Luzzatto Coen, a Jewish Italian woman originally from Trieste, a niece on the maternal side of Samuel David Luzzatto. Gemma (with her brothers Fiorello, born in 1882, and Richard, born in 1885) followed the family to the various places where her father was posted: Fort Sully (South Dakota), Watertown (New York) and finally Arizona. She received a solid musical education from her father as a child and inherited from her mother the very rich Central European polyglot tradition. [2] Life in Hungary In 1898, her father, seriously ill during the Spanish-American war, left the American army, and the family moved to the maternal home of Trieste, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the death of her father in 1904, the family moved to Budapest, where Gemma gave English lessons. In 1908, she married a Hungarian Jew, Herman Gluck, and settled there permanently, together with her mother who died and was buried there in 1915. Fiorello and Richard returned to New York, where Fiorello completed his studies and began his political career. Richard died of a heart attack in 1927.