Lujzi 

A huge number of children were born right after the war, between ‘45 and ‘48, as those who survived and came back founded families imme- diately. And then many of these marriages turned out to be nightmares due to the traumas from the loss of the previous families, spouses and children. Children were born immediately to replace the lost ones; in English we call these children memorial candles.

The generation that grew up after the war and comes from physically and mentally damaged parents don’t count as survivors, only as the second generation. And so they don’t have the right to claim victimhood, because they were not there; yet in many aspects their lives resemble that of the sur- vivors’, with the difference that they don’t have a direct experience of the war. They have neither a past, nor an identity, as opposed to those children born some years earlier, who survived in hiding. My experience is that it is often members of this generation who have had the most problems; many of them were incapable of leading a normal life. (Now referred to as the 1.5 generation)

Because I was born in 1943, I theoretically count as a survivor even though I don’t have a personal memory of the war, because according to the laws I should have been killed, too. But at the same time I don’t count as a survivor as I was not in real danger.

I am not a Jew. More precisely, my father was born a Jew, but he con- verted in 1912, but of course according to the anti-Jewish laws he still counted as a Jew and I a half-Jew. But nevertheless my situation was very different from that of many others. We lived in Budapest and we had a much higher chance there for survival; and also as my mother is an absolute Aryan, a Catholic, who had all her papers back till the eighteenth century, so my father was protected for a long time by having an Aryan spouse. When many were taken to Ukraine for labor service he did not have to go; only in 1944, when doctors and engi- neers were called in, some even from the ghettos, did my my father, who was an engineer, have to go into labor service and then only locally. My father was the youngest of three brothers. One of his brothers left for Argentina, where he denied his Jewish origins, so most of my relatives there don’t even know that he was born a Jew, only two, to whom I told the truth. My father’s oldest brother, who had stayed in Hungary, married a Jewish woman and they were ghettoized together with my father’s parents, but all survived.

So, I have a completely different background on both sides of my family than most Hungarians of my age here in New York. First of all, we were not religious. The only Jewish thing in our family is that my father was born a Jew, but his family converted when he was a small child. While from Hitler’s point of view this doesn’t matter, from a family point of view our life was com- pletely different. According to the family myth, my grandfather, who was born in 1862, decided at the age of six that he was completely uninterested in the religion. My father was already born into a non-religious family and when he was eight, his father converted with his three sons, but his mother refused to and did so only later, during the war.

So, religion was not at all present in our lives, but at the same time we only socialized with others of Jewish origin. The less a person was closed into the religious Jewish world, the richer life one could have. It was also a question of class, not only religion. As nobody wants to say that I come from a poor Jewish family, they would rather say, I come from a religious family. But in this narrow sense ‘religious’ also meant poor and uneducated, as those who wanted to study went from the countryside to the city and from then on were no longer religious. There were few, who were religious, wealthy and from the city at the same time. No university professors or architects emerged directly from among the unassimilated religious Jews. I can’t talk much about this topic here, as many only wish to hear how terrible Hungarians are, how many Jews they had killed. Of course this is absolutely true, but yet the story is much more complicated than that.

It is also interesting how much the number of children had changed just within one generation. In my grandparents’ time there were six to eight, but within one generation this changed for more educated people: my father had two brothers, and my mother only one sister.

After the Nazis persecuted my father during the war, by 1948 it was the communists who were going to imprison him. He owned a small factory with his brother, and he was able to get a six-month business visa to come to the US to buy used ball bearings. In March 1948 he had a sense that the communists would take over power and he left Hungary a week earlier than planned. He was already sitting on the Queen Elizabeth, on his way to New York from London, when he heard the news that indeed it had happened. He almost had a nervous breakdown as my mother and I were trapped at home. After a while he was granted political asylum in the US by President Truman, but meanwhile, by 1951, my mother and I were in danger as class aliens. My father got a job as an engineer and with political help from his then-congressman, Gerald Ford (who was to become President much later on) he was able to help get us out of Hungary legally, especially as my mother was a sick middle-aged woman with a kid, not of much interest to the government, and she also offered up all our property, which in any case would have been nationalized at any minute, as the factory had already been. Although my father was able to help get us out of Hungary he could not get a visa for us to join him in the US, as he only had his first papers at that time (what today would be called a temporary green card). He did get us visas to Argentina, but his older brother, the doctor, who lived in Argentina, refused to take us in, as he was afraid that then his Jewish origins would come to surface. And so we were in the middle of nowhere. We ended up alone in Bogotá, Colombia and it was a most terrible experience.

