My Jewish Budapest
by George Szirtes · 11/01/06
I didn’t know which, if any, of my parents’ friends were Jewish. I now think most would have been, though not tangibly so, not in the wedged dark of the flats where they sat smoking or dusting their porcelain shepherdesses, reading their books and magazines, glancing occasionally at their various Stalins. I didn’t know anything about history then. I didn’t know about liberal, cosmopolitan Budapest at the turn of the century with its Jewish professionals, artists, and industrialists; about their status as scapegoats after the disaster of the First World War when Hungary was whittled down to one-third of its size and two-thirds of its population; about the leading part Jews played in the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919; about their fervent efforts to assimilate and secularize under the anti-Semitic pressures of the interwar years. If Hungary is a small country that punches above its weight, then Hungarian Jews had punched well above theirs.
I didn’t yet know, of course–not consciously at any rate–that in some vital way, life for us was about not surrendering to your weight.
AND LATER, after we left, I did not know that the sudden and traumatic decision to become refugees was urged by my mother against my father’s instincts because she feared the revival of fascism more than she feared the return of the Soviet troops, because she feared that the occupants of prisons that had been opened by the revolution of 1956 included some that would want to imprison and kill us, all the more so because the current Party hierarchy could be identified as Jewish. She had heard, indirectly, that there was an element in the revolution–however small, however insignificant–that wanted a purge of not just postwar radicalized Jews but of all Jews, and even a few who wanted “to finish the job” started in 1944.
I didn’t know that, on her release from Ravensbruck, she had returned to Transylvania to trace the pretty mother, the handsome father, and the most beautiful brother in the world and found them all gone, with every trace of their property appropriated by neighbors. I didn’t know that this was how discovered that they were all dead. Nor did I then know that soon after that the doctors had firmly told her not to have children because her heart condition made it dangerous for her, but that she had gone ahead anyway.
I didn’t know any of that, not when I was married and baptized by full immersion by my wife’s Baptist missionary-minister father at the age of just twenty-one. Nor did I know, until after her suicide in 1975, that my mother had inwardly giggled and written to a friend to tell her how we had emerged out of the water like drowned rats. I did know that she loved my wife-to-be, that she regarded her almost as the daughter she had always wished to have.
And I know that when I returned to Budapest for the first time in 1984, and had given a reading in English to a group of invited guests of the British cultural attaché, including a number of Hungarian writers, one of them–the elderly, kindly István Vas, a major poet whose work I would later translate–told me that he knew precisely which district of Budapest I came from, and was right in his guess.
And I know that, in the course of an early visit to Budapest, somewhere in the mid-eighties, when I was dropped at the flat of a friend by a friendly Hungarian academic, he asked me my name, and when I said Szirtes, he said, no, your real name, and when I told him, he gave me his real name.
Not that this knowledge changes the fact that I have spent almost all my life not knowing that “real” name, a name that was never consciously real to me, or that I have spent the overwhelming majority of my life in England without specifically Jewish friends, without having once entered a synagogue or made it a point to associate myself with specifically Jewish matters. I suspect that, at base, like many poets (and I am an English poet who has never written a poem in Hungarian) I have a broadly religious temperament governed by an agnostic, fully secularized mind. I am not at all sure what religion that temperament is founded on.
NONE OF this matters to the world. The world has other considerations. In so far as Jews anywhere are attacked, assailed, slandered, or threatened, I am Jewish, in the same way my father was: by accident. And all the more do I feel myself–indeed, know myself–included. And yet, at the same time, I know there is no return to the Jewish house I have never known, no knocking on the door and announcing: Hi, I’m home.
