My Jewish Budapest
by George Szirtes · 11/01/06
My Jewish Budapest did not exist. If it did exist it failed to inform me, if, indeed, it informed anyone. It might have existed in whispers, in tones of voice, in the sharing of certain unspoken, or little spoken, or not-spoken before the children, anxieties, but then I was a child and I had never heard of it. Furthermore I was not a Jewish child and neither was my brother, because, as you could have checked for yourself by a cursory physical examination, we were not circumcised. That we did not speak Hebrew, had never knowingly entered a synagogue, and had participated in no Jewish festivals or ceremonies, was further proof of the same fact.
True enough, our father was Jewish, he never denied that. He looked Jewish, that is if looks themselves can be Jewish. He had deep soft dark eyes and a considerable nose; indeed he still has the nose, and will, I expect, hold on to it now for the rest of his life; or maybe one should say, it has held and will hold on to him, it being a relatively small organ among many larger organs on the greater body to which it clings. My father was Jewish by accident, it seemed to me: the accident of his nose. Whether that was a minor or a serious accident, I couldn’t tell. But then the entire, as-yet-untried, ground of our being (to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich) was necessarily unclear.
My mother (and I will refer to “my” rather than “our” mother or father from here on, because the very nature of the situation dictates that we speak as individuals, not as communities, not even as the tiny family community between brother and brother, meaning that I cannot begin to presume to speak for my brother) was not Jewish, and it was the maternal line that, as she well knew, or intensely hoped, counted. Unlike my father, she did not look Jewish. She was, she said, Lutheran, a Lutheran from Transylvania. I didn’t think too much about this at the time. In my childish eyes she was a beautiful, volatile, deeply loving, demanding menace and consolation.
Nevertheless, at some stage it must have transpired–in what chance conversation? What overheard remark? What moment of intimate confession?–that she had spent time in a concentration camp, in Ravensbruck, and that she had come within an inch of death there. This beautiful, Transylvanian Lutheran atheist had been reduced to a near skeleton. Who could have wanted to put her in that position, and why? Ah well, she said, it wasn’t only Jews there, but politicals, and there were cases of mistaken identity. When she said this I have not the foggiest idea, but these reasons percolated through to me, dripped through, quite possibly at different times. Your parents’ pasts are of little interest when you are under ten years old, and I wasn’t even eight before we left. Lutheran and atheist were the terms she wished us most clearly to grasp and, in so far as we could grasp anything at all, we grasped them.
How far did we–did I–believe this? I was aware of vulnerability on account of my father’s little accident of birth. I slowly got to hear about the years he had spent in forced labor in the Soviet Union and of his escape on the route march back. In this way the vulnerability was occasionally amplified to anxiety. There was also the incident of a magazine my parents would read regularly, a small magazine dealing with science and general knowledge of the world, as presented through the lens of Stalinist control no doubt, though as a child I knew even less of Stalinist control than I did about Jews and Jewishness. There was, it was true, a picture of Stalin on our wall–a kindly looking, avuncular if proud man to judge by the image–but I imagined everyone had one of those, just like everyone seemed to have at least one piece of white porcelain showing a little boy or girl, or a shepherdess. One did not refer to such things. I hardly noticed them then, the shepherdesses and the Stalins. They were of no more significance than tables or chairs.
And yet Stalin must have been important, because there was the occasion–was it spring, 1956?–when some adults came around to talk to my parents about, it must have been, of all things, Stalin! And there was a lot of argument, particularly from my mother, who, as I have already said, was volatile. Her volatility–provided it was not directed at us–was as normal and as much a part of life as the tables and the chairs, the shepherdesses, and Stalin. The fact that she seemed to be excited and angry was therefore not particularly alarming, but when she swept me up and raised me to the picture of Stalin and told me not to believe what these adult visitors had apparently been saying, but to continue to trust what they had said before, right up to this very moment, about him, that he was a good man, a good father, and a great leader. I don’t think I had given very much thought to Stalin till then, and this seemed somewhat startling, a little overdone.