After South America we finally made it to America, where nothing good awaited me, I was fortunately an excellent student and I could get into the best university. I got married after graduation because I wanted to get away from home. We were both accepted for doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. We moved back to Europe for a while; we lived in Switzerland for three years, where I could only work illegally and I was able to start my university career only by returning to the US several years later.

In 1970 I came back to Hungary for the first time, after nineteen years. Since then I’ve returned every single year but for one. But it was not until 1995 that I spent my first longer period of time at home, when I received my first Fulbright Teaching Fellowship I was invited to teach at ELTE, which was import- ant for me, as I had not had enough professional connections in Hungary before that. And this way I had enough time to try to experience somewhat what it would have been like if I had stayed in Hungary. The first day, when I went to the department, I was talking with my head of department, and it turned out that he was born in Budapest and on May 10, 1943, three days before me. I jumped from my chair and hugged him, and said, ‘You are twin brother I left behind!’ As a reserved person he got scared of my enthusiasm and did not understand what I had wanted to say by that. However, it was simple: you are here, and even though we are completely different people, I could be here, too, if my parents had stayed in Hungary. But finally it is all the same, because in the end I ended up here again, anyway.

In Hungary I got to know an enormous number of people; many more than in the US. In America distances are vast, in all aspects; and people work from dusk to dawn. This can not be said about Hungary, where a lot of time is wasted without reason in Hungary, for example by waiting for a doctor. The amount of work that people work and study in America I have never seen anywhere else, even though I have lived in many places.

At university I studied modern languages and became a medievalist, with a specialization as a Hispanist, and most of my publications are about medieval literature and language. However, I also work in linguistics and in Hungary as a Fulbright professor on two occasions I taught courses on lan- guage and gender at the Department of Linguistics, both at ELTE and at the University of Szeged. It is difficult to say how many languages I speak. Let’s say six; but I can read in more languages. Three of these are Latin lan- guages, and there is a seventh one, which is the only one I have mostly for- gotten, Russian. Hungarian, Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, in the order I learned them. Besides these I also use Dutch, Catalan and Latin in my job. I am completely different from many Hungarian immigrants I know in America. I have always known who I wanted to become, that I want to become someone. For me it was unimaginable to marry someone, bear three children and have no meaningful professional life.

For over more than the last decade I have lived half of a year in Hungary and half in New York. Everything that is good here is bad there and in reverse. I teach here, there, but elsewhere, too, for example in France. In some respects, some people live at much lower living standards in America than they would at home, even if they would be poorer at home, as at home at least they would have a life. It is not true that America is a heaven for everyone. Your life there revolves around work, you might buy a house in the suburbs and then you travel one-and a-half hours two times a day, or more, if it is snowing, and this is what you do in a completely alien society, where you get a two-week vacation, if you are lucky enough, but never more than that. And moreover, there are such huge distances that once you get home you will not go back into the city for a social or a cultural event. And the next day you start the same rat race again.

I am a Hungarian among Americans but an American among Hungarians. Not that I am not at home in many places, but I don’t belong anywhere. At the same time I belong everywhere. I am a rootless intellectual Jew. That I am an intellectual is the most important, but directly after that comes that I am a Jew, and a Jew who is not even Jewish. Apart from two girlfriends, every- one whom I know is a Jew or has Jewish roots. I barely know a Gentile who is not a member of my own family, with those, who are not, we don’t tend to remain in close contact. So, from this point of view I am completely a Jew.

Besides that I consider myself very Hungarian, even though I left Hungary at the age of eight. Also as immigrants at home we always spoke only Hungarian and later I did not want to forget the language as it meant for me the golden age of my childhood, just like for many survivors the memories of prewar Hungary where their grandmother was making strudel. I grew up with a strong Hungarian identity, but if I had to define myself I would rather say that I am a European and not just a Hungarian. And that is also a kind of Jewish identity, because it was always the Jews who represented European identity, who were multilingual, and who asked universal questions. This who I am, the descendant of these people. Part of my cultural identity is a Jewish identity, but which excludes religousness, as that shuts one in culturally.

