Life and Times of Fiorello's Sister, Gemma La Guardia Glück

Gemma and Fiorello La Guardia were born in New York to a Jewish mother from Austro-Hungarian Trieste and an Italian Catholic father. The impoverished family returned to Europe when the siblings were teenagers, where both ended up having sustained relationships with Budapest (where their mother is buried to this day). As a youth Fiorello worked for the American Embassy in Budapest and in Fiume, while Gemma married a Hungarian Jew and lived for 26 years in interwar Budapest, from where her family was deported in June 1944. This study aims to treat the La Guardia family's (mostly obfuscated) Jewish origins and Gemma's memoir, which is an important if too scant testimony of her interwar life in Budapest and to the deportation and destruction of an unusual Hungarian Jewish family, as well as an early documentation to the horrors of Ravensbrück. Nevertheless, details of the Gemma's life in Budapest, as well as about the probable causes of her brother's decades-long strained relationship with her are obfuscated in her memoir. Through interwar Hungarian and U.S. newspaper records from 1930's I document the problems caused for Fiorello in his American political life by his sister having revealed details of their family origins.