The day after her father left again, I confessed my love to Wilma, and she assured me that it was mutual. Wilma had moved out of the dorm shortly before and into a small, very modest room. The room was furnished with nine orange boxes and little else. We now spent almost all of our free time together, eating dinner in her room every night and cramming, me for my exam while she prepared for her dissertation, until I returned to my dorm late at night. Soon we knew we wanted to get married. Over Christmas break, we went to New York to Wilma’s sister and brother-in-law’s house and then to Richmond to my parents and sister’s house. On the way to New York, on December 21, 1947, we decided to get married on December 21 of the following year. My parents and sister, who did not yet know about our plans, liked Wilma immediately. My father, who had typical German prejudices against Eastern European Jews and therefore disliked my friend Nancy Lubasch, said with relief, “Bohemia is almost Germany.” Immediately after our return to Chicago, Wilma’s mother came to stop our wedding. She had envisioned something different for her daughter; not a barely twenty-one-year-old fellow who had not yet graduated and had no steady job in sight. As she put it, “He is nothing, he has nothing, and he looks like nothing.” At the end of her week-long stay with Wilma, on Friday evening after Kiddush services and dinner at Wilma’s apartment, Wilma’s mother and I had a conversation that lasted several hours. She soon realized that we were determined to get married and eventually changed her attitude toward me. From that point on, we got along well. In the summer, I went to Canada for a week and met Wilma’s large family.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 94f (translation)