Lujzi 

A huge number of children were born right after the war, between ‘45 and ‘48, as those who survived and came back founded families imme- diately. And then many of these marriages turned out to be nightmares due to the traumas from the loss of the previous families, spouses and children. Children were born immediately to replace the lost ones; in English we call these children memorial candles.

The generation that grew up after the war and comes from physically and mentally damaged parents don’t count as survivors, only as the second generation. And so they don’t have the right to claim victimhood, because they were not there; yet in many aspects their lives resemble that of the sur- vivors’, with the difference that they don’t have a direct experience of the war. They have neither a past, nor an identity, as opposed to those children born some years earlier, who survived in hiding. My experience is that it is often members of this generation who have had the most problems; many of them were incapable of leading a normal life. (Now referred to as the 1.5 generation)

Because I was born in 1943, I theoretically count as a survivor even though I don’t have a personal memory of the war, because according to the laws I should have been killed, too. But at the same time I don’t count as a survivor as I was not in real danger.

I am not a Jew. More precisely, my father was born a Jew, but he con- verted in 1912, but of course according to the anti-Jewish laws he still counted as a Jew and I a half-Jew. But nevertheless my situation was very different from that of many others. We lived in Budapest and we had a much higher chance there for survival; and also as my mother is an absolute Aryan, a Catholic, who had all her papers back till the eighteenth century, so my father was protected for a long time by having an Aryan spouse. When many were taken to Ukraine for labor service he did not have to go; only in 1944, when doctors and engi- neers were called in, some even from the ghettos, did my my father, who was an engineer, have to go into labor service and then only locally. My father was the youngest of three brothers. One of his brothers left for Argentina, where he denied his Jewish origins, so most of my relatives there don’t even know that he was born a Jew, only two, to whom I told the truth. My father’s oldest brother, who had stayed in Hungary, married a Jewish woman and they were ghettoized together with my father’s parents, but all survived.

So, I have a completely different background on both sides of my family than most Hungarians of my age here in New York. First of all, we were not religious. The only Jewish thing in our family is that my father was born a Jew, but his family converted when he was a small child. While from Hitler’s point of view this doesn’t matter, from a family point of view our life was com- pletely different. According to the family myth, my grandfather, who was born in 1862, decided at the age of six that he was completely uninterested in the religion. My father was already born into a non-religious family and when he was eight, his father converted with his three sons, but his mother refused to and did so only later, during the war.

So, religion was not at all present in our lives, but at the same time we only socialized with others of Jewish origin. The less a person was closed into the religious Jewish world, the richer life one could have. It was also a question of class, not only religion. As nobody wants to say that I come from a poor Jewish family, they would rather say, I come from a religious family. But in this narrow sense ‘religious’ also meant poor and uneducated, as those who wanted to study went from the countryside to the city and from then on were no longer religious. There were few, who were religious, wealthy and from the city at the same time. No university professors or architects emerged directly from among the unassimilated religious Jews. I can’t talk much about this topic here, as many only wish to hear how terrible Hungarians are, how many Jews they had killed. Of course this is absolutely true, but yet the story is much more complicated than that.

It is also interesting how much the number of children had changed just within one generation. In my grandparents’ time there were six to eight, but within one generation this changed for more educated people: my father had two brothers, and my mother only one sister.

After the Nazis persecuted my father during the war, by 1948 it was the communists who were going to imprison him. He owned a small factory with his brother, and he was able to get a six-month business visa to come to the US to buy used ball bearings. In March 1948 he had a sense that the communists would take over power and he left Hungary a week earlier than planned. He was already sitting on the Queen Elizabeth, on his way to New York from London, when he heard the news that indeed it had happened. He almost had a nervous breakdown as my mother and I were trapped at home. After a while he was granted political asylum in the US by President Truman, but meanwhile, by 1951, my mother and I were in danger as class aliens. My father got a job as an engineer and with political help from his then-congressman, Gerald Ford (who was to become President much later on) he was able to help get us out of Hungary legally, especially as my mother was a sick middle-aged woman with a kid, not of much interest to the government, and she also offered up all our property, which in any case would have been nationalized at any minute, as the factory had already been. Although my father was able to help get us out of Hungary he could not get a visa for us to join him in the US, as he only had his first papers at that time (what today would be called a temporary green card). He did get us visas to Argentina, but his older brother, the doctor, who lived in Argentina, refused to take us in, as he was afraid that then his Jewish origins would come to surface. And so we were in the middle of nowhere. We ended up alone in Bogotá, Colombia and it was a most terrible experience.

