Sisters had differing results in love
This is an except from The Ruby Family Histories (2006), written from Helga Ruby's point of view.
Actually, around that time, Ogi acquired a suitor. His name was Herr Repper, and he was a refugee from Prague. He had a wife and two boys there, but he happened to be out of the country on a buying trip when the Germans marched into Prague and he never went back. His wife and children were rounded up and died in Auschwitz.
I don’t recall how and when he got to America, but when he met Ogi, he fell in love with her. He was a very nice man and I liked him a lot. I thought they might get married, but something happened and they broke apart. I’m not sure what caused that to happen, but it was sad for her, because she never found another man with whom to build her life.
As for Hilda, she divorced Peiser in disgust after he sued my mother and I. After her marriage ended, Hilda went to work as a chambermaid at Grossingers, then a posh Catskills resort where the richest Jewish men would be. That is where she met Joe Liebman, a much older and very gross diamond merchant. He was a Russian Jew who left Russia as a very young man, and was already in the diamond business in Antwerp before World War I.
He was in the U.S. during the Second World War, but afterwards he relocated to Paris and Monte Carlo, where he had the two most beautiful jewelry shops, both called Clerc, one on the Place de la Opera and the other in the Hotel de Paris in Monaco. Like Peiser, Joe was a rough, sometimes swinish, person, and Hilda was certainly not attracted to him physically. As she had all her life, she went for the money.