After South America we finally made it to America, where nothing good awaited me, I was fortunately an excellent student and I could get into the best university. I got married after graduation because I wanted to get away from home. We were both accepted for doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. We moved back to Europe for a while; we lived in Switzerland for three years, where I could only work illegally and I was able to start my university career only by returning to the US several years later.

In 1970 I came back to Hungary for the first time, after nineteen years. Since then I’ve returned every single year but for one. But it was not until 1995 that I spent my first longer period of time at home, when I received my first Fulbright Teaching Fellowship I was invited to teach at ELTE, which was import- ant for me, as I had not had enough professional connections in Hungary before that. And this way I had enough time to try to experience somewhat what it would have been like if I had stayed in Hungary. The first day, when I went to the department, I was talking with my head of department, and it turned out that he was born in Budapest and on May 10, 1943, three days before me. I jumped from my chair and hugged him, and said, ‘You are twin brother I left behind!’ As a reserved person he got scared of my enthusiasm and did not understand what I had wanted to say by that. However, it was simple: you are here, and even though we are completely different people, I could be here, too, if my parents had stayed in Hungary. But finally it is all the same, because in the end I ended up here again, anyway.

In Hungary I got to know an enormous number of people; many more than in the US. In America distances are vast, in all aspects; and people work from dusk to dawn. This can not be said about Hungary, where a lot of time is wasted without reason in Hungary, for example by waiting for a doctor. The amount of work that people work and study in America I have never seen anywhere else, even though I have lived in many places.

At university I studied modern languages and became a medievalist, with a specialization as a Hispanist, and most of my publications are about medieval literature and language. However, I also work in linguistics and in Hungary as a Fulbright professor on two occasions I taught courses on lan- guage and gender at the Department of Linguistics, both at ELTE and at the University of Szeged. It is difficult to say how many languages I speak. Let’s say six; but I can read in more languages. Three of these are Latin lan- guages, and there is a seventh one, which is the only one I have mostly for- gotten, Russian. Hungarian, Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, in the order I learned them. Besides these I also use Dutch, Catalan and Latin in my job. I am completely different from many Hungarian immigrants I know in America. I have always known who I wanted to become, that I want to become someone. For me it was unimaginable to marry someone, bear three children and have no meaningful professional life.

For over more than the last decade I have lived half of a year in Hungary and half in New York. Everything that is good here is bad there and in reverse. I teach here, there, but elsewhere, too, for example in France. In some respects, some people live at much lower living standards in America than they would at home, even if they would be poorer at home, as at home at least they would have a life. It is not true that America is a heaven for everyone. Your life there revolves around work, you might buy a house in the suburbs and then you travel one-and a-half hours two times a day, or more, if it is snowing, and this is what you do in a completely alien society, where you get a two-week vacation, if you are lucky enough, but never more than that. And moreover, there are such huge distances that once you get home you will not go back into the city for a social or a cultural event. And the next day you start the same rat race again.

I am a Hungarian among Americans but an American among Hungarians. Not that I am not at home in many places, but I don’t belong anywhere. At the same time I belong everywhere. I am a rootless intellectual Jew. That I am an intellectual is the most important, but directly after that comes that I am a Jew, and a Jew who is not even Jewish. Apart from two girlfriends, every- one whom I know is a Jew or has Jewish roots. I barely know a Gentile who is not a member of my own family, with those, who are not, we don’t tend to remain in close contact. So, from this point of view I am completely a Jew.

Besides that I consider myself very Hungarian, even though I left Hungary at the age of eight. Also as immigrants at home we always spoke only Hungarian and later I did not want to forget the language as it meant for me the golden age of my childhood, just like for many survivors the memories of prewar Hungary where their grandmother was making strudel. I grew up with a strong Hungarian identity, but if I had to define myself I would rather say that I am a European and not just a Hungarian. And that is also a kind of Jewish identity, because it was always the Jews who represented European identity, who were multilingual, and who asked universal questions. This who I am, the descendant of these people. Part of my cultural identity is a Jewish identity, but which excludes religousness, as that shuts one in culturally.